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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Call of the Blood, by Robert Smythe
+Hichens, Illustrated by Orson Lowell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Call of the Blood
+
+
+Author: Robert Smythe Hichens
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2006  [eBook #20157]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CALL OF THE BLOOD***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/c/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 20157-h.htm or 20157-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/1/5/20157/20157-h/20157-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/1/5/20157/20157-h.zip)
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+      Some minor changes have been made to correct typographical
+      errors and inconsistencies.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CALL OF THE BLOOD
+
+by
+
+ROBERT HICHENS
+
+Author of
+"The Garden of Allah" Etc.
+
+Illustrated by Orson Lowell
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: See p. 399 "HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY
+PRAYED"]
+
+
+
+New York and London
+Harper & Brothers Publishers
+MCMVI
+Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
+All rights reserved.
+Published October, 1906.
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+   "HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY PRAYED"     _Frontispiece_
+
+   "'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID"      _Facing p._ 38
+
+   "HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN
+   THE HOUSE OF THE SIRENS"                                 "      78
+
+   "HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE
+   DRINKING IN THE BREEZE"                                  "     120
+
+   "'I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,'
+   SHE SAID"                                                "     280
+
+   "HE KEPT HIS HAND ON HERS AND HELD IT ON THE
+   WARM GROUND"                                             "     302
+
+   "'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN--IN MY
+   SICILIAN,' SHE SAID, TENDERLY"                           "     366
+
+   "SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE
+   CAVES WHERE THE FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN
+   THE DAWN"                                                "     420
+
+
+
+
+THE
+CALL OF THE BLOOD
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+On a dreary afternoon of November, when London was closely wrapped in a
+yellow fog, Hermione Lester was sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton
+Place reading a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her
+writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from the writer of the
+letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to her on the previous day that he
+was coming over from Paris by the night train and boat.
+
+Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten in height, flat,
+thin, but strongly built, with a large waist and limbs which, though
+vigorous, were rather unwieldy. Her face was plain: rather square and
+harsh in outline, with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good
+complexion, clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and slightly
+prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy, and brightness, full,
+too, of eager intelligence and of energy, eyes of a woman who was
+intensely alive both in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look
+most attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent from her
+body but was present in her eyes, which showed forth the spirit in her
+with a glorious frankness and a keen intensity. Nevertheless, despite
+these eyes and her thickly growing, warm-colored, and wavy brown hair,
+she was a plain, almost an ugly woman, whose attractive force issued from
+within, inviting inquiry and advance, as the flame of a fire does,
+playing on the blurred glass of a window with many flaws in it.
+
+Hermione was, in fact, found very attractive by a great many people of
+varying temperaments and abilities, who were captured by her spirit and
+by her intellect, the soul of the woman and the brains, and who, while
+seeing clearly and acknowledging frankly the plainness of her face and
+the almost masculine ruggedness of her form, said, with a good deal of
+truth, that "somehow they didn't seem to matter in Hermione." Whether
+Hermione herself was of this opinion not many knew. Her general
+popularity, perhaps, made the world incurious about the subject.
+
+The room in which Hermione was reading the letters of Artois was small
+and crammed with books. There were books in cases uncovered by glass from
+floor to ceiling, some in beautiful bindings, but many in tattered paper
+covers, books that looked as if they had been very much read. On several
+tables, among photographs and vases of flowers, were more books and many
+magazines, both English and foreign. A large writing-table was littered
+with notes and letters. An upright grand-piano stood open, with a
+quantity of music upon it. On the thick Persian carpet before the fire
+was stretched a very large St. Bernard dog, with his muzzle resting on
+his paws and his eyes blinking drowsily in serene contentment.
+
+As Hermione read the letters one by one her face showed a panorama of
+expressions, almost laughably indicative of her swiftly passing thoughts.
+Sometimes she smiled. Once or twice she laughed aloud, startling the dog,
+who lifted his massive head and gazed at her with profound inquiry. Then
+she shook her head, looked grave, even sad, or earnest and full of
+sympathy, which seemed longing to express itself in a torrent of
+comforting words. Presently she put the letters together, tied them up
+carelessly with a piece of twine, and put them back into the drawer from
+which she had taken them. Just as she had finished doing this the door of
+the room, which was ajar, was pushed softly open, and a dark-eyed,
+Eastern-looking boy dressed in livery appeared.
+
+"What is it, Selim?" asked Hermione, in French.
+
+"Monsieur Artois, madame."
+
+"Emile!" cried Hermione, getting up out of her chair with a sort of eager
+slowness. "Where is he?"
+
+"He is here!" said a loud voice, also speaking French.
+
+Selim stood gracefully aside, and a big man stepped into the room and
+took the two hands which Hermione stretched out in his.
+
+"Don't let any one else in, Selim," said Hermione to the boy.
+
+"Especially the little Townly," said Artois, menacingly.
+
+"Hush, Emile! Not even Miss Townly if she calls, Selim."
+
+Selim smiled with grave intelligence at the big man, said, "I understand,
+madame," and glided out.
+
+"Why, in Heaven's name, have you--you, pilgrim of the Orient--insulted
+the East by putting Selim into a coat with buttons and cloth trousers?"
+exclaimed Artois, still holding Hermione's hands.
+
+"It's an outrage, I know. But I had to. He was stared at and followed,
+and he actually minded it. As soon as I found out that, I trampled on all
+my artistic prejudices, and behold him--horrible but happy! Thank you for
+coming--thank you."
+
+She let his hands go, and they stood for a moment looking at each other
+in the firelight.
+
+Artois was a tall man of about forty-three, with large, almost Herculean
+limbs, a handsome face, with regular but rather heavy features, and very
+big gray eyes, that always looked penetrating and often melancholy. His
+forehead was noble and markedly intellectual, and his well-shaped,
+massive head was covered with thick, short, mouse-colored hair. He wore a
+mustache and a magnificent beard. His barber, who was partly responsible
+for the latter, always said of it that it was the "most beautiful
+fan-shaped beard in Paris," and regarded it with a pride which was
+probably shared by its owner. His hands and feet were good,
+capable-looking, but not clumsy, and his whole appearance gave an
+impression of power, both physical and intellectual, and of indomitable
+will combined with subtlety. He was well dressed, fashionably not
+artistically, yet he suggested an artist, not necessarily a painter. As
+he looked at Hermione the smile which had played about his lips when he
+entered the little room died away.
+
+"I've come to hear about it all," he said, in his resonant voice--a voice
+which matched his appearance. "Do you know"--and here his accent was
+grave, almost reproachful--"that in all your letters to me--I looked them
+over before I left Paris--there is no allusion, not one, to this Monsieur
+Delarey."
+
+"Why should there be?" she answered.
+
+She sat down, but Artois continued to stand.
+
+"We seldom wrote of persons, I think. We wrote of events, ideas, of work,
+of conditions of life; of man, woman, child--yes--but not often of
+special men, women, children. I am almost sure--in fact, quite sure, for
+I've just been reading them--that in your letters to me there is very
+little discussion of our mutual friends, less of friends who weren't
+common to us both."
+
+As she spoke she stretched out a long, thin arm, and pulled open the
+drawer into which she had put the bundle tied with twine.
+
+"They're all in here."
+
+"You don't lock that drawer?"
+
+"Never."
+
+He looked at her with a sort of severity.
+
+"I lock the door of the room, or, rather, it locks itself. You haven't
+noticed it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It's the same as the outer door of a flat. I have a latch-key to it."
+
+He said nothing, but smiled. All the sudden grimness had gone out of his
+face.
+
+Hermione withdrew her hand from the drawer holding the letters.
+
+"Here they are!"
+
+"My complaints, my egoism, my ambitions, my views--Mon Dieu! Hermione,
+what a good friend you've been!"
+
+"And some people say you're not modest!"
+
+"I--modest! What is modesty? I know my own value as compared with that of
+others, and that knowledge to others must often seem conceit."
+
+She began to untie the packet, but he stretched out his hand and stopped
+her.
+
+"No, I didn't come from Paris to read my letters, or even to hear you
+read them! I came to hear about this Monsieur Delarey."
+
+Selim stole in with tea and stole out silently, shutting the door this
+time. As soon as he had gone, Artois drew a case from his pocket, took
+out of it a pipe, filled it, and lit it. Meanwhile, Hermione poured out
+tea, and, putting three lumps of sugar into one of the cups, handed it to
+Artois.
+
+"I haven't come to protest. You know we both worship individual freedom.
+How often in those letters haven't we written it--our respect of the
+right of the individual to act for him or herself, without the
+interference of outsiders? No, I've come to hear about it all, to hear
+how you managed to get into the pleasant state of mania."
+
+On the last words his deep voice sounded sarcastic, almost patronizing.
+Hermione fired up at once.
+
+"None of that from you, Emile!" she exclaimed.
+
+Artois stirred his tea rather more than was necessary, but did not begin
+to drink it.
+
+"You mustn't look down on me from a height," she continued. "I won't have
+it. We're all on a level when we're doing certain things, when we're
+truly living, simply, frankly, following our fates, and when we're dying.
+You feel that. Drop the analyst, dear Emile, drop the professional point
+of view. I see right through it into your warm old heart. I never was
+afraid of you, although I place you high, higher than your critics,
+higher than your public, higher than you place yourself. Every woman
+ought to be able to love, and every man. There's nothing at all absurd in
+the fact, though there may be infinite absurdities in the manifestation
+of it. But those you haven't yet had an opportunity of seeing in me, so
+you've nothing yet to laugh at or label. Now drink your tea."
+
+He laughed a loud, roaring laugh, drank some of his tea, puffed out a
+cloud of smoke, and said:
+
+"Whom will you ever respect?"
+
+"Every one who is sincere--myself included."
+
+"Be sincere with me now, and I'll go back to Paris to-morrow like a shorn
+lamb. Be sincere about Monsieur Delarey."
+
+Hermione sat quite still for a moment with the bundle of letters in her
+lap. At last she said:
+
+"It's difficult sometimes to tell the truth about a feeling, isn't it?"
+
+"Ah, you don't know yourself what the truth is."
+
+"I'm not sure that I do. The history of the growth of a feeling may be
+almost more complicated than the history of France."
+
+Artois, who was a novelist, nodded his head with the air of a man who
+knew all about that.
+
+"Maurice--Maurice Delarey has cared for me, in that way, for a long time.
+I was very much surprised when I first found it out."
+
+"Why, in the name of Heaven?"
+
+"Well, he's wonderfully good-looking."
+
+"No explanation of your astonishment."
+
+"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which astonished me, the
+fact of a very handsome man loving me."
+
+"Now, what's your theory?"
+
+He bent down his head a little towards her, and fixed his great, gray
+eyes on her face.
+
+"Theory! Look here, Emile, I dare say it's difficult for a man like you,
+genius, insight, and all, thoroughly to understand how an ugly woman
+regards beauty, an ugly woman like me, who's got intellect and passion
+and intense feeling for form, color, every manifestation of beauty. When
+I look at beauty I feel rather like a dirty little beggar staring at an
+angel. My intellect doesn't seem to help me at all. In me, perhaps, the
+sensation arises from an inward conviction that humanity was meant
+originally to be beautiful, and that the ugly ones among us are--well,
+like sins among virtues. You remember that book of yours which was and
+deserved to be your one artistic failure, because you hadn't put yourself
+really into it?"
+
+Artois made a wry face.
+
+"Eventually you paid a lot of money to prevent it from being published
+any more. You withdrew it from circulation. I sometimes feel that we ugly
+ones ought to be withdrawn from circulation. It's silly, perhaps, and I
+hope I never show it, but there the feeling is. So when the handsomest
+man I had ever seen loved me, I was simply amazed. It seemed to me
+ridiculous and impossible. And then, when I was convinced it was
+possible, very wonderful, and, I confess it to you, very splendid. It
+seemed to help to reconcile me with myself in a way in which I had never
+been reconciled before."
+
+"And that was the beginning?"
+
+"I dare say. There were other things, too. Maurice Delarey isn't at all
+stupid, but he's not nearly so intelligent as I am."
+
+"That doesn't surprise me."
+
+"The fact of this physical perfection being humble with me, looking up to
+me, seemed to mean a great deal. I think Maurice feels about intellect
+rather as I do about beauty. He made me understand that he must. And that
+seemed to open my heart to him in an extraordinary way. Can you
+understand?"
+
+"Yes. Give me some more tea, please."
+
+He held out his cup. She filled it, talking while she did so. She had
+become absorbed in what she was saying, and spoke without any
+self-consciousness.
+
+"I knew my gift, such as it is, the gift of brains, could do something
+for him, though his gift of beauty could do nothing for me--in the way of
+development. And that, too, seemed to lead me a step towards him.
+Finally--well, one day I knew I wanted to marry him. And so, Emile, I'm
+going to marry him. Here!"
+
+She held out to him his cup full of tea.
+
+"There's no sugar," he said.
+
+"Oh--the first time I've forgotten."
+
+"Yes."
+
+The tone of his voice made her look up at him quickly and exclaim:
+
+"No, it won't make any difference!"
+
+"But it has. You've forgotten for the first time. Cursed be the egotism
+of man."
+
+He sat down in an arm-chair on the other side of the tea-table.
+
+"It ought to make a difference. Maurice Delarey, if he is a man--and if
+you are going to marry him he must be--will not allow you to be the
+Egeria of a fellow who has shocked even Paris by telling it the naked
+truth."
+
+"Yes, he will. I shall drop no friendship for him, and he knows it.
+There is not one that is not honest and innocent. Thank God I can say
+that. If you care for it, Emile, we can both add to the size of the
+letter bundles."
+
+He looked at her meditatively, even rather sadly.
+
+"You are capable of everything in the way of friendship, I believe," he
+said. "Even of making the bundle bigger with a husband's consent. A
+husband's--I suppose the little Townly's upset? But she always is."
+
+"When you're there. You don't know Evelyn. You never will. She's at her
+worst with you because you terrify her. Your talent frightens her, but
+your appearance frightens her even more."
+
+"I am as God made me."
+
+"With the help of the barber. It's your beard as much as anything else."
+
+"What does she say of this affair? What do all your innumerable adorers
+say?"
+
+"What should they say? Why should anybody be surprised? It's surely the
+most natural thing in the world for a woman, even a very plain woman, to
+marry. I have always heard that marriage is woman's destiny, and though I
+don't altogether believe that, still I see no special reason why I should
+never marry if I wish to. And I do wish to."
+
+"That's what will surprise the little Townly and the gaping crowd."
+
+"I shall begin to think I've seemed unwomanly all these years."
+
+"No. You're an extraordinary woman who astonishes because she is going to
+do a very important thing that is very ordinary."
+
+"It doesn't seem at all ordinary to me."
+
+Emile Artois began to stroke his beard. He was determined not to feel
+jealous. He had never wished to marry Hermione, and did not wish to marry
+her now, but he had come over from Paris secretly a man of wrath.
+
+"You needn't tell me that," he said. "Of course it is the great event to
+you. Otherwise you would never have thought of doing it."
+
+"Exactly. Are you astonished?"
+
+"I suppose I am. Yes, I am."
+
+"I should have thought you were far too clever to be so."
+
+"Exactly what I should have thought. But what living man is too clever to
+be an idiot? I never met the gentleman and never hope to."
+
+"You looked upon me as the eternal spinster?"
+
+"I looked upon you as Hermione Lester, a great creature, an extraordinary
+creature, free from the prejudices of your sex and from its pettinesses,
+unconventional, big brained, generous hearted, free as the wind in a
+world of monkey slaves, careless of all opinion save your own, but humbly
+obedient to the truth that is in you, human as very few human beings are,
+one who ought to have been an artist but who apparently preferred to be
+simply a woman."
+
+Hermione laughed, winking away two tears.
+
+"Well, Emile dear, I'm being very simply a woman now, I assure you."
+
+"And why should I be surprised? You're right. What is it makes me
+surprised?"
+
+He sat considering.
+
+"Perhaps it is that you are so unusual, so individual, that my
+imagination refuses to project the man on whom your choice could fall. I
+project the snuffy professor--Impossible! I project the Greek god--again
+my mind cries, 'Impossible!' Yet, behold, it is in very truth the Greek
+god, the ideal of the ordinary woman."
+
+"You know nothing about it. You're shooting arrows into the air."
+
+"Tell me more then. Hold up a torch in the darkness."
+
+"I can't. You pretend to know a woman, and you ask her coldly to explain
+to you the attraction of the man she loves, to dissect it. I won't try
+to."
+
+"But," he said, with now a sort of joking persistence, which was only a
+mask for an almost irritable curiosity, "I want to know."
+
+"And you shall. Maurice and I are dining to-night at Caminiti's in
+Peathill Street, just off Regent Street. Come and meet us there, and
+we'll all three spend the evening together. Half-past eight, of course no
+evening dress, and the most delicious Turkish coffee in London."
+
+"Does Monsieur Delarey like Turkish coffee?"
+
+"Loves it."
+
+"Intelligently?"
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"Does he love it inherently, or because you do?"
+
+"You can find that out to-night."
+
+"I shall come."
+
+He got up, put his pipe into a case, and the case into his pocket, and
+said:
+
+"Hermione, if the analyst may have a word--"
+
+"Yes--now."
+
+"Don't let Monsieur Delarey, whatever his character, see now, or in the
+future, the dirty little beggar staring at the angel. I use your own
+preposterously inflated phrase. Men can't stand certain things and remain
+true to the good in their characters. Humble adoration from a woman like
+you would be destructive of blessed virtues in Antinous. Think well of
+yourself, my friend, think well of your sphinxlike eyes. Haven't they
+beauty? Doesn't intellect shoot its fires from them? Mon Dieu! Don't let
+me see any prostration to-night, or I shall put three grains of something
+I know--I always call it Turkish delight--into the Turkish coffee of
+Monsieur Delarey, and send him to sleep with his fathers."
+
+Hermione got up and held out her hands to him impulsively.
+
+"Bless you, Emile!" she said. "You're a--"
+
+There was a gentle tap on the door. Hermione went to it and opened it.
+Selim stood outside with a pencil note on a salver.
+
+"Ha! The little Townly has been!" said Artois.
+
+"Yes, it's from her. You told her, Selim, that I was with Monsieur
+Artois?"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Did she say anything?"
+
+"She said, 'Very well,' madame, and then she wrote this. Then she said
+again, 'Very well,' and then she went away."
+
+"All right, Selim."
+
+Selim departed.
+
+"Delicious!" said Artois. "I can hear her speaking and see her drifting
+away consumed by jealousy, in the fog."
+
+"Hush, Emile, don't be so malicious."
+
+"P'f! I must be to-day, for I too am--"
+
+"Nonsense. Be good this evening, be very good."
+
+"I will try."
+
+He kissed her hand, bending his great form down with a slightly burlesque
+air, and strode out without another word. Hermione sat down to read Miss
+Townly's note:
+
+       "Dearest, never mind. I know that I must now accustom myself to be
+     nothing in your life. It is difficult at first, but what is
+     existence but a struggle? I feel that I am going to have another of
+     my neuralgic seizures. I wonder what it all means?--Your,    EVELYN."
+
+Hermione laid the note down, with a sigh and a little laugh.
+
+"I wonder what it all means? Poor, dear Evelyn! Thank God, it sometimes
+means--" She did not finish the sentence, but knelt down on the carpet
+and took the St. Bernard's great head in her hands.
+
+"You don't bother, do you, old boy, as long as you have your bone. Ah,
+I'm a selfish wretch. But I am going to have my bone, and I can't help
+feeling happy--gloriously, supremely happy!"
+
+And she kissed the dog's cold nose and repeated:
+
+"Supremely--supremely happy!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+Miss Townly, gracefully turned away from Hermione's door by Selim, did,
+as Artois had surmised, drift away in the fog to the house of her friend
+Mrs. Creswick, who lived in Sloane Street. She felt she must unburden
+herself to somebody, and Mrs. Creswick's tea, a blend of China tea with
+another whose origin was a closely guarded secret, was the most delicious
+in London. There are merciful dispensations of Providence even for Miss
+Townlys, and Mrs. Creswick was at home with a blazing fire. When she saw
+Miss Townly coming sideways into the room with a slightly drooping head,
+she said, briskly:
+
+"Comfort me with crumpets, for I am sick with love! Cheer up, my dear
+Evelyn. Fogs will pass and even neuralgia has its limits. I don't ask you
+what is the matter, because I know perfectly well."
+
+Miss Townly went into a very large arm-chair and waveringly selected a
+crumpet.
+
+"What does it all mean?" she murmured, looking obliquely at her friend's
+parquet.
+
+"Ask the baker, No. 5 Allitch Street. I always get them from there. And
+he's a remarkably well-informed man."
+
+"No, I mean life with its extraordinary changes, things you never
+expected, never dreamed of--and all coming so abruptly. I don't think I'm
+a stupid person, but I certainly never looked for this."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"This most extraordinary engagement of Hermione's."
+
+Mrs. Creswick, who was a short woman who looked tall, with a briskly
+conceited but not unkind manner, and a decisive and very English nose,
+rejoined:
+
+"I don't know why we should call it extraordinary. Everybody gets engaged
+at some time or other, and Hermione's a woman like the rest of us and
+subject to aberration. But I confess I never thought she would marry
+Maurice Delarey. He never seemed to mean more to her than any one else,
+so far as I could see."
+
+"Everybody seems to mean so much to Hermione that it makes things
+difficult to outsiders," replied Miss Townly, plaintively. "She is so
+wide-minded and has so many interests that she dwarfs everybody else. I
+always feel quite squeezed when I compare my poor little life with hers.
+But then she has such physical endurance. She breaks the ice, you know,
+in her bath in the winter--of course I mean when there is ice."
+
+"It isn't only in her bath that she breaks the ice," said Mrs. Creswick.
+
+"I perfectly understand," Miss Townly said, vaguely. "You mean--yes,
+you're right. Well, I prefer my bath warmed for me, but my circulation
+was never of the best."
+
+"Hermione is extraordinary," said Mrs. Creswick, trying to look at her
+profile in the glass and making her face as Roman as she could, "I know
+all London, but I never met another Hermione. She can do things that
+other women can't dream of even, and nobody minds."
+
+"Well, now she is going to do a thing we all dream of and a great many of
+us do. Will it answer? He's ten years younger than she is. Can it
+answer?"
+
+"One can never tell whether a union of two human mysteries will answer,"
+said Mrs. Creswick, judicially. "Maurice Delarey is wonderfully
+good-looking."
+
+"Yes, and Hermione isn't."
+
+"That has never mattered in the least."
+
+"I know. I didn't say it had. But will it now?"
+
+"Why should it?"
+
+"Men care so much for looks. Do you think Hermione loves Mr. Delarey for
+his?"
+
+"She dives deep."
+
+"Yes, as a rule."
+
+"Why not now? She ought to have dived deeper than ever this time."
+
+"She ought, of course. I perfectly understand that. But it's very odd, I
+think we often marry the man we understand less than any one else in the
+world. Mystery is so very attractive."
+
+Miss Townly sighed. She was emaciated, dark, and always dressed to look
+mysterious.
+
+"Maurice Delarey is scarcely my idea of a mystery," said Mrs. Creswick,
+taking joyously a marron glacé. "In my opinion he's an ordinarily
+intelligent but an extraordinarily handsome man. Hermione is exactly the
+reverse, extraordinarily intelligent and almost ugly."
+
+"Oh no, not ugly!" said Miss Townly, with unexpected warmth.
+
+Though of a tepid personality, she was a worshipper at Hermione's shrine.
+
+"Her eyes are beautiful," she added.
+
+"Good eyes don't make a beauty," said Mrs. Creswick again, looking at her
+three-quarters face in the glass. "Hermione is too large, and her face is
+too square, and--but as I said before, it doesn't matter the least.
+Hermione's got a temperament that carries all before it."
+
+"I do wish I had a temperament," said Miss Townly. "I try to cultivate
+one."
+
+"You might as well try to cultivate a mustache," Mrs. Creswick rather
+brutally rejoined. "If it's there, it's there, but if it isn't one prays
+in vain."
+
+"I used to think Hermione would do something," continued Miss Townly,
+finishing her second cup of tea with thirsty languor.
+
+"Do something?"
+
+"Something important, great, something that would make her famous, but of
+course now"--she paused--"now it's too late," she concluded. "Marriage
+destroys, not creates talent. Some celebrated man--I forget which--has
+said something like that."
+
+"Perhaps he'd destroyed his wife's. I think Hermione might be a great
+mother."
+
+Miss Townly blushed faintly. She did nearly everything faintly. That was
+partly why she admired Hermione.
+
+"And a great mother is rare," continued Mrs. Creswick. "Good mothers are,
+thank God, quite common even in London, whatever those foolish people who
+rail at the society they can't get into may say. But great mothers are
+seldom met with. I don't know one."
+
+"What do you mean by a great mother?" inquired Miss Townly.
+
+"A mother who makes seeds grow. Hermione has a genius for friendship and
+a special gift for inspiring others. If she ever has a child, I can
+imagine that she will make of that child something wonderful."
+
+"Do you mean an infant prodigy?" asked Miss Townly, innocently.
+
+"No, dear, I don't!" said Mrs. Creswick; "I mean nothing of the sort.
+Never mind!"
+
+When Mrs. Creswick said "Never mind!" Miss Townly usually got up to go.
+She got up to go now, and went forth into Sloane Street meditating, as
+she would have expressed it, "profoundly."
+
+Meanwhile Artois went back to the Hans Crescent Hotel on foot. He walked
+slowly along the greasy pavement through the yellow November fog, trying
+to combat a sensation of dreariness which had floated round his spirit,
+as the fog floated round his body, directly he stepped into the street.
+He often felt depressed without a special cause, but this afternoon
+there was a special cause for his melancholy. Hermione was going to be
+married.
+
+She often came to Paris, where she had many friends, and some years ago
+they had met at a dinner given by a brilliant Jewess, who delighted in
+clever people, not because she was stupid, but for the opposite reason.
+Artois was already famous, though not loved, as a novelist. He had
+published two books; works of art, cruel, piercing, brutal, true.
+Hermione had read them. Her intellect had revelled in them, but they had
+set ice about her heart, and when Madame Enthoven told her who was going
+to take her in to dinner, she very nearly begged to be given another
+partner. She felt that her nature must be in opposition to this man's.
+
+Artois was not eager for the honor of her company. He was a careful
+dissecter of women, and, therefore, understood how mysterious women are;
+but in his intimate life they counted for little. He regarded them there
+rather as the European traveller regards the Mousmés of Japan, as
+playthings, and insisted on one thing only--that they must be pretty. A
+Frenchman, despite his unusual intellectual power, he was not wholly
+emancipated from the la petite femme tradition, which will never be
+outmoded in Paris while Paris hums with life, and, therefore, when he was
+informed that he was to take in to dinner the tall, solidly built,
+big-waisted, rugged-faced woman, whom he had been observing from a
+distance ever since he came into the drawing-room, he felt that he was
+being badly treated by his hostess.
+
+Yet he had been observing this woman closely.
+
+Something unusual, something vital in her had drawn his attention, fixed
+it, held it. He knew that, but said to himself that it was the attention
+of the novelist that had been grasped by an uncommon human specimen, and
+that the man of the world, the diner-out, did not want to eat in company
+with a specimen, but to throw off professional cares with a gay little
+chatterbox of the Mousmé type. Therefore he came over to be presented to
+Hermione with rather a bad grace.
+
+And that introduction was the beginning of the great friendship which was
+now troubling him in the fog.
+
+By the end of that evening Hermione and he had entirely rid themselves of
+their preconceived notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining
+him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a
+possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be
+agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She
+was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as
+she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen
+interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once
+began to show to Artois how much interested she was in him. By doing so
+she captivated him at once. He would not, perhaps, have been captivated
+by the heart without the brains, but the two in combination took
+possession of him with an ease which, when the evening was over, but only
+then, caused him some astonishment.
+
+Hermione had a divining-rod to discover the heart in another, and she
+found out at once that Artois had a big heart as well as a fine
+intellect. He was deceptive because he was always ready to show the
+latter, and almost always determined to conceal the former. Even to
+himself he was not quite frank about his heart, but often strove to
+minimize its influence upon him, if not to ignore totally its promptings
+and its utterances. Why this was so he could not perhaps have explained
+even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of his temperament. From the
+first moment of their intercourse Hermione showed to him her conviction
+that he had a warm heart, and that it could be relied upon without
+hesitation. This piqued but presently delighted, and also soothed
+Artois, who was accustomed to be misunderstood, and had often thought he
+liked to be misunderstood, but who now found out how pleasant a brilliant
+woman's intuition may be, even at a Parisian dinner. Before the evening
+was over they knew that they were friends; and friends they had remained
+ever since.
+
+Artois was a reserved man, but, like many reserved people, if once he
+showed himself as he really was, he could continue to be singularly
+frank. He was singularly frank with Hermione. She became his confidante,
+often at a distance. He scarcely ever came to London, which he disliked
+exceedingly, but from Paris or from the many lands in which he
+wandered--he was no pavement lounger, although he loved Paris rather as a
+man may love a very chic cocotte--he wrote to Hermione long letters, into
+which he put his mind and heart, his aspirations, struggles, failures,
+triumphs. They were human documents, and contained much of his secret
+history.
+
+It was of this history that he was now thinking, and of Hermione's
+comments upon it, tied up with a ribbon in Paris. The news of her
+approaching marriage with a man whom he had never seen had given him a
+rude shock, had awakened in him a strange feeling of jealousy. He had
+grown accustomed to the thought that Hermione was in a certain sense his
+property. He realized thoroughly the egotism, the dog-in-the-manger
+spirit which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish it. As a
+friend he certainly loved Hermione. She knew that. But he did not love
+her as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know
+that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her, and she loved but
+was not in love with him. Why, then, should this marriage make a
+difference in their friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt
+that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a mother. The latter
+thought made his egotism shudder. She would be involved in the happy
+turmoil of a family existence, while he would remain without in that
+loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom. Yes, his
+egotism shuddered, and he was angry at the weakness. He chastised the
+frailties of others, but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of
+helplessness came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven. How unworthy
+was his sensation of hostility against Delarey, his sensation that
+Hermione was wronging him by entering into this alliance, and how
+powerless he was to rid himself of either sensation! There was good cause
+for his melancholy--his own folly. He must try to conquer it, and, if
+that were impossible, to rein it in before the evening.
+
+When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room and worked for an
+hour and a half, producing a short paragraph, which did not please him.
+Then he took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.
+
+Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her
+back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As
+Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was
+passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to
+the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was
+to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual
+spirit.
+
+He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in
+build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by
+perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained
+limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick,
+low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide
+apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small,
+straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the
+features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that
+denoted health and an out-door life--an out-door life in the south,
+Artois thought.
+
+As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the
+restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself
+were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of
+a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical
+endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity,
+he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much
+handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he
+had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the
+look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant
+readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised
+for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an
+intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an
+extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was
+fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to
+be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that
+had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys
+dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that
+one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate,
+leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous,
+unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a
+tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.
+
+Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When
+she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as
+Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she
+had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body--sympathy,
+enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but
+a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of
+contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a
+Delarey for her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure
+rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been
+captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he
+still felt angry.
+
+Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her
+anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so
+transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and
+inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was
+also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception
+of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but
+not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced
+that in order to do so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in
+this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of a willing horse,
+a fine racing pace of the nature that woke pleasure and admiration in
+those who watched it.
+
+Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards him, but was
+ready to admire and rejoice in him as Hermione's greatest friend. He was
+met more than half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost touching
+him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike within Artois increased,
+and he consciously determined not to yield to the charm of this younger
+man who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not speak much
+English, but fortunately Delarey talked French fairly well, not with
+great fluency like Hermione, but enough to take a modest share in
+conversation, which was apparently all the share that he desired. Artois
+believed that he was no great talker. His eyes were more eager than was
+his tongue, and seemed to betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could
+not, perhaps, show forth in words. The conversation at first was mainly
+between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional word from
+Delarey--generally interrogative--and was confined to generalities. But
+this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and
+seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself
+the inane was speedily banished; pale topics--the spectres that haunt the
+dull and are cherished by them--were whipped away to limbo, and some
+subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities,
+was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two
+people in Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who had been
+very intimate, but who had now quarrelled, and every one said,
+irrevocably. The question arose whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the
+facts of the case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced,
+said it was the woman's.
+
+"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but in this instance it
+has failed her, it has been warped by jealousy; not the jealousy that
+often accompanies passion, for she and Robert Meunier were only great
+friends, linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much more subtle
+form of that mental disease. You know, Hermione, that both of them are
+brilliant critics of literature?"
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in this walk of
+letters, each striving to be more unerring than the other in dividing the
+sheep from the goats. I am the guilty person who made discord where there
+had been harmony."
+
+"You, Emile! How was that?"
+
+"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to be a critic, so
+difficult to be a creator. You two, now would you even dare to try to
+create?' They were nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a
+magnificent subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine, a conte. If
+you like I will give it you, and leave you to create--separately, not
+together--what you have so often written about, the perfect conte.' They
+accepted my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month to work it out.
+At the end of that time the two contes were to be submitted to a jury of
+competent literary men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but
+created great interest in our circle--you know it, Hermione, that dines
+at Réneau's on Thursday nights?"
+
+"Yes. Well, what happened?"
+
+"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but Robert Meunier astonished us
+all. He produced certainly one of the best contes that was ever written
+in the French language."
+
+"And Madame Lagrande?"
+
+"It is not too much to say that from that moment she has almost hated
+Robert."
+
+"And you dare to say she has a noble nature?"
+
+"Yes, a noble nature from which, under some apparently irresistible
+impulse, she has lapsed."
+
+"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on the table and leaning
+forward to her fiancé, "you're not in literature any more than I am,
+you're an outsider--bless you! What d'you say to that?"
+
+Delarey hesitated and looked modestly at Artois.
+
+"No, no," cried Hermione, "none of that, Maurice! You may be a better
+judge in this than Emile is with all his knowledge of the human heart.
+You're the man in the street, and sometimes I'd give a hundred pounds for
+his opinion and not twopence for the big man's who's in the profession.
+Would--could a noble nature yield to such an impulse?"
+
+"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.
+
+"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's possible. For a
+moment, yes, perhaps. But you say, Emile, that there's an actual breach
+between them."
+
+"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study of jealousy in its
+various forms?"
+
+"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't understand it."
+
+"Yet you must be capable of it."
+
+"You think every one is?"
+
+"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not. And you, I am
+certain, are."
+
+Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang out wholesomely in the
+narrow room.
+
+"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For instance, if I cared
+for some one and was cared for--"
+
+"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had only a certain,
+limited faculty of affection and transferred his affection
+elsewhere--what then?"
+
+"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe my affection
+would die. My love subsists on sympathy--take that food from it and it
+would starve and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask. If
+I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And without the love there
+could be no jealousy. But that isn't the point, Emile."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"What is?"
+
+"The point is--can a noble nature lapse like that from its nobility?"
+
+"Yes, it can."
+
+"Then it changes, it ceases to be noble. You would not say that a brave
+man can show cowardice and remain a brave man."
+
+"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave, might, under certain
+circumstances, show fear, without being what is called a coward. Human
+nature is full of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of
+extraordinary contradictions. But this point I will concede you, that it
+is like the boomerang, which flies forward, circles, and returns to the
+point from which it started. The inherently noble nature will, because it
+must, return eventually to its nobility. Then comes the really tragic
+moment with the passion of remorse."
+
+He spoke quietly, almost coldly. Hermione looked at him with shining
+eyes. She had quite forgotten Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier, had
+lost the sense of the special in her love of the general.
+
+"That's a grand theory," she said. "That we must come back to the good
+that is in us in the end, that we must be true to that somehow, almost
+whether we will or no. I shall try to think of that when I am sinning."
+
+"You--sinning!" exclaimed Delarey.
+
+"Maurice, dear, you think too well of me."
+
+Delarey flushed like a boy, and glanced quickly at Artois, who did not
+return his gaze.
+
+"But if that's true, Emile," Hermione continued, "Madame Lagrande and
+Robert Meunier will be friends again."
+
+"Some day I know she will hold out the olive-branch, but what if he
+refuses it?"
+
+"You literary people are dreadfully difficile."
+
+"True. Our jealousies are ferocious, but so are the jealousies of
+thousands who can neither read nor write."
+
+"Jealousy," she said, forgetting to eat in her keen interest in the
+subject. "I told you I didn't believe myself capable of it, but I don't
+know. The jealousy that is born of passion I might understand and suffer,
+perhaps, but jealousy of a talent greater than my own, or of one that I
+didn't possess--that seems to me inexplicable. I could never be jealous
+of a talent."
+
+"You mean that you could never hate a person for a talent in them?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Suppose that some one, by means of a talent which you had not, won from
+you a love which you had? Talent is a weapon, you know."
+
+"You think it is a weapon to conquer the affections! Ah, Emile, after all
+you don't know us!"
+
+"You go too fast. I did not say a weapon to conquer the affection of a
+woman."
+
+"You're speaking of men?"
+
+"I know," Delarey said, suddenly, forgetting to be modest for once, "you
+mean that a man might be won away from one woman by a talent in another.
+Isn't that it?"
+
+"Ah," said Hermione, "a man--I see."
+
+She sat for a moment considering deeply, with her luminous eyes fixed on
+the food in her plate, food which she did not see.
+
+"What horrible ideas you sometimes have, Emile," she said, at last.
+
+"You mean what horrible truths exist," he answered, quietly.
+
+"Could a man be won so? Yes, I suppose he might be if there were a
+combination."
+
+"Exactly," said Artois.
+
+"I see now. Suppose a man had two strains in him, say: the adoration of
+beauty, of the physical; and the adoration of talent, of the mental. He
+might fall in love with a merely beautiful woman and transfer his
+affections if he came across an equally beautiful woman who had some
+great talent."
+
+"Or he might fall in love with a plain, talented woman, and be taken from
+her by one in whom talent was allied with beauty. But in either case are
+you sure that the woman deserted could never be jealous, bitterly
+jealous, of the talent possessed by the other woman? I think talent often
+creates jealousy in your sex."
+
+"But beauty much oftener, oh, much! Every woman, I feel sure, could more
+easily be jealous of physical beauty in another woman than of mental
+gifts. There's something so personal in beauty."
+
+"And is genius not equally personal?"
+
+"I suppose it is, but I doubt if it seems so."
+
+"I think you leave out of account the advance of civilization, which is
+greatly changing men and women in our day. The tragedies of the mind are
+increasing."
+
+"And the tragedies of the heart--are they diminishing in consequence? Oh,
+Emile!" And she laughed.
+
+"Hermione--your food! You are not eating anything!" said Delarey, gently,
+pointing to her plate. "And it's all getting cold."
+
+"Thank you, Maurice."
+
+She began to eat at once with an air of happy submission, which made
+Artois understand a good deal about her feeling for Delarey.
+
+"The heart will always rule the head, I dare say, in this world where the
+majority will always be thoughtless," said Artois. "But the greatest
+jealousy, the jealousy which is most difficult to resist and to govern,
+is that in which both heart and brain are concerned. That is, indeed, a
+full-fledged monster."
+
+Artois generally spoke with a good deal of authority, often without
+meaning to do so. He thought so clearly, knew so exactly what he was
+thinking and what he meant, that he felt very safe in conversation, and
+from this sense of safety sprang his air of masterfulness. It was an air
+that was always impressive, but to-night it specially struck Hermione.
+Now she laid down her knife and fork once more, to Delarey's half-amused
+despair, and exclaimed:
+
+"I shall never forget the way you said that. Even if it were nonsense one
+would have to believe it for the moment, and of course it's dreadfully
+true. Intellect and heart suffering in combination must be far more
+terrible than the one suffering without the other. No, Maurice, I've
+really finished. I don't want any more. Let's have our coffee."
+
+"The Turkish coffee," said Artois, with a smile. "Do you like Turkish
+coffee, Monsieur Delarey?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur. Hermione has taught me to."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"At first it seemed to me too full of grounds," he explained.
+
+"Perhaps a taste for it must be an acquired one among Europeans. Do we
+have it here?"
+
+"No, no," said Hermione, "Caminiti has taken my advice, and now there's a
+charming smoke-room behind this. Come along."
+
+She got up and led the way out. The two men followed her, Artois coming
+last. He noticed now more definitely the very great contrast between
+Hermione and her future husband. Delarey, when in movement, looked more
+than ever like a Mercury. His footstep was light and elastic, and his
+whole body seemed to breathe out a gay activity, a fulness of the joy of
+life. Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the tarantella, and
+when they were in the small smoke-room, which Caminiti had fitted up in
+what he believed to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely
+accurate, was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire:
+
+"Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?"
+
+"No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her veins. But I have
+never been in Sicily or Italy."
+
+"Ah, Emile," said Hermione, "how clever of you to find that out. I notice
+it, too, sometimes, that touch of the blessed South. I shall take him
+there some day, and see if the Southern blood doesn't wake up in his
+veins when he's in the rays of the real sun we never see in England."
+
+"She'll take you to Italy, you fortunate, damned dog!" thought Artois.
+"What luck for you to go there with such a companion!"
+
+They sat down and the two men began to smoke. Hermione never smoked
+because she had tried smoking and knew she hated it. They were alone in
+the room, which was warm, but not too warm, and faintly lit by shaded
+lamps. Artois began to feel more genial, he scarcely knew why. Perhaps
+the good dinner had comforted him, or perhaps he was beginning to yield
+to the charm of Delarey's gay and boyish modesty, which was untainted and
+unspoiled by any awkward shyness.
+
+Artois did not know or seek to know, but he was aware that he was more
+ready to be happy with the flying moment than he had been, or had
+expected to be that evening. Something almost paternal shone in his gray
+eyes as he stretched his large limbs on Caminiti's notion of a Turkish
+divan, and watched the first smoke-wreaths rise from his cigar, a light
+which made his face most pleasantly expressive to Hermione.
+
+"He likes Maurice," she thought, with a glow of pleasure, and with the
+thought came into her heart an even deeper love for Maurice. For it was a
+triumph, indeed, if Artois were captured speedily by any one. It seemed
+to her just then as if she had never known what perfect happiness was
+till now, when she sat between her best friend and her lover, and
+sensitively felt that in the room there were not three separate persons
+but a Trinity. For a moment there was a comfortable silence. Then an
+Italian boy brought in the coffee. Artois spoke to him in Italian. His
+eyes lit up as he answered with the accent of Naples, lit up still more
+when Artois spoke to him again in his own dialect. When he had served the
+coffee he went out, glowing.
+
+"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.
+
+"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I--it doesn't matter to me.
+Wherever it is will be the same to me."
+
+"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said Artois. "I expect that's
+profoundly true."
+
+"Don't you--don't you know?" ventured Delarey.
+
+"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every branch of knowledge."
+
+He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm that had in it
+something more sad than bitterness. It struck both Hermione and Delarey
+as almost monstrous that anybody with whom they were connected should be
+feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life presented itself to them in a
+glorious radiance of sunshine, in a passionate light, in a torrent of
+color. Their knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by their
+dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as if every one ought to be
+as happy as they were, almost as if every one could be as happy as they
+were.
+
+"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you can't mean to say that
+you have never known the happiness that makes of every place--Clapham,
+Lippe-Detmold, a West African swamp, a Siberian convict settlement--an
+Italy? You have had a wonderful life. You have worked, you have wandered,
+had your ambition and your freedom--"
+
+"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted, "wide open on
+life watching the manifestations of life."
+
+"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a minute to everything but
+your own happiness? Oh, it's selfish, I know, but it does one good,
+Emile, any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It
+reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of
+the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one
+sees--one must see--everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery,
+not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking
+graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps
+I don't put it well, but--"
+
+"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what you say."
+
+"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.
+
+His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration
+and love.
+
+Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw
+children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A
+desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his
+intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign
+spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had
+arrived.
+
+"There's truth in what you say. But there's another truth, too, which you
+bring to my mind at this moment."
+
+"What's that, Emile?"
+
+"The payment that is exacted from great happiness. These intense joys of
+which you speak--what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any
+violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably,
+followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a
+beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this
+highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the
+great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the
+track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or
+woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost
+certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."
+
+"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"
+
+"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 had lifted, 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
+very handsome, 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 hand and
+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."
+
+[Illustration: "'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 is modest 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 select and 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.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Lucrezia Gabbi came 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 but
+slight 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
+portičre. 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 opened wider, 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 old man'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 manly chin. 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?"
+
+"Macchč!"
+
+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.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"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 passionately tender 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 was a 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:
+
+     "This is a word--perhaps unwelcome, for I think I understand, dear
+     friend, something of what you are feeling and of what you desire
+     just now--a word of welcome to your garden of paradise. May there
+     never be an angel with a flaming sword to keep the gate against
+     you. Listen to the shepherds fluting, dream, or, better, live, as
+     you are grandly capable of living, under the old olives of Sicily.
+     Take your golden time boldly with both hands. Life may seem to most
+     of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured thing,
+     but when it is not so for a while to one who can think as you can
+     think, the power of thought, of deep thought, intensifies its
+     glory. You will never enjoy as might a pagan, perhaps never as
+     might a saint. But you will enjoy as a generous-blooded woman with
+     a heart that only your friends--I should like to dare to say only
+     one friend--know in its rare entirety. There is an egoist here, in
+     the shadow of the mosques, who turns his face towards Mecca, and
+     prays that you may never leave your garden.
+                                                               E. A."
+
+     "Does the Sicilian grandmother respond to the magic of the south?"
+
+When she drew near to the end of this letter Hermione hesitated.
+
+"He--there's something," she said, "that is too kind to me. I don't think
+I'll read it."
+
+"Don't," said Delarey. "But it can't be too kind."
+
+She saw the postscript and smiled.
+
+"And quite at the end there's an allusion to you."
+
+"Is there?"
+
+"I must read that."
+
+And she read it.
+
+"He needn't be afraid of the grandmother's not responding, need he,
+Maurice?"
+
+"No," he said, smiling too. "But is that it, do you think? Why should it
+be? Who wouldn't love this place?"
+
+And he went to the open door and looked out towards the sea.
+
+"Who wouldn't?" he repeated.
+
+"Oh, I have met an Englishman who was angry with Etna for being the shape
+it is."
+
+"What an ass!"
+
+"I thought so, too. But, seriously, I expect the grandmother has
+something to say in that matter of your feeling already, as if you
+belonged here."
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+He was still looking towards the distant sea far down below them.
+
+"Is that an island?" he asked.
+
+"Where?" said Hermione, getting up and coming towards him. "Oh, that--no,
+it is a promontory, but it's almost surrounded by the sea. There is only
+a narrow ledge of rock, like a wall, connecting it with the main-land,
+and in the rock there's a sort of natural tunnel through which the sea
+flows. I've sometimes been to picnic there. On the plateau hidden among
+the trees there's a ruined house. I have spent many hours reading and
+writing in it. They call it, in Marechiaro, Casa delle Sirene--the house
+of the sirens."
+
+               "Questo vino č bello e fino,"
+
+cried Gaspare's voice outside.
+
+"A Brindisi!" said Hermione. "Gaspare's treating the boys. Questo
+vino--oh, how glorious to be here in Sicily!"
+
+She put her arm through Delarey's, and drew him out onto the terrace.
+Gaspare, Lucrezia, Sebastiano, and the three boys stood there with
+glasses of red wine in their hands raised high above their heads.
+
+               "Questo vino č bello e fino,
+               Č portato da Castel Perini,
+               Faccio brindisi alla Signora Ermini,"
+
+continued Gaspare, joyously, and with an obvious pride in his poetical
+powers.
+
+They all drank simultaneously, Lucrezia spluttering a little out of
+shyness.
+
+"Monte Amato, Gaspare, not Castel Perini. But that doesn't rhyme, eh?
+Bravo! But we must drink, too."
+
+Gaspare hastened to fill two more glasses.
+
+"Now it's our turn," cried Hermione.
+
+               "Questo vino č bello e fino,
+               Č portato da Castello a mare,
+               Faccio brindisi al Signor Gaspare."
+
+The boys burst into a hearty laugh, and Gaspare's eyes gleamed with
+pleasure while Hermione and Maurice drank. Then Sebastiano drew from the
+inner pocket of his old jacket a little flute, smiling with an air of
+intense and comic slyness which contorted his face.
+
+"Ah," said Hermione, "I know--it's the tarantella!"
+
+She clapped her hands.
+
+"It only wanted that," she said to Maurice. "Only that--the tarantella!"
+
+"Guai Lucrezia!" cried Gaspare, tyrannically.
+
+Lucrezia bounded to one side, bent her body inward, and giggled with all
+her heart. Sebastiano leaned his back against a column and put the flute
+to his lips.
+
+"Here, Maurice, here!" said Hermione.
+
+She made him sit down on one of the seats under the parlor window, facing
+the view, while the four boys took their places, one couple opposite to
+the other. Then Sebastiano began to twitter the tune familiar to the
+Sicilians of Marechiaro, in which all the careless pagan joy of life in
+the sun seems caught and flung out upon a laughing, dancing world.
+Delarey laid his hands on the warm tiles of the seat, leaned forward, and
+watched with eager eyes. He had never seen the tarantella, yet now with
+his sensation of expectation there was blended another feeling. It seemed
+to him as if he were going to see something he had known once, perhaps
+very long ago, something that he had forgotten and that was now going to
+be recalled to his memory. Some nerve in his body responded to
+Sebastiano's lively tune. A desire of movement came to him as he saw the
+gay boys waiting on the terrace, their eyes already dancing, although
+their bodies were still.
+
+Gaspare bent forward, lifted his hands above his head, and began to snap
+his fingers in time to the music. A look of joyous invitation had come
+into his eyes--an expression that was almost coquettish, like the
+expression of a child who has conceived some lively, innocent design of
+which he thinks that no one knows except himself. His young figure surely
+quivered with a passion of merry mischief which was communicated to his
+companions. In it there began to flame a spirit that suggested undying
+youth. Even before they began to dance the boys were transformed. If they
+had ever known cares those cares had fled, for in the breasts of those
+who can really dance the tarantella there is no room for the smallest
+sorrow, in their hearts no place for the most minute regret, anxiety, or
+wonder, when the rapture of the measure is upon them. Away goes
+everything but the pagan joy of life, the pagan ecstasy of swift
+movement, and the leaping blood that is quick as the motes in a sunray
+falling from a southern sky. Delarey began to smile as he watched them,
+and their expression was reflected in his eyes. Hermione glanced at him
+and thought what a boy he looked. His eyes made her feel almost as if
+she were sitting with a child.
+
+The mischief, the coquettish joy of the boys increased. They snapped
+their fingers more loudly, swayed their bodies, poised themselves first
+on one foot, then on the other, then abruptly, and with a wildness that
+was like the sudden crash of all the instruments in an orchestra breaking
+in upon the melody of a solitary flute, burst into the full frenzy of the
+dance. And in the dance each seemed to be sportively creative, ruled by
+his own sweet will.
+
+"That's why I love the tarantella more than any other dance," Hermione
+murmured to her husband, "because it seems to be the invention of the
+moment, as if they were wild with joy and had to show it somehow, and
+showed it beautifully by dancing. Look at Gaspare now."
+
+With his hands held high above his head, and linked together, Gaspare was
+springing into the air, as if propelled by one of those boards which are
+used by acrobats in circuses for leaping over horses. He had thrown off
+his hat, and his low-growing hair, which was rather long on the forehead,
+moved as he sprang upward, as if his excitement, penetrating through
+every nerve in his body, had filled it with electricity. While Hermione
+watched him she almost expected to see its golden tufts give off sparks
+in response to the sparkling radiance that flashed from his laughing
+eyes. For in all the wild activity of his changing movements Gaspare
+never lost his coquettish expression, the look of seductive mischief that
+seemed to invite the whole world to be merry and mad as he was. His
+ever-smiling lips and ever-smiling eyes defied fatigue, and his young
+body--grace made a living, pulsing, aspiring reality--suggested the
+tireless intensity of a flame. The other boys danced well, but Gaspare
+outdid them all, for they only looked gay while he looked mad with joy.
+And to-day, at this moment, he felt exultant. He had a padrona to whom he
+was devoted with that peculiar sensitive devotion of the Sicilian which,
+once it is fully aroused, is tremendous in its strength and jealous in
+its doggedness. He was in command of Lucrezia, and was respectfully
+looked up to by all his boy friends of Marechiaro as one who could
+dispense patronage, being a sort of purse-bearer and conductor of rich
+forestieri in a strange land. Even Sebastiano, a personage rather apt to
+be a little haughty in his physical strength, and, though no longer a
+brigand, no great respecter of others, showed him to-day a certain
+deference which elated his boyish spirit. And all his elation, all his
+joy in the present and hopes for the future, he let out in the dance. To
+dance the tarantella almost intoxicated him, even when he only danced it
+in the village among the contadini, but to-day the admiring eyes of his
+padrona were upon him. He knew how she loved the tarantella. He knew,
+too, that she wanted the padrone, her husband, to love it as she did.
+Gaspare was very shrewd to read a woman's thoughts so long as her love
+ran in them. Though but eighteen, he was a man in certain knowledge. He
+understood, almost unconsciously, a good deal of what Hermione was
+feeling as she watched, and he put his whole soul into the effort to
+shine, to dazzle, to rouse gayety and wonder in the padrone, who saw him
+dance for the first time. He was untiring in his variety and his
+invention. Sometimes, light-footed in his mountain boots, with an almost
+incredible swiftness and vim, he rushed from end to end of the terrace.
+His feet twinkled in steps so complicated and various that he made the
+eyes that watched him wink as at a play of sparks in a furnace, and his
+arms and hands were never still, yet never, even for a second, fell into
+a curve that was ungraceful. Sometimes his head was bent whimsically
+forward as if in invitation. Sometimes he threw his whole body backward,
+exposing his brown throat, and staring up at the sun like a sun
+worshipper dancing to his divinity. Sometimes he crouched on his
+haunches, clapping his hands together rhythmically, and, with bent knees,
+shooting out his legs like some jovially grotesque dwarf promenading
+among a crowd of Follies. And always the spirit of the dance seemed to
+increase within him, and the intoxication of it to take more hold upon
+him, and his eyes grew brighter and his face more radiant, and his body
+more active, more utterly untiring, till he was the living embodiment
+surely of all the youth and all the gladness of the world.
+
+Hermione had kept Artois's letter in her hand, and now, as she danced in
+spirit with Gaspare, and rejoiced not only in her own joy, but in his,
+she thought suddenly of that sentence in it--"Life may seem to most of us
+who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured, thing." Life a
+tortured thing! She was thinking now, exultantly thinking. Her thoughts
+were leaping, spinning, crouching, whirling, rushing with Gaspare in the
+sunshine. But life was a happy, a radiant reality. No dream, it was more
+beautiful than any dream, as the clear, when lovely, is more lovely than
+even that which is exquisite and vague. She had, of course, always known
+that in the world there is much joy. Now she felt it, she felt all the
+joy of the world. She felt the joy of sunshine and of blue, the joy of
+love and of sympathy, the joy of health and of activity, the joy of sane
+passion that fights not against any law of God or man, the joy of liberty
+in a joyous land where the climate is kindly, and, despite poverty and
+toil, there are songs upon the lips of men, there are tarantellas in
+their sun-browned bodies, there are the fires of gayety in their bold,
+dark eyes. Joy, joy twittered in the reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the
+boys were joys made manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of
+joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off drone of the
+"Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy that was different, less subtly
+sweet, perhaps, but more buoyant, more fearless, more careless. The glory
+of the pagan world was round about her, and for a moment her heart was
+like the heart of a nymph scattering roses in a Bacchic triumph.
+
+Maurice moved beside her, and she heard him breathing quickly.
+
+"What is it, Maurice?" she asked. "You--do you--"
+
+"Yes," he answered, understanding the question she had not fully asked.
+"It drives me almost mad to sit still and see those boys. Gaspare's like
+a merry devil tempting one."
+
+As if Gaspare had understood what Maurice said, he suddenly spun round
+from his companions, and began to dance in front of Maurice and Hermione,
+provocatively, invitingly, bending his head towards them, and laughing
+almost in their faces, but without a trace of impertinence. He did not
+speak, though his lips were parted, showing two rows of even, tiny teeth,
+but his radiant eyes called to them, scolded them for their inactivity,
+chaffed them for it, wondered how long it would last, and seemed to deny
+that it could last forever.
+
+"What eyes!" said Hermione. "Did you ever see anything so expressive?"
+
+Maurice did not answer. He was watching Gaspare, fascinated, completely
+under the spell of the dance. The blood was beginning to boil in his
+veins, warm blood of the south that he had never before felt in his body.
+Artois had spoken to Hermione of "the call of the blood." Maurice began
+to hear it now, to long to obey it.
+
+Gaspare clapped his hands alternately in front of him and behind him,
+leaping from side to side, with a step in which one foot crossed over the
+other, and holding his body slightly curved inward. And all the time he
+kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation grew stronger in
+them.
+
+"Venga!" he whispered, always dancing. "Venga, signorino, venga--venga!"
+
+He spun round, clapped his hands furiously, snapped his fingers, and
+jumped back. Then he held out his hands to Delarey, with a gay authority
+that was irresistible.
+
+"Venga, venga, signorino! Venga, venga!"
+
+All the blood in Delarey responded, chasing away something--was it a
+shyness, a self-consciousness of love--that till now had held him back
+from the gratification of his desire? He sprang up and he danced the
+tarantella, danced it almost as if he had danced it all his life, with a
+natural grace, a frolicsome abandon that no pure-blooded Englishman could
+ever achieve, danced it as perhaps once the Sicilian grandmother had
+danced it under the shadow of Etna. Whatever Gaspare did he imitated,
+with a swiftness and a certainty that were amazing, and Gaspare,
+intoxicated by having such a pupil, outdid himself in countless changing
+activities. It was like a game and like a duel, for Gaspare presently
+began almost to fight for supremacy as he watched Delarey's startling
+aptitude in the tarantella, which, till this moment, he had considered
+the possession of those born in Sicily and of Sicilian blood. He seemed
+to feel that this pupil might in time become the master, and to be put
+upon his mettle, and he put forth all his cunning to be too much for
+Delarey.
+
+And Hermione was left alone, watching, for Lucrezia had disappeared,
+suddenly mindful of some household duty.
+
+When Delarey sprang up she felt a thrill of responsive excitement, and
+when she watched his first steps, and noted the look of youth in him, the
+supple southern grace that rivalled the boyish grace of Gaspare, she was
+filled with that warm, that almost yearning admiration which is the
+child of love. But another feeling followed--a feeling of melancholy. As
+she watched him dancing with the four boys, a gulf seemed to yawn between
+her and them. She was alone on her side of this gulf, quite alone. They
+were remote from her. She suddenly realized that Delarey belonged to the
+south, and that she did not. Despite all her understanding of the beauty
+of the south, all her sympathy for the spirit of the south, all her
+passionate love of the south, she was not of it. She came to it as a
+guest. But Delarey was of it. She had never realized that absolutely till
+this moment. Despite his English parentage and upbringing, the southern
+strain in his ancestry had been revived in him. The drop of southern
+blood in his veins was his master. She had not married an Englishman.
+
+Once again, and in all the glowing sunshine, with Etna and the sea before
+her, and the sound of Sebastiano's flute in her ears, she was on the
+Thames Embankment in the night with Artois, and heard his deep voice
+speaking to her.
+
+"Does he know his own blood?" said the voice. "Our blood governs us when
+the time comes."
+
+And again the voice said:
+
+"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."
+
+"The call of the blood." There was now something almost terrible to
+Hermione in that phrase, something menacing and irresistible. Were men,
+then, governed irrevocably, dominated by the blood that was in them?
+Artois had certainly seemed to imply that they were, and he knew men as
+few knew them. His powerful intellect, like a search-light, illumined the
+hidden places, discovering the concealed things of the souls of men. But
+Artois was not a religious man, and Hermione had a strong sense of
+religion, though she did not cling, as many do, to any one creed. If the
+call of the blood were irresistible in a man, then man was only a slave.
+The criminal must not be condemned, nor the saint exalted. Conduct was
+but obedience in one who had no choice but to obey. Could she believe
+that?
+
+The dance grew wilder, swifter. Sebastiano quickened the time till he was
+playing it prestissimo. One of the boys, Giulio, dropped out exhausted.
+Then another, Alfio, fell against the terrace wall, laughing and wiping
+his streaming face. Finally Giuseppe gave in, too, obviously against his
+will. But Gaspare and Maurice still kept on. The game was certainly a
+duel now--a duel which would not cease till Sebastiano put an end to it
+by laying down his flute. But he, too, was on his mettle and would not
+own fatigue. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could not bear the dance any
+more. It was, perhaps, absurd of her. Her brain, fatigued by travel, was
+perhaps playing her tricks. But she felt as if Maurice were escaping from
+her in this wild tarantella, like a man escaping through a fantastic
+grotto from some one who called to him near its entrance. A faint
+sensation of something that was surely jealousy, the first she had ever
+known, stirred in her heart--jealousy of a tarantella.
+
+"Maurice!" she said.
+
+He did not hear her.
+
+"Maurice!" she called. "Sebastiano--Gaspare--stop! You'll kill
+yourselves!"
+
+Sebastiano caught her eye, finished the tune, and took the flute from his
+lips. In truth he was not sorry to be commanded to do the thing his pride
+of music forbade him to do of his own will. Gaspare gave a wild, boyish
+shout, and flung himself down on Giuseppe's knees, clasping him round the
+neck jokingly. And Maurice--he stood still on the terrace for a moment
+looking dazed. Then the hot blood surged up to his head, making it tingle
+under his hair, and he came over slowly, almost shamefacedly, and sat
+down by Hermione.
+
+"This sun's made me mad, I think," he said, looking at her. "Why, how
+pale you are, Hermione!"
+
+"Am I? No, it must be the shadow of the awning makes me look so. Oh,
+Maurice, you are indeed a southerner! Do you know, I feel--I feel as if I
+had never really seen you till now, here on this terrace, as if I had
+never known you as you are till now, now that I've watched you dance the
+tarantella."
+
+"I can't dance it, of course. It was absurd of me to try."
+
+"Ask Gaspare! No, I'll ask him. Gaspare, can the padrone dance the
+tarantella?"
+
+"Eh--altro!" said Gaspare, with admiring conviction.
+
+He got off Giuseppe's knee, where he had been curled up almost like a big
+kitten, came and stood by Hermione, and added:
+
+"Per Dio, signora, but the padrone is like one of us!"
+
+Hermione laughed. Now that the dance was over and the twittering flute
+was silent, her sense of loneliness and melancholy was departing. Soon,
+no doubt, she would be able to look back upon it and laugh at it as one
+laughs at moods that have passed away.
+
+"This is his first day in Sicily, Gaspare."
+
+"There are forestieri who come here every year, and who stay for months,
+and who can talk our language--yes, and can even swear in dialetto as we
+can--but they are not like the padrone. Not one of them could dance the
+tarantella like that. Per Dio!"
+
+A radiant look of pleasure came into Maurice's face.
+
+"I'm glad you've brought me here," he said. "Ah, when you chose this
+place for our honeymoon you understood me better than I understand
+myself, Hermione."
+
+"Did I?" she said, slowly. "But no, Maurice, I think I chose a little
+selfishly. I was thinking of what I wanted. Oh, the boys are going, and
+Sebastiano."
+
+That evening, when they had finished supper--they did not wish to test
+Lucrezia's powers too severely by dining the first day--they came out
+onto the terrace. Lucrezia and Gaspare were busily talking in the
+kitchen. Tito, the donkey, was munching his hay under the low-pitched
+roof of the out-house. Now and then they could faintly hear the sound of
+his moving jaws, Lucrezia's laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These
+fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence that lay about
+them, the night hush of the mountains and the sea. Hermione sat down on
+the seat in the terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless
+night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars. There was a cool
+breeze blowing from Etna. Here and there upon the mountains shone
+solitary lights, and one was moving slowly through the darkness along the
+crest of a hill opposite to them, a torch carried by some peasant going
+to his hidden cottage among the olive-trees.
+
+Maurice lit his cigar and stood by Hermione, who was sitting sideways and
+leaning her arms on the wall, and looking out into the wide dimness in
+which, somewhere, lay the ravine. He did not want to talk just then, and
+she kept silence. This was really their wedding night, and both of them
+were unusually conscious, but in different ways, of the mystery that lay
+about them, and that lay, too, within them. It was strange to be together
+up here, far up in the mountains, isolated in their love. Below the wall,
+on the side of the ravine, the leaves of the olives rustled faintly as
+the wind passed by. And this whisper of the leaves seemed to be meant for
+them, to be addressed to them. They were surely being told something by
+the little voices of the night.
+
+"Maurice," Hermione said, at last, "does this silence of the mountains
+make you wish for anything?"
+
+"Wish?" he said. "I don't know--no, I think not. I have got what I
+wanted. I have got you. Why should I wish for anything more? And I feel
+at home here. It's extraordinary how I feel at home."
+
+"You! No, it isn't extraordinary at all."
+
+She looked up at him, still keeping her arms on the terrace wall. His
+physical beauty, which had always fascinated her, moved her more than
+ever in the south, seemed to her to become greater, to have more meaning
+in this setting of beauty and romance. She thought of the old pagan gods.
+He was, indeed, suited to be their happy messenger. At that moment
+something within her more than loved him, worshipped him, felt for him an
+idolatry that had something in it of pain. A number of thoughts ran
+through her mind swiftly. One was this: "Can it be possible that he will
+die some day, that he will be dead?" And the awfulness, the unspeakable
+horror of the death of the body gripped her and shook her in the dark.
+
+"Oh, Maurice!" she said. "Maurice!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+She held out her hands to him. He took them and sat down by her.
+
+"What is it, Hermione?" he said again.
+
+"If beauty were only deathless!"
+
+"But--but all this is, for us. It was here for the old Greeks to see, and
+I suppose it will be here--"
+
+"I didn't mean that."
+
+"I've been stupid," he said, humbly.
+
+"No, my dearest--my dearest one. Oh, how did you ever love me?"
+
+She had forgotten the warning of Artois. The dirty little beggar was
+staring at the angel and wanted the angel to know it.
+
+"Hermione! What do you mean?"
+
+He looked at her, and there was genuine surprise in his face and in his
+voice.
+
+"How can you love me? I'm so ugly. Oh, I feel it here, I feel it horribly
+in the midst of--of all this loveliness, with you."
+
+She hid her face against his shoulder almost like one afraid.
+
+"But you are not ugly! What nonsense! Hermione!"
+
+He put his hand under her face and raised it, and the touch of his hand
+against her cheek made her tremble. To-night she more than loved, she
+worshipped him. Her intellect did not speak any more. Its voice was
+silenced by the voice of the heart, by the voices of the senses. She felt
+as if she would like to go down on her knees to him and thank him for
+having loved her, for loving her. Abasement would have been a joy to her
+just then, was almost a necessity, and yet there was pride in her, the
+decent pride of a pure-natured woman who has never let herself be soiled.
+
+"Hermione," he said, looking into her face. "Don't speak to me like that.
+It's all wrong. It puts me in the wrong place, I a fool and you--what you
+are. If that friend of yours could hear you--by Jove!"
+
+There was something so boyish, so simple in his voice that Hermione
+suddenly threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, as she might have
+kissed a delightful child. She began to laugh through tears.
+
+"Thank God you're not conceited!" she exclaimed.
+
+"What about?" he asked.
+
+But she did not answer. Presently they heard Gaspare's step on the
+terrace. He came to them bareheaded, with shining eyes, to ask if they
+were satisfied with Lucrezia. About himself he did not ask. He felt that
+he had done all things for his padrona as he alone could have done them,
+knowing her so well.
+
+"Gaspare," Hermione said, "everything is perfect. Tell Lucrezia."
+
+"Better not, signora. I will say you are fairly satisfied, as it is only
+the first day. Then she will try to do better to-morrow. I know
+Lucrezia."
+
+And he gazed at them calmly with his enormous liquid eyes.
+
+"Do not say too much, signora. It makes people proud."
+
+[Illustration: "HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN THE HOUSE OF
+THE SIRENS"]
+
+She thought that she heard an odd Sicilian echo of Artois. The peasant
+lad's mind reflected the mind of the subtle novelist for a moment.
+
+"Very well, Gaspare," she said, submissively.
+
+He smiled at her with satisfaction.
+
+"I understand girls," he said. "You must keep them down or they will keep
+you down. Every girl in Marechiaro is like that. We keep them down
+therefore."
+
+He spoke calmly, evidently quite without thought that he was speaking to
+a woman.
+
+"May I go to bed, signora?" he added. "I got up at four this morning."
+
+"At four!"
+
+"To be sure all was ready for you and the signore."
+
+"Gaspare! Go at once. We will go to bed, too. Shall we, Maurice?"
+
+"Yes. I'm ready."
+
+Just as they were going up the steps into the house, he turned to take a
+last look at the night. Far down below him over the terrace wall he saw a
+bright, steady light.
+
+"Is that on the sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing to it. "Do they fish
+there at night?"
+
+"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."
+
+Gaspare shook his head.
+
+"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.
+
+"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."
+
+"But no one lives there."
+
+"Oh, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista lives there with
+Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora. Buon riposo, signore."
+
+"Buon riposo, Gaspare."
+
+And Maurice echoed it:
+
+"Buon riposo."
+
+As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near
+Tito's stable, Maurice added:
+
+"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying good-night. I feel as if
+I'd said it before, somehow."
+
+"Your blood has said it without your knowing it, perhaps many times. Are
+you coming, Maurice?"
+
+He turned once more, looked down at the light shining in the house of the
+sirens, then followed Hermione in through the open door.
+
+
+
+V
+
+That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such
+as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world--a world that
+never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to
+hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the
+dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see
+it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to
+enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked
+up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of
+worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of
+when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or
+a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past
+years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a
+youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt
+when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased,
+instead of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this sometimes
+surprised her. For she had thought till now that the dead sculptors of
+Greece and Rome had in their works succeeded in transcending humanity,
+had shown what God might have created instead of what He had created, and
+had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living
+being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material.
+Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty
+something strange, something ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if
+he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence
+in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks
+in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the
+trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again
+in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green
+glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like
+Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she
+imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing,
+light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent
+spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a
+"fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did
+not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her
+by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had
+been struck by in a London restaurant.
+
+This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a
+handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that
+set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In
+Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he
+arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and
+he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each
+other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously
+absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this
+son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of
+satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering
+upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her
+orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing
+seas.
+
+"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one
+morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the
+world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the
+shining that came in answer to the words--"Let there be light!"
+
+In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the
+wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be
+busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had
+realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that
+there was nothing remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not
+cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily
+she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because
+they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more
+closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that
+was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing,
+playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to
+know that she would be a little saddened were her husband to change, to
+grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had spoken to Artois of
+possible development in Maurice, of what she might do for him, and at
+first, just at first, she had instinctively exerted her influence over
+him to bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And he had eagerly
+striven to respond, stirred by his love for her, and his reverence--not a
+very clever, but certainly a very affectionate reverence--for her
+brilliant qualities of brain. In those very first days together, isolated
+in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go--as she
+herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind
+was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious,
+love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land
+stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours
+forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of
+love but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love prompts thought,
+not stifles it. In their long mountain walks, in their rides on muleback
+to distant villages, hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests
+of the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when the noon
+wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on the terrace when the stars
+came out, and the shepherds led their flocks down to the valleys with
+little happy tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts,
+desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that beauty and
+solitude and nearness to nature in this isle of the south woke in her.
+She did not fear to be subtle, she did not fear to be trivial. Everything
+she noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she noticed
+suggested to her, she related. The sound of the morning breeze in the
+olive-trees seemed to her different from the sound of the breeze of
+evening. She tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of the
+music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every sound, not only with
+the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon
+the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy
+against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring
+as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked
+Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with
+her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the
+sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over
+rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away
+towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line
+immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came,
+like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then
+fading until taken softly by eternity--that was Hermione's feeling--that
+sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can
+imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys
+elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight,
+when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the
+little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the
+bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail
+came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she
+was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring
+of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and
+laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her passionate
+imagination now threw gossamers before, now drew gossamers away from a
+holy of holies that no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that
+holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was a tender, glorious
+attempt to compass the impossible.
+
+All this was at first. But Hermione was generally too clear-brained to be
+long tricked even by her own enthusiasms. She soon began to understand
+that though Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she saw and
+felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant attempt of love in a man
+who thought he had married his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and
+the spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She watched in a
+rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion of gratitude. But Gaspare was
+in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of
+the phenomenon, a dancer in the exquisite tarantella. And Maurice, too,
+on that first day had he not obeyed Sebastiano's call? Soon she knew that
+when she had sat alone on the terrace seat, and seen the dancers losing
+all thought of time and the hour in the joy of their moving bodies, while
+hers was still, the scene had been prophetic. In that moment Maurice had
+instinctively taken his place in the mask of the spring and she hers.
+Their bodies had uttered their minds. She was the passionate watcher, but
+he was the passionate performer. Therefore she was his audience. She had
+travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it, had travelled
+out to be Sicily.
+
+There was a great difference between them, but, having realized it
+thoroughly, Hermione was able not to regret but to delight in it. She did
+not wish to change her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice
+to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand with her heart,
+he would be completely changed, and into something not natural, like a
+performing dog or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps
+amazement, combined too often with a faint disgust. And ceasing to desire
+she ceased to endeavor.
+
+"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering her
+conversation with Artois. "And, thank God, I don't want to now."
+
+And then she set herself to watch her Sicilian, as she loved to call him,
+enjoying the spring in Sicily in his own way, dancing the tarantella with
+surely the spirit of eternal youth. He had, she thought, heard the call
+of the blood and responded to it fully and openly, fearless and
+unashamed. Day by day, seeing his boyish happiness in this life of the
+mountains and the sea, she laughed at the creeping, momentary sense of
+apprehension that had been roused in her during her conversation with
+Artois upon the Thames Embankment. Artois had said that he distrusted
+what he loved. That was the flaw in an over-intellectual man. The mind
+was too alert, too restless, dogging the steps of the heart like a spy,
+troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness. But she could trust where
+she loved. Maurice was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of
+paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched him, then threw
+himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.
+
+The strain of Sicilian blood that was in him worked in him curiously,
+making her sometimes marvel at the mysterious power of race, at the
+stubborn and almost tyrannical domination some dead have over some
+living, those who are dust over those who are quick with animation and
+passion. Everything that was connected with Sicily and with Sicilian life
+not only reached his senses and sank easily into his heart, but seemed
+also to rouse his mind to an activity that astonished her. In connection
+with Sicily he showed a swiftness, almost a cleverness, she never noted
+in him when things Sicilian were not in question.
+
+For instance, like most Englishmen, Maurice had no great talent for
+languages. He spoke French fairly well, having had a French nurse when he
+was a child, and his mother had taught him a little Italian. But till now
+he had never had any desire to be proficient in any language except his
+own. Hermione, on the other hand, was gifted as a linguist, loving
+languages and learning them easily. Yet Maurice picked up--in his case
+the expression, usually ridiculous, was absolutely applicable--Sicilian
+with a readiness that seemed to Hermione almost miraculous. He showed no
+delight in the musical beauty of Italian. What he wanted, and what his
+mind--or was it rather what his ears and his tongue and his lips?--took,
+and held and revelled in, was the Sicilian dialect spoken by Lucrezia and
+Gaspare when they were together, spoken by the peasants of Marechiaro and
+of the mountains. To Hermione Gaspare had always talked Italian,
+incorrect, but still Italian, and she spoke no dialect, although she
+could often guess at what the Sicilians meant when they addressed her in
+their vigorous but uncouth jargon, different from Italian almost as
+Gaelic is from English. But Maurice very soon began to speak a few words
+of Sicilian. Hermione laughed at him and discouraged him jokingly,
+telling him that he must learn Italian thoroughly, the language of love,
+the most melodious language in the world.
+
+"Italian!" he said. "What's the use of it? I want to talk to the people.
+A grammar! I won't open it. Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+Gaspare came rushing bareheaded to them in the sun.
+
+"The signora says I'm to learn Italian, but I say that I've Sicilian
+blood in my veins and must talk as you do."
+
+"But I, signore, can speak Italian!" said Gaspare, with twinkling pride.
+
+"As a bear dances. No, professor, you and I, we'll be good patriots.
+We'll speak in our mother-tongue. You rascal, you know we've begun
+already."
+
+And looking mischievously at Hermione, he began to sing in a loud, warm
+voice:
+
+               "Cu Gabbi e Jochi e Parti e Mascarati,
+               Si fa lu giubileu universali.
+               Tiripi-tůmpiti, tůmpiti, tůmpiti,
+               Milli cardůbuli 'n culu ti půncinu!"
+
+Gaspare burst into a roar of delighted laughter.
+
+"It's the tarantella over again," Hermione said. "You're a hopeless
+Sicilian. I give you up."
+
+That same day she said to him:
+
+"You love the peasants, don't you, Maurice?"
+
+"Yes. Are you surprised?"
+
+"No; at least I'm not surprised at your loving them."
+
+"Well, then, Hermione?"
+
+"Perhaps a little at the way you love them."
+
+"What way's that?"
+
+"Almost as they love each other--that's to say, when they love each other
+at all. Gaspare now! I believe you feel more as if he were a young
+brother of yours than as if he were your servant."
+
+"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna[1] of a boy in spite
+of all his mischief and fun. You should hear him talk of you. He'd die
+for his padrona."
+
+[Footnote: 1. The Sicilians use the word "donna" to express the meaning
+we convey by the word "trump."]
+
+"I believe he would. In love, the love that means being in love, I think
+Sicilians, though tremendously jealous, are very fickle, but if they take
+a devotion to any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a
+splendid quality."
+
+"If they've got faults, I love their faults," he said. "They're a lovable
+race."
+
+"Praising yourself!" she said, laughing at him, but with tender eyes.
+
+"Myself?"
+
+"Never mind. What is it, Gaspare?"
+
+Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes shining with happiness and a
+box under his arm.
+
+"The signore knows."
+
+"Revolver practice," said Maurice. "I promised him he should have a try
+to-day. We're going to a place close by on the mountain. He's warned off
+Ciccio and his goats. Got the paper, Gaspare?"
+
+Gaspare pointed to a bulging pocket.
+
+"Enough to write a novel on. Well--will you come, Hermione?"
+
+"It's too hot in the sun, and I know you're going into the eye of the
+sun."
+
+"You see, it's the best place up at the top. There's that stone wall,
+and--"
+
+"I'll stay here and listen to your music."
+
+They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into the heart of the
+gold, and singing as they went:
+
+               "Ciao, ciao, ciao,
+               Morettina bella, ciao--"
+
+Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise of stones falling
+downward from their feet on the sunbaked mountain-side. Hermione sat
+still on the seat by the ravine.
+
+               "Ciao, ciao, ciao!"
+
+She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing
+that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have
+to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang
+that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even
+the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet
+plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard
+coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always
+comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met
+many Sicilians of the nobility in Palermo--princes, senators, young men
+of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese.
+Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian
+peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered
+what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead.
+Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of
+hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive!
+Things that had doubtless stirred in them--instincts, desires,
+repugnances, joys--were stirring in him, dominating his English
+inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was
+assisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to
+be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the
+greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man
+and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things
+in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had
+once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their
+faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long
+cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if
+there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And
+she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a
+good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat,
+socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe
+her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman--and she
+was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high
+traditions--she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its
+pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, that
+all men and women are just human beings, brothers and sisters of a great
+family. In judging of individuals she could never be influenced by
+anything except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart and mind,
+qualities that might belong to any man. She was affected by habits,
+manners--what woman of breeding is not?--but even these could scarcely
+warp her judgment if they covered anything fine. She could find gold
+beneath mud and forget the mud.
+
+Maurice was like the peasants, not like the Palermitan aristocracy. He
+was near to the breast of Sicily, of that mother of many nations, who had
+come to conquer, and had fought, and bled, and died, or been expelled,
+but had left indefaceable traces behind them, traces of Norman of Greek
+of Arab. He was no cosmopolitan with characteristics blurred; he was of
+the soil. Well, she loved the soil dearly. The almond blossomed from it.
+The olive gave its fruit, and the vine its generous blood, and the orange
+its gold, at the word of the soil, the dear, warm earth of Sicily. She
+thought of Maurice's warm hands, brown now as Gaspare's. How she loved
+his hands, and his eyes that shone with the lustre of the south! Had not
+this soil, in very truth, given those hands and those eyes to her? She
+felt that it had. She loved it more for the gift. She had reaped and
+garnered in her blessed Sicilian harvest.
+
+Lucrezia came to her round the angle of the cottage, knowing she was
+alone. Lucrezia was mending a hole in a sock for Gaspare. Now she sat
+down on the seat under the window, divided from Hermione by the terrace,
+but able to see her, to feel companionship. Had the padrone been there
+Lucrezia would not have ventured to come. Gaspare had often explained to
+her her very humble position in the household. But Gaspare and the
+padrone were away on the mountain-top, and she could not resist being
+near to her padrona, for whom she already felt a very real affection and
+admiration.
+
+"Is it a big hole, Lucrezia?" said Hermione, smiling at her.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia put her thumb through it, holding it up on her fist.
+
+"Gaspare's holes are always big."
+
+She spoke as if in praise.
+
+"Gaspare is strong," she added. "But Sebastiano is stronger."
+
+As she said the last words a dreamy look came into her round face, and
+she dropped the hand that held the stocking into her lap.
+
+"Sebastiano is hard like the rocks, signora."
+
+"Hard-hearted, Lucrezia."
+
+Lucrezia said nothing.
+
+"You like Sebastiano, Lucrezia?"
+
+Lucrezia reddened under her brown skin.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"So do I. He's always been a good friend of mine."
+
+Lucrezia shifted along the seat until she was nearly opposite to where
+Hermione was sitting.
+
+"How old is he?"
+
+"Twenty-five, signora."
+
+"I suppose he will be marrying soon, won't he? The men all marry young
+round about Marechiaro."
+
+Lucrezia began to darn.
+
+"His father, Chinetti Urbano, wishes him to marry at once. It is better
+for a man."
+
+"You understand men, Lucrezia?"
+
+"Si, signora. They are all alike."
+
+"And what are they like?"
+
+"Oh, signora, you know as well as I do. They must have their own way and
+we must not think to have ours. They must roam where they like, love
+where they choose, day or night, and we must sit in the doorway and get
+to bed at dark, and not bother where they've been or what they've done.
+They say we've no right, except one or two. There's Francesco, to be
+sure. He's a lamb with Maria. She can sit with her face to the street.
+But she wouldn't sit any other way, and he knows it. But the rest! Eh,
+giŕ!"
+
+"You don't think much of men, Lucrezia!"
+
+"Oh, signora, they're just as God made them. They can't help it any more
+than we can help--"
+
+She stopped and pursed her lips suddenly, as if checking some words that
+were almost on them.
+
+"Lucrezia, come here and sit by me."
+
+Lucrezia looked up with a sort of doubtful pleasure and surprise.
+
+"Signora?"
+
+"Come here."
+
+Lucrezia got up and came slowly to the seat by the ravine. Hermione took
+her hand.
+
+"You like Sebastiano very much, don't you?"
+
+Lucrezia hung her head.
+
+"Si, signora," she whispered.
+
+"Do you think he'd be good to a woman if she loved him?"
+
+"I shouldn't care. Bad or good, I'd--I'd--"
+
+Suddenly, with a sort of childish violence, she put her two hands on
+Hermione's arms.
+
+"I want Sebastiano, signora; I want him!" she cried. "I've prayed to the
+Madonna della Rocca to give him to me; all last year I've prayed, and
+this. D'you think the Madonna's going to do it? Do you? Do you?"
+
+Heat came out of her two hands, and heat flashed in her eyes. Her broad
+bosom heaved, and her lips, still parted when she had done speaking,
+seemed to interrogate Hermione fiercely in the silence. Before Hermione
+could reply two sounds came to them: from below in the ravine the distant
+drone of the ceramella, from above on the mountain-top the dry crack of a
+pistol-shot.
+
+Swiftly Lucrezia turned and looked downward, but Hermione looked upward
+towards the bare flank that rose behind the cottage.
+
+"It's Sebastiano, signora."
+
+The ceramella droned on, moving slowly with its player on the hidden path
+beneath the olive-trees.
+
+A second pistol-shot rang out sharply.
+
+"Go down and meet him, Lucrezia."
+
+"May I--may I, really, signora?"
+
+"Yes; go quickly."
+
+Lucrezia bent down and kissed her padrona's hand.
+
+"Bacio la mano, bacio la mano a Lei!"
+
+Then, bareheaded, she went out from the awning into the glare of the
+sunshine, passed through the ruined archway, and disappeared among the
+rocks. She had gone to her music. Hermione stayed to listen to hers, the
+crack of the pistol up there near the blue sky.
+
+Sebastiano was playing the tune she loved, the "Pastorale," but to-day
+she did not heed it. Indeed, now that she was left alone she was not
+conscious that she heard it. Her heart was on the hill-top near the blue.
+
+Again and again the shots rang out. It seemed to Hermione that she knew
+which were fired by Maurice and which by Gaspare, and she whispered to
+herself "That's Maurice!" when she fancied one was his. Presently she was
+aware of some slight change and wondered what it was. Something had
+ceased, and its cessation recalled her mind to her surroundings. She
+looked round her, then down to the ravine, and then at once she
+understood. There was no more music from the ceramella. Lucrezia had met
+Sebastiano under the olives. That was certain. Hermione smiled. Her
+woman's imagination pictured easily enough why the player had stopped.
+She hoped Lucrezia was happy. Her first words, still more her manner, had
+shown Hermione the depth of her heart. There was fire there, fire that
+burned before a shrine when she prayed to the Madonna della Rocca. She
+was ready even to be badly treated if only she might have Sebastiano. It
+seemed to be all one to her. She had no illusions, but her heart knew
+what it needed.
+
+Crack went the pistol up on the mountain-top.
+
+"That's not Maurice!" Hermione thought.
+
+There was another report, then another.
+
+"That last one was Maurice!"
+
+Lucrezia did not seem even to expect a man to be true and faithful.
+Perhaps she knew the Sicilian character too well. Hermione lifted her
+face up and looked towards the mountain. Her mind had gone once more to
+the Thames Embankment. As once she had mentally put Gaspare beside
+Artois, so now she mentally put Lucrezia. Lucrezia distrusted the south,
+and she was of it. Men must be as God had made them, she said, and
+evidently she thought that God had made them to run wild, careless of
+woman's feelings, careless of everything save their own vagrant desires.
+The tarantella--that was the dance of the soil here, the dance of the
+blood. And in the tarantella each of the dancers seemed governed by his
+own sweet will, possessed by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he
+followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence, giving himself up
+joyously, eagerly, utterly--to what? To his whim. Was the tarantella an
+allegory of life here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that
+first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of separation which
+brought with it a faint and creeping melancholy.
+
+"Crack! Crack!"
+
+She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly the sound of the firing
+was distressing to her, almost sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music
+better. For it suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith,
+and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian. But the
+reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death, ugly things.
+
+"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing up towards the
+mountain-top. "Maurice!"
+
+The pistol made reply. They had not heard her. They were too far or were
+too intent upon their sport to hear.
+
+"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost as a person calls
+for help. Another pistol-shot answered her, mocking at her in the sun.
+Then she heard a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be
+either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the laughter of
+something she could not personify, of some jeering spirit of the
+mountain. It died away at last, and she stood there, shivering in the
+sunshine.
+
+"Signora! Signora!"
+
+Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below. She turned and saw him
+standing with Lucrezia on the terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's
+waist. He took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm round
+Lucrezia.
+
+Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the mountain-top. But
+something within her held her back from climbing up to the distant
+laughter, a feeling, an idiotic feeling she called it to herself
+afterwards. She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling of
+fear.
+
+"Am I wanted up there?"
+
+That was what something within her said. And the answer was made by her
+body. She turned and began to descend towards the terrace.
+
+And at that moment, for the first time in her life, she was conscious of
+a little stab of pain such as she had never known before. It was pain of
+the mind and of the heart, and yet it was like bodily pain, too. It made
+her angry with herself. It was like a betrayal, a betrayal of herself by
+her own intellect, she thought.
+
+She stopped once more on the mountain-side.
+
+"Am I going to be ridiculous?" she said to herself. "Am I going to be one
+of the women I despise?"
+
+Just then she realized that love may become a tyrant, ministering to the
+soul with persecutions.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Sebastiano took his arm from Lucrezia's waist as Hermione came down to
+the terrace, and said:
+
+"Buona sera, signora. Is the signore coming down yet?"
+
+He flung out his arm towards the mountain.
+
+"I don't know, Sebastiano. Why?"
+
+"I've come with a message for him."
+
+"Not for Lucrezia?"
+
+Sebastiano laughed boldly, but Lucrezia, blushing red, disappeared into
+the kitchen.
+
+"Don't play with her, Sebastiano," said Hermione. "She's a good girl."
+
+"I know that, signora."
+
+"She deserves to be well treated."
+
+Sebastiano went over to the terrace wall, looked into the ravine, turned
+round, and came back.
+
+"Who's treating Lucrezia badly, signora?"
+
+"I did not say anybody was."
+
+"The girls in Marechiaro can take care of themselves, signora. You don't
+know them as I do."
+
+"D'you think any woman can take care of herself, Sebastiano?"
+
+He looked into her face and laughed, but said nothing. Hermione sat down.
+She had a desire to-day, after Lucrezia's conversation with her, to get
+at the Sicilian man's point of view in regard to women.
+
+"Don't you think women want to be protected?" she asked.
+
+"What from, signora?"
+
+There was still laughter in his eyes.
+
+"Not from us, anyway," he added. "Lucrezia there--she wants me for her
+husband. All Marechiaro knows it."
+
+Hermione felt that under the circumstances it was useless to blush for
+Lucrezia, useless to meet blatant frankness with sensitive delicacy.
+
+"Do you want Lucrezia for your wife?" she said.
+
+"Well, signora, I'm strong. A stick or a knife in my hand and no man can
+touch me. You've never seen me do the scherma con coltello? One day I'll
+show you with Gaspare. And I can play better even than the men from
+Bronte on the ceramella. You've heard me. Lucrezia knows I can have any
+girl I like."
+
+There was a simplicity in his immense superiority to women that robbed it
+of offensiveness and almost made Hermione laugh. In it, too, she felt the
+touch of the East. Arabs had been in Sicily and left their traces there,
+not only in the buildings of Sicily, but in its people's songs, and in
+the treatment of the women by the men.
+
+"And are you going to choose Lucrezia?" she asked, gravely.
+
+"Signora, I wasn't sure. But yesterday, I had a letter from Messina. They
+want me there. I've got a job that'll pay me well to go to the Lipari
+Islands with a cargo."
+
+"Are you a sailor, too?"
+
+"Signora, I can do anything."
+
+"And will you be long away?"
+
+"Who knows, signora? But I told Lucrezia to-day, and when she cried I
+told her something else. We are 'promised.'"
+
+"I am glad," Hermione said, holding out her hand to him.
+
+He took it in an iron grip.
+
+"Be very good to her when you're married, won't you?"
+
+"Oh, she'll be all right with me," he answered, carelessly. "And I won't
+give her the slap in the face on the wedding-day."
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+There was a shrill cry from the mountain and Maurice and Gaspare came
+leaping down, scattering the stones, the revolvers still in their hands.
+
+"Look, signora, look!" cried Gaspare, pulling a sheet of paper from his
+pocket and holding it proudly up. "Do you see the holes? One, two,
+three--"
+
+He began to count.
+
+"And I made five. Didn't I, signore?"
+
+"You're a dead shot, Gasparino. Did you hear us, Hermione?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "But you didn't hear me."
+
+"You? Did you call?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Sebastiano's got a message for you," Hermione said.
+
+She could not tell him now the absurd impulse that had made her call him.
+
+"What's the message, Sebastiano?" asked Maurice, in his stumbling
+Sicilian-Italian that was very imperfect, but that nevertheless had
+already the true accent of the peasants about Marechiaro.
+
+"Signore, there will be a moon to-night."
+
+"Giŕ. Lo so."
+
+"Are you sleepy, signorino?"
+
+He touched his eyes with his sinewy hands and made his face look drowsy.
+Maurice laughed.
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you afraid of being naked in the sea at night? But you need not
+enter it. Are you afraid of sleeping at dawn in a cave upon the sands?"
+
+"What is it all?" asked Maurice. "Gaspare, I understand you best."
+
+"I know," said Gaspare, joyously. "It's the fishing. Nito has sent. I
+told him to. Is it Nito, Sebastiano?"
+
+Sebastiano nodded. Gaspare turned eagerly to Maurice.
+
+"Oh, signore, you must come, you will come!"
+
+"Where? In a boat?"
+
+"No. We go down to the shore, to Isola Bella. We take food, wine, red
+wine, and a net. Between twenty-two and twenty-three o'clock is the time
+to begin. And the sea must be calm. Is the sea calm to-day, Sebastiano?"
+
+"Like that."
+
+Sebastiano moved his hand to and fro in the air, keeping it absolutely
+level. Gaspare continued to explain with gathering excitement and
+persuasiveness, talking to his master as much by gesture as by the words
+that Maurice could only partially understand.
+
+"The sea is calm. Nito has the net, but he will not go into the sea. Per
+Dio, he is birbante. He will say he has the rheumatism, I know, and walk
+like that." (Gaspare hobbled to and fro before them, making a face of
+acute suffering.) "He has asked for me. Hasn't Nito asked for me,
+Sebastiano?"
+
+Here Gaspare made a grimace at Sebastiano, who answered, calmly:
+
+"Yes, he has asked for you to come with the padrone."
+
+"I knew it. Then I shall undress. I shall take one end of the net while
+Nito holds the other, and I shall go out into the sea. I shall go up to
+here." (He put his hands up to his chin, stretching his neck like one
+avoiding a rising wave.) "And I shall wade, you'll see!--and if I come to
+a hole I shall swim. I can swim for hours, all day if I choose."
+
+"And all night too?" said Hermione, smiling at his excitement.
+
+"Davvero! But at night I must drink wine to keep out the cold. I come out
+like this." (He shivered violently, making his teeth chatter.) "Then I
+drink a glass and I am warm, and when they have taken the fish I go in
+again. We fish all along the shore from Isola Bella round by the point
+there, where there's the Casa delle Sirene, and to the caves beyond the
+Caffč Berardi. And when we've got enough--many fish--at dawn we sleep on
+the sand. And when the sun is up Carmela will take the fish and make a
+frittura, and we all eat it and drink more wine, and then--"
+
+"And then--you're ready for the Campo Santo?" said Hermione.
+
+"No, signora. Then we will dance the tarantella, and come home up the
+mountain singing, 'O sole mio!' and 'A mezzanotte a punto,' and the song
+of the Mafioso, and--"
+
+Hermione began to laugh unrestrainedly. Gaspare, by his voice, his face,
+his gestures, had made them assist at a veritable orgie of labor,
+feasting, sleep, and mirth, all mingled together and chasing one another
+like performers in a revel. Even his suggestion of slumber on the sands
+was violent, as if they were to sleep with a kind of fury of excitement
+and determination.
+
+"Signora!" he cried, staring as if ready to be offended.
+
+Then he looked at Maurice, who was laughing, too, threw himself back
+against the wall, opened his mouth, and joined in with all his heart. But
+suddenly he stopped. His face changed, became very serious.
+
+"I may go, signora?" he asked. "No one can fish as I can. The others will
+not go in far, and they soon get cold and want to put on their clothes.
+And the padrone! I must take care of the padrone! Guglielmo, the
+contadino, will sleep in the house, I know. Shall I call him? Guglielmo!
+Guglielmo!"
+
+He vanished like a flash, they scarcely knew in what direction.
+
+"He's alive!" exclaimed Maurice. "By Jove, he's alive, that boy!
+Glorious, glorious life! Oh, there's something here that--"
+
+He broke off, looked down at the broad sea shimmering in the sun, then
+said:
+
+"The sun, the sea, the music, the people, the liberty--it goes to my
+head, it intoxicates me."
+
+"You'll go to-night?" she said.
+
+"D'you mind if I do?"
+
+"Mind? No. I want you to go. I want you to revel in this happy time, this
+splendid, innocent, golden time. And to-morrow we'll watch for you,
+Lucrezia and I, watch for you down there on the path. But--you'll bring
+us some of the fish, Maurice? You won't forget us?"
+
+"Forget you!" he said. "You shall have all--"
+
+"No, no. Only the little fish, the babies that Carmela rejects from the
+frittura."
+
+"I'll go into the sea with Gaspare," said Maurice.
+
+"I'm sure you will, and farther out even than he does."
+
+"Ah, he'll never allow that. He'd swim to Africa first!"
+
+That night, at twenty-one o'clock, Hermione and Lucrezia stood under the
+arch, and watched Maurice and Gaspare springing down the mountain-side as
+if in seven-leagued boots. Soon they disappeared into the darkness of the
+ravine, but for some time their loud voices could be heard singing
+lustily:
+
+                    "Ciao, ciao, ciao,
+                    Morettina bella ciao,
+                    Prima di partire
+                    Un bacio ti voglio da';
+                    Un bacio al papŕ,
+                    Un bacio alla mammŕ,
+                    Cinquanta alla mia fidanzata,
+                    Che vado a far solda'."
+
+"I wish I were a man, Lucrezia," said Hermione, when the voices at length
+died away towards the sea.
+
+"Signora, we were made for the men. They weren't made for us. But I like
+being a girl."
+
+"To-night. I know why, Lucrezia."
+
+And then the padrona and the cameriera sat down together on the terrace
+under the stars, and talked together about the man the cameriera loved,
+and his exceeding glory.
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice and Gaspare were giving themselves joyously to the
+glory of the night. The glamour of the moon, which lay full upon the
+terrace where the two women sat, was softened, changed to a shadowy
+magic, in the ravine where the trees grew thickly, but the pilgrims did
+not lower their voices in obedience to the message of the twilight of the
+night. The joy of life which was leaping within them defied the subtle
+suggestions of mystery, was careless because it was triumphant, and all
+the way down to the sea they sang, Gaspare changing the song when it
+suited his mood to do so; and Maurice, as in the tarantella, imitating
+him with the swiftness that is born of sympathy. For to-night, despite
+their different ages, ranks, ways of life, their gayety linked them
+together, ruled out the differences, and made them closely akin, as they
+had been in Hermione's eyes when they danced upon the terrace. They did
+not watch the night. They were living too strongly to be watchful. The
+spirit of the dancing faun was upon them, and guided them down among the
+rocks and the olive-trees, across the Messina road, white under the moon,
+to the stony beach of Isola Bella, where Nito was waiting for them with
+the net.
+
+Nito was not alone. He had brought friends of his and of Gaspare's, and a
+boy who staggered proudly beneath a pannier filled with bread and cheese,
+oranges and apples, and dark blocks of a mysterious dolce. The
+wine-bottles were not intrusted to him, but were in the care of Giulio,
+one of the donkey-boys who had carried up the luggage from the station.
+Gaspare and his padrone were welcomed with a lifting of hats, and for a
+moment there was a silence, while the little group regarded the
+"Inglese" searchingly. Had Maurice felt any strangeness, any aloofness,
+the sharp and sensitive Sicilians would have at once been conscious of
+it, and light-hearted gayety might have given way to gravity, though not
+to awkwardness. But he felt, and therefore showed, none. His soft hat
+cocked at an impudent angle over his sparkling, dark eyes, his laughing
+lips, his easy, eager manner, and his pleasant familiarity with Gaspare
+at once reassured everybody, and when he cried out, "Ciao, amici, ciao!"
+and waved a pair of bathing drawers towards the sea, indicating that he
+was prepared to be the first to go in with the net, there was a general
+laugh, and a babel of talk broke forth--talk which he did not fully
+understand, yet which did not make him feel even for a moment a stranger.
+
+Gaspare at once took charge of the proceedings as one born to be a leader
+of fishermen. He began by ordering wine to be poured into the one glass
+provided, placed it in Maurice's hand, and smiled proudly at his pupil's
+quick "Alla vostra salute!" before tossing it off. Then each one in turn,
+with an "Alla sua salute!" to Maurice, took a drink from the great,
+leather bottle; and Nito, shaking out his long coil of net, declared that
+it was time to get to work.
+
+Gaspare cast a sly glance at Maurice, warning him to be prepared for a
+comedy, and Maurice at once remembered the scene on the terrace when
+Gaspare had described Nito's "birbante" character, and looked out for
+rheumatics.
+
+"Who goes into the sea, Nito?" asked Gaspare, very seriously.
+
+Nito's wrinkled and weather-beaten face assumed an expression of
+surprise.
+
+"Who goes into the sea!" he ejaculated. "Why, don't we all know who likes
+wading, and can always tell the best places for the fish?"
+
+He paused, then as Gaspare said nothing, and the others, who had received
+a warning sign from him, stood round with deliberately vacant faces, he
+added, clapping Gaspare on the shoulder, and holding out one end of the
+net:
+
+"Off with your clothes, compare, and we will soon have a fine frittura
+for Carmela."
+
+But Gaspare shook his head.
+
+"In summer I don't mind. But this is early in the year, and, besides--"
+
+"Early in the year! Who told me the signore distinto would--"
+
+"And besides, compare, I've got the stomach-ache."
+
+He deftly doubled himself up and writhed, while the lips of the others
+twitched with suppressed amusement.
+
+"Comparedro, I don't believe it!"
+
+"Haven't I, signorino?" cried Gaspare, undoubling himself, pointing to
+his middleman, and staring hard at Maurice.
+
+"Si, si! Č vero, č vero!" cried Maurice.
+
+"I've been eating Zampaglione, and I am full. If I go into the sea
+to-night I shall die."
+
+"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Nito, throwing up his hands towards the stars.
+
+He dared not give the lie to the "signore distinto," yet he had no trust
+in Gaspare's word, and had gained no sort of conviction from his eloquent
+writhings.
+
+"You must go in, Nito," said Gaspare.
+
+"I--Madonna!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not?" cried Nito, in a plaintive whine that was almost feminine. "I
+go into the sea with my rheumatism!"
+
+Abruptly one of his legs gave way, and he stood before them in a crooked
+attitude.
+
+"Signore," he said to Maurice. "I would go into the sea, I would stay
+there all night, for I love it, but Dr. Marini has forbidden me to enter
+it. See how I walk!"
+
+And he began to hobble up and down exactly as Gaspare had on the terrace,
+looking over his shoulder at Maurice all the time to see whether his
+deception was working well. Gaspare, seeing that Nito's attention was for
+the moment concentrated, slipped away behind a boat that was drawn up on
+the beach; and Maurice, guessing what he was doing, endeavored to make
+Nito understand his sympathy.
+
+"Molto forte--molto dolore?" he said.
+
+"Si, signore!"
+
+And Nito burst forth into a vehement account of his sufferings,
+accompanied by pantomime.
+
+"It takes me in the night, signore! Madonna, it is like rats gnawing at
+my legs, and nothing will stop it. Pancrazia--she is my wife,
+signore--Pancrazia, she gets out of bed and she heats oil to rub it on,
+but she might as well put it on the top of Etna for all the good it does
+me. And there I lie like a--"
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+A wild shriek rent the air, and Gaspare, clad in a pair of bathing
+drawers, bounded out from behind the boat, gave Nito a cuff on the cheek,
+executed some steps of the tarantella, whirled round, snatched up one end
+of the net, and cried:
+
+"Al mare, al mare!"
+
+Nito's rheumatism was no more. His bent leg straightened itself as if by
+magic, and he returned Gaspare's cuff by an affectionate slap on his bare
+shoulder, exclaiming to Maurice:
+
+"Isn't he terribile, signore? Isn't he terribile?"
+
+Nito lifted up the other end of the net and they all went down to the
+shore.
+
+That night it seemed to Delarey as if Sicily drew him closer to her
+breast. He did not know why he had now for the first time the sensation
+that at last he was really in his natural place, was really one with the
+soil from which an ancestor of his had sprung, and with the people who
+had been her people. That Hermione's absence had anything to do with his
+almost wild sense of freedom did not occur to him. All he knew was this,
+that alone among these Sicilian fishermen in the night, not understanding
+much of what they said, guessing at their jokes, and sharing in their
+laughter, without always knowing what had provoked it, he was perfectly
+at home, perfectly happy.
+
+Gaspare went into the sea, wading carefully through the silver waters,
+and Maurice, from the shore, watched his slowly moving form, taking a
+lesson which would be useful to him later. The coast-line looked
+enchanted in the glory of the moon, in the warm silence of the night, but
+the little group of men upon the shore scarcely thought of its
+enchantment. They felt it, perhaps, sometimes faintly in their gayety,
+but they did not savor its wonder and its mystery as Hermione would have
+savored them had she been there.
+
+The naked form of Gaspare, as he waded far out in the shallow sea, was
+like the form of a dream creature rising out of waves of a dream. When he
+called to them across the silver surely something of the magic of the
+night was caught and echoed in his voice. When he lifted the net, and its
+black and dripping meshes slipped down from his ghostly hands into the
+ghostly movement that was flickering about him, and the circles tipped
+with light widened towards sea and shore, there was a miracle of delicate
+and fantastic beauty delivered up tenderly like a marvellous gift to the
+wanderers of the dark hours. But Sicily scarcely wonders at Sicily.
+Gaspare was intent only on the catching of fish, and his companions smote
+the night with their jokes and their merry, almost riotous laughter.
+
+The night wore on. Presently they left Isola Bella, crossed a stony spit
+of land, and came into a second and narrower bay, divided by a turmoil
+of jagged rocks and a bold promontory covered with stunted olive-trees,
+cactus, and seed-sown earth plots, from the wide sweep of coast that
+melted into the dimness towards Messina. Gathered together on the little
+stones of the beach, in the shadow of some drawn-up fishing-boats, they
+took stock of the fish that lay shining in the basket, and broke their
+fast on bread and cheese and more draughts from the generous wine-bottle.
+
+Gaspare was dripping, and his thin body shook as he gulped down the wine.
+
+"Basta Gaspare!" Maurice said to him. "You mustn't go in any more."
+
+"No, no, signore, non basta! I can fish all night. Once the wine has
+warmed me, I can--"
+
+"But I want to try it."
+
+"Oh, signore, what would the signora say? You are a stranger. You will
+take cold, and then the signora will blame me and say I did not take
+proper care of my padrone."
+
+But Delarey was determined. He stripped off his clothes, put on his
+bathing drawers, took up the net, and, carefully directed by the admiring
+though protesting Gaspare, he waded into the sea.
+
+For a moment he shuddered as the calm water rose round him. Then, English
+fashion, he dipped under, with a splash that brought a roar of laughter
+to him from the shore.
+
+"Meglio cosě!" he cried, coming up again in the moonlight. "Adesso sto
+bene!"
+
+The plunge had made him suddenly feel tremendously young and triumphant,
+reckless with a happiness that thrilled with audacity. As he waded out he
+began to sing in a loud voice:
+
+               "Ciao, ciao, ciao,
+               Morettina bella ciao,
+               Prima di partire
+               Un bacio ti voglio da'."
+
+Gaspare, who was hastily dressing by the boats, called out to him that
+his singing would frighten away the fish, and he was obediently silent.
+He imprisoned the song in his heart, but that went on singing bravely. As
+he waded farther he felt splendid, as if he were a lord of life and of
+the sea. The water, now warm to him, seemed to be embracing him as it
+crept upward towards his throat. Nature was clasping him with amorous
+arms. Nature was taking him for her own.
+
+"Nature, nature!" he said to himself. "That's why I'm so gloriously happy
+here, because I'm being right down natural."
+
+His mind made an abrupt turn, like a coursed hare, and he suddenly found
+himself thinking of the night in London, when he had sat in the
+restaurant with Hermione and Artois and listened to their talk,
+reverently listened. Now, as the net tugged at his hand, influenced by
+the resisting sea, that talk, as he remembered it, struck him as
+unnatural, as useless, and the thoughts which he had then admired and
+wondered at, as complicated and extraordinary. Something in him said,
+"That's all unnatural." The touch of the water about his body, the light
+of the moon upon him, the breath of the air in his wet face drove out his
+reverence for what he called "intellectuality," and something savage got
+hold of his soul and shook it, as if to wake up the sleeping self within
+him, the self that was Sicilian.
+
+As he waded in the water, coming ever nearer to the jagged rocks that
+shut out from his sight the wide sea and something else, he felt as if
+thinking and living were in opposition, as if the one were destructive of
+the other; and the desire to be clever, to be talented, which had often
+assailed him since he had known, and especially since he had loved,
+Hermione, died out of him, and he found himself vaguely pitying Artois,
+and almost despising the career and the fame of a writer. What did
+thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to live with your body,
+out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat as the savages live. When he
+waded to shore for the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the
+fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he could have
+shouted like a boy.
+
+He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now clothed, took hold of him
+by the arm with a familiarity that had in it nothing disrespectful.
+
+"Signore, basta, basta! Giulio will go in now."
+
+"Si! si!" cried Giulio, beginning to tug at his waistcoat buttons.
+
+"Once more, Gaspare!" said Maurice. "Only once!"
+
+"But if you take cold, signorino, the signora--"
+
+"I sha'n't catch cold. Only once!"
+
+He broke away, laughing, from Gaspare, and was swiftly in the sea. The
+Sicilians looked at him with admiration.
+
+"E' veramente piů Siciliano di noi!" exclaimed Nito.
+
+The others murmured their assent. Gaspare glowed with pride in his pupil.
+
+"I shall make the signore one of us," he said, as he deftly let out the
+coils of the net.
+
+"But how long is he going to stay?" asked Nito. "Will he not soon be
+going back to his own country?"
+
+For a moment Gaspare's countenance fell.
+
+"When the heat comes," he began, doubtfully. Then he cheered up.
+
+"Perhaps he will take me with him to England," he said.
+
+This time Maurice waded with the net into the shadow of the rocks out of
+the light of the moon. The night was waning, and a slight chill began to
+creep into the air. A little breeze, too, sighed over the sea, ruffling
+its surface, died away, then softly came again. As he moved into the
+darkness Maurice was conscious that the buoyancy of his spirits received
+a slight check. The night seemed suddenly to have changed, to have
+become more mysterious. He began to feel its mystery now, to be aware of
+the strangeness of being out in the sea alone at such an hour. Upon the
+shore he saw the forms of his companions, but they looked remote and
+phantom-like. He did not hear their voices. Perhaps the slow approach of
+dawn was beginning to affect them, and the little wind that was springing
+up chilled their merriment and struck them to silence. Before him the
+dense blackness of the rocks rose like a grotesque wall carved in
+diabolic shapes, and as he stared at these shapes he had an odd fancy
+that they were living things, and that they were watching him at his
+labor. He could not get this idea, that he was being watched, out of his
+head, and for a moment he forgot about the fish, and stood still, staring
+at the monsters, whose bulky forms reared themselves up into the
+moonlight from which they banished him.
+
+"Signore! Signorino!"
+
+There came to him a cry of protest from the shore. He started, moved
+forward with the net, and went under water. He had stepped into a deep
+hole. Still holding fast to the net, he came up to the surface, shook his
+head, and struck out. As he did so he heard another cry, sharp yet
+musical. But this cry did not come from the beach where his companions
+were gathered. It rose from the blackness of the rocks close to him, and
+it sounded like the cry of a woman. He winked his eyes to get the water
+out of them, and swam for the rocks, heedless of his duty as a fisherman.
+But the net impeded him, and again there was a shout from the shore:
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! E' pazzo Lei?"
+
+Reluctantly he turned and swam back to the shallow water. But when his
+feet touched bottom he stood still. That cry of a woman from the mystery
+of the rocks had startled, had fascinated his ears. Suddenly he
+remembered that he must be near to that Casa delle Sirene, whose little
+light he had seen from the terrace of the priest's house on his first
+evening in Sicily. He longed to hear that woman's voice again. For a
+moment he thought of it as the voice of a siren, of one of those beings
+of enchantment who lure men on to their destruction, and he listened
+eagerly, almost passionately, while the ruffled water eddied softly about
+his breast. But no music stole to him from the blackness of the rocks,
+and at last he turned slowly and waded to the shore.
+
+He was met with merry protests. Nito declared that the net had nearly
+been torn out of his hands. Gaspare, half undressed to go to his rescue,
+anxiously inquired if he had come to any harm. The rocks were sharp as
+razors near the point, and he might have cut himself to pieces upon them.
+He apologized to Nito and showed Gaspare that he was uninjured. Then,
+while the others began to count the fish, he went to the boats to put on
+his clothes, accompanied by Gaspare.
+
+"Why did you swim towards the rocks, signorino?" asked the boy, looking
+at him with a sharp curiosity.
+
+Delarey hesitated for a moment. He was inclined, he scarcely knew why, to
+keep silence about the cry he had heard. Yet he wanted to ask Gaspare
+something.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, at last, as they reached the boats, "was any one of
+you on the rocks over there just now?"
+
+He had forgotten to number his companions when he reached the shore.
+Perhaps one was missing, and had wandered towards the point to watch him
+fishing.
+
+"No, signore. Why do you ask?"
+
+Again Delarey hesitated. Then he said:
+
+"I heard some one call out to me there."
+
+He began to rub his wet body with a towel.
+
+"Call! What did they call?"
+
+"Nothing; no words. Some one cried out."
+
+"At this hour! Who should be there, signore?"
+
+The action of the rough towel upon his body brought a glow of warmth to
+Delarey, and the sense of mystery began to depart from his mind.
+
+"Perhaps it was a fisherman," he said.
+
+"They do not fish from there, signore. It must have been me you heard.
+When you went under the water I cried out. Drink some wine, signorino."
+
+He held a glass full of wine to Delarey's lips. Delarey drank.
+
+"But you've got a man's voice, Gaspare!" he said, putting down the glass
+and beginning to get into his clothes.
+
+"Per Dio! Would you have me squeak like a woman, signore?"
+
+Delarey laughed and said no more. But he knew it was not Gaspare's voice
+he had heard.
+
+The net was drawn up now for the last time, and as soon as Delarey had
+dressed they set out to walk to the caves on the farther side of the
+rocks, where they meant to sleep till Carmela was about and ready to make
+the frittura. To reach them they had to clamber up from the beach to the
+Messina road, mount a hill, and descend to the Caffč Berardi, a small,
+isolated shanty which stood close to the sea, and was used in summer-time
+by bathers who wanted refreshment. Nito and the rest walked on in front,
+and Delarey followed a few paces behind with Gaspare. When they reached
+the summit of the hill a great sweep of open sea was disclosed to their
+view, stretching away to the Straits of Messina, and bounded in the far
+distance by the vague outlines of the Calabrian Mountains. Here the wind
+met them more sharply, and below them on the pebbles by the caffč they
+could see the foam of breaking waves. But to the right, and nearer to
+them, the sea was still as an inland pool, guarded by the tree-covered
+hump of land on which stood the house of the sirens. This hump, which
+would have been an islet but for the narrow wall of sheer rock which
+joined it to the main-land, ran out into the sea parallel to the road.
+
+On the height, Delarey paused for a moment, as if to look at the wide
+view, dim and ethereal, under the dying moon.
+
+"Is that Calabria?" he asked.
+
+"Si, signore. And there is the caffč. The caves are beyond it. You cannot
+see them from here. But you are not looking, signorino!"
+
+The boy's quick eyes had noticed that Delarey was glancing towards the
+tangle of trees, among which was visible a small section of the gray wall
+of the house of the sirens.
+
+"How calm the sea is there!" Delarey said, swiftly.
+
+"Si, signore. That is where you can see the light in the window from our
+terrace."
+
+"There's no light now."
+
+"How should there be? They are asleep. Andiamo?"
+
+They followed the others, who were now out of sight. When they reached
+the caves, Nito and the boys had already flung themselves down upon the
+sand and were sleeping. Gaspare scooped out a hollow for Delarey, rolled
+up his jacket as a pillow for his padrone's head, murmured a "Buon
+riposo!" lay down near him, buried his face in his arms, and almost
+directly began to breathe with a regularity that told its tale of
+youthful, happy slumber.
+
+It was dark in the cave and quite warm. The sand made a comfortable bed,
+and Delarey was luxuriously tired after the long walk and the wading in
+the sea. When he lay down he thought that he, too, would be asleep in a
+moment, but sleep did not come to him, though he closed his eyes in
+anticipation of it. His mind was busy in his weary body, and that little
+cry of a woman still rang in his ears. He heard it like a song sung by a
+mysterious voice in a place of mystery by the sea. Soon he opened his
+eyes. Turning a little in the sand, away from his companions, he looked
+out from the cave, across the sloping beach and the foam of the waves,
+to the darkness of trees on the island. (So he called the place of the
+siren's house to himself now, and always hereafter.) From the cave he
+could not see the house, but only the trees, a formless, dim mass that
+grew about it. The monotonous sound of wave after wave did not still the
+cry in his ears, but mingled with it, as must have mingled with the song
+of the sirens to Ulysses the murmur of breaking seas ever so long ago.
+And he thought of a siren in the night stealing to a hidden place in the
+rocks to watch him as he drew the net, breast high in the water. There
+was romance in his mind to-night, new-born and strange. Sicily had put it
+there with the wild sense of youth and freedom that still possessed him.
+Something seemed to call him away from this cave of sleep, to bid his
+tired body bestir itself once more. He looked at the dark forms of his
+comrades, stretched in various attitudes of repose, and suddenly he knew
+he could not sleep. He did not want to sleep. He wanted--what? He raised
+himself to a sitting posture, then softly stood up, and with infinite
+precaution stole out of the cave.
+
+The coldness of the coming dawn took hold on him on the shore, and he saw
+in the east a mysterious pallor that was not of the moon, and upon the
+foam of the waves a light that was ghastly and that suggested infinite
+weariness and sickness. But he did not say this to himself. He merely
+felt that the night was quickly departing, and that he must hasten on his
+errand before the day came.
+
+He was going to search for the woman who had cried out to him in the sea.
+And he felt as if she were a creature of the night, of the moon and of
+the shadows, and as if he could never hope to find her in the glory of
+the day.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Delarey stole along the beach, walking lightly despite his fatigue. He
+felt curiously excited, as if he were on the heels of some adventure. He
+passed the Caffč Berardi almost like a thief in the night, and came to
+the narrow strip of pebbles that edged the still and lakelike water,
+protected by the sirens' isle. There he paused. He meant to gain that
+lonely land, but how? By the water lay two or three boats, but they were
+large and clumsy, impossible to move without aid. Should he climb up to
+the Messina road, traverse the spit of ground that led to the rocky wall,
+and try to make his way across it? The feat would be a difficult one, he
+thought. But it was not that which deterred him. He was impatient of
+delay, and the détour would take time. Between him and the islet was the
+waterway. Already he had been in the sea. Why not go in again? He
+stripped, packed his clothes into a bundle, tied roughly with a rope made
+of his handkerchief and bootlaces, and waded in. For a long way the water
+was shallow. Only when he was near to the island did it rise to his
+breast, to his throat, higher at last. Holding the bundle on his head
+with one hand, he struck out strongly and soon touched bottom again. He
+scrambled out, dressed on a flat rock, then looked for a path leading
+upward.
+
+The ground was very steep, almost precipitous, and thickly covered with
+trees and with undergrowth. This undergrowth concealed innumerable rocks
+and stones which shifted under his feet and rolled down as he began to
+ascend, grasping the bushes and the branches. He could find no path.
+What did it matter? All sense of fatigue had left him. With the activity
+of a cat he mounted. A tree struck him across the face. Another swept off
+his hat. He felt that he had antagonists who wished to beat him back to
+the sea, and his blood rose against them. He tore down a branch that
+impeded him, broke it with his strong hands, and flung it away viciously.
+His teeth were set and his nerves tingled, and he was conscious of the
+almost angry joy of keen bodily exertion. The body--that was his God
+to-night. How he loved it, its health and strength, its willingness, its
+capacities! How he gloried in it! It had bounded down the mountain. It
+had gone into the sea and revelled there. It had fished and swum. Now it
+mounted upward to discovery, defying the weapons that nature launched
+against it. Splendid, splendid body!
+
+He fought with the trees and conquered them. His trampling feet sent the
+stones leaping downward to be drowned in the sea. His swift eyes found
+the likely places for a foothold. His sinewy hands forced his enemies to
+assist him in the enterprise they hated. He came out on to the plateau at
+the summit of the island and stood still, panting, beside the house that
+hid there.
+
+Its blind, gray wall confronted him coldly in the dimness, one shuttered
+window, like a shut eye, concealing the interior, the soul of the house
+that lay inside its body. In this window must have been set the light he
+had seen from the terrace. He wished there were a light burning now. Had
+he swum across the inlet and fought his way up through the wood only to
+see a gray wall, a shuttered window? That cry had come from the rocks,
+yet he had been driven by something within him to this house,
+connecting--he knew not why--the cry with it and with the far-off light
+that had been like a star caught in the sea. Now he said to himself that
+he should have gone back to the rocks and sought the siren there. Should
+he go now? He hesitated for a moment, leaning against the wall of the
+house.
+
+               "Maju torna, maju veni
+               Cu li belli soi ciureri;
+               Oh chi pompa chi nni fa;
+               Maju torna, maju č ccŕ!
+
+               "Maju torna, maju vinni,
+               Duna isca a li disinni;
+               Vinni riccu e ricchi fa,
+               Maju viva! Maju č ccŕ!"
+
+He heard a girl's voice singing near him, whether inside the house or
+among the trees he could not at first tell. It sang softly yet gayly, as
+if the sun were up and the world were awake, and when it died away
+Delarey felt as if the singer must be in the dawn, though he stood still
+in the night. He put his ear to the shuttered window and listened.
+
+"L'haju; nun l'haju?"
+
+The voice was speaking now with a sort of whimsical and half-pathetic
+merriment, as if inclined to break into laughter at its own childish
+wistfulness.
+
+"M'ama; nun m'ama?"
+
+It broke off. He heard a little laugh. Then the song began again:
+
+               "Maju viju, e maju cňgghiu,
+               Bona sorti di Diů vňgghiu;
+               Ciuri di maju cňgghiu a la campía,
+               Diů, pinzŕticci vu a la sorti mia!"
+
+The voice was not in the house. Delarey was sure of that now. He was
+almost sure, too, that it was the same voice which had cried out to him
+from the rocks. Moving with precaution, he stole round the house to the
+farther side, which looked out upon the open sea, keeping among the
+trees, which grew thickly about the house on three sides, but which left
+it unprotected to the sea-winds on the fourth.
+
+A girl was standing in this open space, alone, looking seaward, with one
+arm out-stretched, one hand laid lightly, almost caressingly, upon the
+gnarled trunk of a solitary old olive-tree, the other arm hanging at her
+side. She was dressed in some dark, coarse stuff, with a short skirt, and
+a red handkerchief tied round her head, and seemed in the pale and almost
+ghastly light in which night and day were drawing near to each other to
+be tall and slim of waist. Her head was thrown back, as if she were
+drinking in the breeze that heralded the dawn--drinking it in like a
+voluptuary.
+
+Delarey stood and watched her. He could not see her face.
+
+She spoke some words in dialect in a clear voice. There was no one else
+visible. Evidently she was talking to herself. Presently she laughed
+again, and began to sing once more:
+
+               "Maju viju, e maju cňgghiu,
+               A la me'casa guaj nu' nni vňgghiu;
+               Ciuri di maju cňgghiu a la campía,
+               Oru ed argentu a la sacchetta mia!"
+
+There was an African sound in the girl's voice--a sound of mystery that
+suggested heat and a force that could be languorous and stretch itself at
+ease. She was singing the song the Sicilian peasant girls join in on the
+first of May, when the ciuri di maju is in blossom, and the young
+countrywomen go forth in merry bands to pick the flower of May, and,
+turning their eyes to the wayside shrine, or, if there be none near, to
+the east and the rising sun, lift their hands full of the flowers above
+their heads, and, making the sign of the cross, murmur devoutly:
+
+               "Divina Pruvidenza, pruvvidětimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza, cunsulŕtimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza č granni assai;
+               Cu' teni fidi a Diů, 'un pirisci mai!"
+
+[Illustration: "HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE DRINKING IN THE
+BREEZE"]
+
+Delarey knew neither song nor custom, but his ears were fascinated by the
+voice and the melody. Both sounded remote and yet familiar to him, as if
+once, in some distant land--perhaps of dreams--he had heard them before.
+He wished the girl to go on singing, to sing on and on into the dawn
+while he listened in his hiding-place, but she suddenly turned round and
+stood looking towards him, as if something had told her that she was not
+alone. He kept quite still. He knew she could not see him, yet he felt as
+if she was aware that he was there, and instinctively he held his breath
+and leaned backward into deeper shadow. After a minute the girl took a
+step forward, and, still staring in his direction, called out:
+
+"Padre?"
+
+Then Delarey knew that it was her voice that he had heard when he was in
+the sea, and he suddenly changed his desire. Now he no longer wished to
+remain unseen, and without hesitation he came out from the trees. The
+girl stood where she was, watching him as he came. Her attitude showed
+neither surprise nor alarm, and when he was close to her, and could at
+last see her face, he found that its expression was one of simple, bold
+questioning. It seemed to be saying to him quietly, "Well, what do you
+want of me?"
+
+Delarey was not acquainted with the Arab type of face. Had he been he
+would have at once been struck by the Eastern look in the girl's long,
+black eyes, by the Eastern cast of her regular, slightly aquiline
+features. Above her eyes were thin, jet-black eyebrows that looked almost
+as if they were painted. Her chin was full and her face oval in shape.
+She had hair like Gaspare's, black-brown, immensely thick and wavy, with
+tiny feathers of gold about the temples. She was tall, and had the
+contours of a strong though graceful girl just blooming into womanhood.
+Her hands were as brown as Delarey's, well shaped, but the hands of a
+worker. She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and brimful of lusty life.
+
+After a minute of silence Delarey's memory recalled some words of
+Gaspare's, till then forgotten.
+
+"You are Maddalena!" he said, in Italian.
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+She uttered the words softly, then fell into silence again, staring at
+him with her lustrous eyes, that were like black jewels.
+
+"You live here with Salvatore?"
+
+She nodded once more and began to smile, as if with pleasure at his
+knowledge of her.
+
+Delarey smiled too, and made with his arms the motion of swimming. At
+that she laughed outright and broke into quick speech. She spoke
+vivaciously, moving her hands and her whole body. Delarey could not
+understand much of what she said, but he caught the words mare and
+pescatore, and by her gestures knew that she was telling him she had been
+on the rocks and had seen his mishap. Suddenly in the midst of her talk
+she uttered the little cry of surprise or alarm which he had heard as he
+came up above water, pointed to her lips to indicate that she had given
+vent to it, and laughed again with all her heart. Delarey laughed too. He
+felt happy and at ease with his siren, and was secretly amused at his
+thought in the sea of the magical being full of enchantment who sang to
+lure men to their destruction. This girl was simply a pretty, but not
+specially uncommon, type of the Sicilian contadina--young, gay, quite
+free from timidity, though gentle, full of the joy of life and of the
+nascent passion of womanhood, blossoming out carelessly in the sunshine
+of the season of flowers. She could sing, this island siren, but probably
+she could not read or write. She could dance, could perhaps innocently
+give and receive love. But there was in her face, in her manner, nothing
+deliberately provocative. Indeed, she looked warmly pure, like a bright,
+eager young animal of the woods, full of a blithe readiness to enjoy,
+full of hope and of unself-conscious animation.
+
+Delarey wondered why she was not sleeping, and strove to ask her,
+speaking carefully his best Sicilian, and using eloquent gestures, which
+set her smiling, then laughing again. In reply to him she pointed towards
+the sea, then towards the house, then towards the sea once more. He
+guessed that some fisherman had risen early to go to his work, and that
+she had got up to see him off, and had been too wakeful to return to bed.
+
+"Niente piů sonno!" he said, opening wide his eyes.
+
+"Niente! Niente!"
+
+He feigned fatigue. She took his travesty seriously, and pointed to the
+house, inviting him by gesture to go in and rest there. Evidently she
+believed that, being a stranger, he could not speak or understand much of
+her language. He did not even try to undeceive her. It amused him to
+watch her dumb show, for her face spoke eloquently and her pretty, brown
+hands knew a language that was delicious. He had no longer any thought of
+sleep, but he felt curious to see the interior of the cottage, and he
+nodded his head in response to her invitation. At once she became the
+hospitable peasant hostess. Her eyes sparkled with eagerness and
+pleasure, and she went quickly by him to the door, which stood half open,
+pushed it back, and beckoned to him to enter.
+
+He obeyed her, went in, and found himself almost in darkness, for the big
+windows on either side of the door were shuttered, and only a tiny flame,
+like a spark, burned somewhere among the dense shadows of the interior at
+some distance from him. Pretending to be alarmed at the obscurity, he put
+out his hand gropingly, and let it light on her arm, then slip down to
+her warm, strong young hand.
+
+"I am afraid!" he exclaimed.
+
+He heard her merry laugh and felt her trying to pull her hand away, but
+he held it fast, prolonging a joke that he found a pleasant one. In that
+moment he was almost as simple as she was, obeying his impulses
+carelessly, gayly, without a thought of wrong--indeed, almost without
+thought at all. His body was still tingling and damp with the sea-water.
+Her face was fresh with the sea-wind. He had never felt more wholesome or
+as if life were a saner thing.
+
+She dragged her hand out of his at last; he heard a grating noise, and a
+faint light sputtered up, then grew steady as she moved away and set a
+match to a candle, shielding it from the breeze that entered through the
+open door with her body.
+
+"What a beautiful house!" he cried, looking curiously around.
+
+He saw such a dwelling as one may see in any part of Sicily where the
+inhabitants are not sunk in the direst poverty and squalor, a modest home
+consisting of two fair-sized rooms, one opening into the other. In each
+room was a mighty bed, high and white, with fat pillows, and a
+counterpane of many colors. At the head of each was pinned a crucifix and
+a little picture of the Virgin, Maria Addolorata, with a palm branch that
+had been blessed, and beneath the picture in the inner room a tiny light,
+rather like an English night-light near its end, was burning. It was this
+that Delarey had seen like a spark in the distance. At the foot of each
+bed stood a big box of walnut wood, carved into arabesques and grotesque
+faces. There were a few straw chairs and kitchen utensils. An old gun
+stood in a corner with a bundle of wood. Not far off was a pan of
+charcoal. There were also two or three common deal-tables, on one of
+which stood the remains of a meal, a big jar containing wine, a flat loaf
+of coarse brown bread, with a knife lying beside it, some green stuff in
+a plate, and a slab of hard, yellow cheese.
+
+Delarey was less interested in these things than in the display of
+photographs, picture-cards, and figures of saints that adorned the
+walls, carefully arranged in patterns to show to the best advantage. Here
+were colored reproductions of actresses in languid attitudes, of peasants
+dancing, of babies smiling, of elaborate young people with carefully
+dressed hair making love with "Molti Saluti!" "Una stretta di Mano!"
+"Mando un bacio!" "Amicizia eterna!" and other expressions of friendship
+and affection, scribbled in awkward handwritings across and around them.
+And mingled with them were representations of saints, such as are sold at
+the fairs and festivals of Sicily, and are reverently treasured by the
+pious and superstitious contadine; San Pancrazio, Santa Leocanda, the
+protector of child-bearing women; Sant Aloe, the patron saint of the
+beasts of burden; San Biagio, Santo Vito, the patron saint of dogs; and
+many others, with the Bambino, the Immacolata, the Madonna di Loreto, the
+Madonna della Rocca.
+
+In the faint light cast by the flickering candle, the faces of saints and
+actresses, of smiling babies, of lovers and Madonnas peered at Delarey as
+if curious to know why at such an hour he ventured to intrude among them,
+why he thus dared to examine them when all the world was sleeping. He
+drew back from them at length and looked again at the great bed with its
+fat pillows that stood in the farther room secluded from the sea-breeze.
+Suddenly he felt a longing to throw himself down and rest.
+
+The girl smiled at him with sympathy.
+
+"That is my bed," she said, simply. "Lie down and sleep, signorino."
+
+Delarey hesitated for a moment. He thought of his companions. If they
+should wake in the cave and miss him what would they think, what would
+they do? Then he looked again at the bed. The longing to lie down on it
+was irresistible. He pointed to the open door.
+
+"When the sun comes will you wake me?" he said.
+
+He took hold of his arm with one hand, and made the motion of shaking
+himself.
+
+"Sole," he said. "Quando c'č il sole."
+
+The girl laughed and nodded.
+
+"Si, signore--non dubiti!"
+
+Delarey climbed up on to the mountainous bed.
+
+"Buona notte, Maddalena!" he said, smiling at her from the pillow like a
+boy.
+
+"Buon riposo, signorino!"
+
+That was the last thing he heard. The last thing he saw was the dark,
+eager face of the girl lit up by the candle-flame watching him from the
+farther room. Her slight figure was framed by the doorway, through which
+a faint, sad light was stealing with the soft wind from the sea. Her
+lustrous eyes were looking towards him curiously, as if he were something
+of a phenomenon, as if she longed to understand his mystery.
+
+Soon, very soon, he saw those eyes no more. He was asleep in the midst of
+the Madonnas and the saints, with the blessed palm branch and the
+crucifix and Maria Addolorata above his head.
+
+The girl sat down on a chair just outside the door, and began to sing to
+herself once more in a low voice:
+
+               "Divina Pruvidenza, pruvvidětimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza, consulŕtimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza č granni assai;
+               Cu' teni fidi a Diů, 'un pirisci mai!"
+
+Once, in his sleep, Delarey must surely have heard her song, for he began
+to dream that he was Ulysses sailing across the purple seas along the
+shores of an enchanted coast, and that he heard far off the sirens
+singing, and saw their shadowy forms sitting among the rocks and
+reclining upon the yellow sands. Then he bade his mariners steer the bark
+towards the shore. But when he drew near the sirens changed into devout
+peasant women, and their alluring songs into prayers uttered to the
+Bambino and the Virgin. But one watched him with eyes that gleamed like
+black jewels, and her lips smiled while they uttered prayers, as if they
+could murmur love words and kiss the lips of men.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Delarey stirred on the great, white bed. A hand grasped him firmly, shook
+him ruthlessly.
+
+"Signorino! C'č il sole!"
+
+He opened his eyes reluctantly. Maddalena was leaning over him. He saw
+her bright face and curious young eyes, then the faces of the saints and
+the actresses upon the wall, and he wondered where he was and where
+Hermione was.
+
+"Hermione!" he said.
+
+"Cosa?" said Maddalena.
+
+She shook him again gently. He stretched himself, yawned, and began to
+smile. She smiled back at him.
+
+"C'č il sole!"
+
+Now he remembered, lifted himself up, and looked towards the doorway. The
+first rays of the sun were filtering in and sparkling in the distance
+upon the sea. The east was barred with red.
+
+He slipped down from the bed.
+
+"The frittura!" he said, in English. "I must make haste!"
+
+Maddalena laughed. She had never heard English before.
+
+"Ditelo ancora!" she cried, eagerly.
+
+They went but together on to the plateau and stood looking seaward.
+
+"I--must--make--haste!" he said, speaking slowly and dividing the words.
+
+"Hi--maust--maiki--'ai--isti!" she repeated, trying to imitate his
+accent.
+
+He burst out laughing. She pouted. Then she laughed, too, peal upon peal,
+while the sunlight grew stronger about them. How fresh the wind was! It
+played with her hair, from which she had now removed the handkerchief,
+and ruffled the little feathers of gold upon her brow. It blew about her
+smooth, young face as if it loved to touch the soft cheeks, the innocent
+lips, the candid, unlined brow. The leaves of the olive-trees rustled and
+the brambles and the grasses swayed. Everything was in movement, stirring
+gayly into life to greet the coming day. Maurice opened his mouth and
+drew in the air to his lungs, expanding his chest. He felt inclined to
+dance, to sing, and very much inclined to eat.
+
+"Addio, Maddalena!" he said, holding out his hand.
+
+He looked into her eyes and added:
+
+"Addio, Maddalena mia!"
+
+She smiled and looked down, then up at him again.
+
+"A rivederci, signorino!"
+
+She took his hand warmly in hers.
+
+"Yes, that's better. A rivederci!"
+
+He held her hand for a moment, looking into her long and laughing eyes,
+and thinking how like a young animal's they were in their unwinking
+candor. And yet they were not like an animal's. For now, when he gazed
+into them, they did not look away from him, but continued to regard him,
+and always with an eager shining of curiosity. That curiosity stirred his
+manhood, fired him. He longed to reply to it, to give a quick answer to
+its eager question, its "what are you?" He glanced round, saw only the
+trees, the sea all alight with sun-rays, the red east now changing slowly
+into gold. Then he bent down, kissed the lips of Maddalena with a laugh,
+turned and descended through the trees by the way he had come. He had no
+feeling that he had done any wrong to Hermione, any wrong to Maddalena.
+His spirits were high, and he sang as he leaped down, agile as a goat, to
+the sea. He meant to return as he had come, and at the water's edge he
+stripped off his clothes once more, tied them into a bundle, plunged into
+the sea, and struck out for the beach opposite. As he did so, as the
+cold, bracing water seized him, he heard far above him the musical cry
+of the siren of the night. He answered it with a loud, exultant call.
+
+That was her farewell and his--this rustic Hero's good-bye to her
+Leander.
+
+When he reached the Caffč Berardi its door stood open, and a middle-aged
+woman was looking out seaward. Beyond, by the caves, he saw figures
+moving. His companions were awake. He hastened towards them. His morning
+plunge in the sea had given him a wild appetite.
+
+"Frittura! Frittura!" he shouted, taking off his hat and waving it.
+
+Gaspare came running towards him.
+
+"Where have you been, signorino?"
+
+"For a walk along the shore."
+
+He still kept his hat in his hand.
+
+"Why, your face is all wet, and so is your hair."
+
+"I washed them in the sea. Mangiamo! Mangiamo!"
+
+"You did not sleep?"
+
+Gaspare spoke curiously, regarded him with inquisitive, searching eyes.
+
+"I couldn't. I'll sleep up there when we get home."
+
+He pointed to the mountain. His eyes were dancing with gayety.
+
+"The frittura, Gasparino, the frittura! And then the tarantella, and then
+'O sole mio'!"
+
+He looked towards the rising sun, and began to sing at the top of his
+voice:
+
+               "O sole, o sole mio,
+               Sta 'n fronte a te,
+               Sta 'n fronte a te!"
+
+Gaspare joined in lustily, and Carmela in the doorway of the Caffč
+Berardi waved a frying-pan at them in time to the music.
+
+"Per Dio, Gaspare!" exclaimed Maurice, as they raced towards the house,
+each striving to be first there--"Per Dio, I never knew what life was
+till I came to Sicily! I never knew what happiness was till this
+morning!"
+
+"The frittura! The frittura!" shouted Gaspare. "I'll be first!"
+
+Neck and neck they reached the caffč as Nito poured the shining fish into
+Madre Carmela's frying-pan.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"They are coming, signora, they are coming! Don't you hear them?"
+
+Lucrezia was by the terrace wall looking over into the ravine. She could
+not see any moving figures, but she heard far down among the olives and
+the fruit trees Gaspare's voice singing "O sole mio!" and while she
+listened another voice joined in, the voice of the padrone:
+
+"Dio mio, but they are merry!" she added, as the song was broken by a
+distant peal of laughter.
+
+Hermione came out upon the steps. She had been in the sitting-room
+writing a letter to Miss Townly, who sent her long and tearful effusions
+from London almost every day.
+
+"Have you got the frying-pan ready, Lucrezia?" she asked.
+
+"The frying-pan, signora!"
+
+"Yes, for the fish they are bringing us."
+
+Lucrezia looked knowing.
+
+"Oh, signora, they will bring no fish."
+
+"Why not? They promised last night. Didn't you hear?"
+
+"They promised, yes, but they won't remember. Men promise at night and
+forget in the morning."
+
+Hermione laughed. She had been feeling a little dull, but now the sound
+of the lusty voices and the laughter from the ravine filled her with a
+sudden cheerfulness, and sent a glow of anticipation into her heart.
+
+"Lucrezia, you are a cynic."
+
+"What is a cinico, signora?"
+
+"A Lucrezia. But you don't know your padrone. He won't forget us."
+
+Lucrezia reddened. She feared she had perhaps said something that seemed
+disrespectful.
+
+"Oh, signora, there is not another like the padrone. Every one says so.
+Ask Gaspare and Sebastiano. I only meant that--"
+
+"I know. Well, to-day you will understand that all men are not forgetful,
+when you eat your fish."
+
+Lucrezia still looked very doubtful, but she said nothing more.
+
+"There they are!" exclaimed Hermione.
+
+She waved her hand and cried out. Life suddenly seemed quite different to
+her. These moving figures peopled gloriously the desert waste, these
+ringing voices filled with music the brooding silence of it. She murmured
+to herself a verse of scripture, "Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy
+cometh with the morning," and she realized for the first time how
+absurdly sad and deserted she had been feeling, how unreasonably forlorn.
+By her present joy she measured her past--not sorrow exactly; she could
+not call it that--her past dreariness, and she said to herself with a
+little shock almost of fear, "How terribly dependent I am!"
+
+"Mamma mia!" cried Lucrezia, as another shout of laughter came up from
+the ravine, "how merry and mad they are! They have had a good night's
+fishing."
+
+Hermione heard the laughter, but now it sounded a little harsh in her
+ears.
+
+"I wonder," she thought, as she leaned upon the terrace wall--"I wonder
+if he has missed me at all? I wonder if men ever miss us as we miss
+them?"
+
+Her call, it seemed, had not been heard, nor her gesture of welcome seen,
+but now Maurice looked up, waved his cap, and shouted. Gaspare, too, took
+off his linen hat with a stentorian cry of "Buon giorno, signora."
+
+"Signora!" said Lucrezia.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Look! Was not I right? Are they carrying anything?"
+
+Hermione looked eagerly, almost passionately, at the two figures now
+drawing near to the last ascent up the bare mountain flank. Maurice had a
+stick in one hand, the other hung empty at his side. Gaspare still waved
+his hat wildly, holding it with both hands as a sailor holds the
+signalling-flag.
+
+"Perhaps," she said--"perhaps it wasn't a good night, and they've caught
+nothing."
+
+"Oh, signora, the sea was calm. They must have taken--"
+
+"Perhaps their pockets are full of fish. I am sure they are."
+
+She spoke with a cheerful assurance.
+
+"If they have caught any fish, I know your frying-pan will be wanted,"
+she said.
+
+"Chi lo sa?" said Lucrezia, with rather perfunctory politeness.
+
+Secretly she thought that the padrona had only one fault. She was a
+little obstinate sometimes, and disinclined to be told the truth. And
+certainly she did not know very much about men, although she had a
+husband.
+
+Through the old Norman arch came Delarey and Gaspare, with hot faces and
+gay, shining eyes, splendidly tired with their exertions and happy in the
+thought of rest. Delarey took Hermione's hand in his. He would have
+kissed her before Lucrezia and Gaspare, quite naturally, but he felt that
+her hand stiffened slightly in his as he leaned forward, and he forbore.
+She longed for his kiss, but to receive it there would have spoiled a
+joy. And kind and familiar though she was with those beneath her, she
+could not bear to show the deeps of her heart before them. To her his
+kiss after her lonely night would be an event. Did he know that? She
+wondered.
+
+He still kept her hand in his as he began to tell her about their
+expedition.
+
+"Did you enjoy it?" she asked, thinking what a boy he looked in his
+eager, physical happiness.
+
+"Ask Gaspare!"
+
+"I don't think I need. Your eyes tell me."
+
+"I never enjoyed any night so much before, out there under the moon. Why
+don't we always sleep out-of-doors?"
+
+"Shall we try some night on the terrace?"
+
+"By Jove, we will! What a lark!"
+
+"Did you go into the sea?"
+
+"I should think so! Ask Gaspare if I didn't beat them all. I had to swim,
+too."
+
+"And the fish?" she said, trying to speak, carelessly.
+
+"They were stunning. We caught an awful lot, and Mother Carmela cooked
+them to a T. I had an appetite, I can tell you, Hermione, after being in
+the sea."
+
+She was silent for a moment. Her hand had dropped out of his. When she
+spoke again, she said:
+
+"And you slept in the caves?"
+
+"The others did."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I couldn't sleep, so I went out on to the beach. But I'll tell you all
+that presently. You won't be shocked, Hermione, if I take a siesta now?
+I'm pretty well done--grandly tired, don't you know. I think I could get
+a lovely nap before collazione."
+
+"Come in, my dearest," she said. "Collazione a little late, Lucrezia, not
+till half-past one."
+
+"And the fish, signora?" asked Lucrezia.
+
+"We've got quite enough without fish," said Hermione, turning away.
+
+"Oh, by Jove!" Delarey said, as they went into the cottage, putting his
+hand into his jacket-pocket, "I've got something for you, Hermione."
+
+"Fish!" she cried, eagerly, her whole face brightening. "Lucre--"
+
+"Fish in my coat!" he interrupted, still not remembering. "No, a letter.
+They gave it me from the village as we came up. Here it is."
+
+He drew out a letter, gave it to her, and went into the bedroom, while
+Hermione stood in the sitting-room by the dining-table with the letter in
+her hand.
+
+It was from Artois, with the Kairouan postmark.
+
+"It's from Emile," she said.
+
+Maurice was closing the shutters, to make the bedroom dark.
+
+"Is he still in Africa?" he asked, letting down the bar with a clatter.
+
+"Yes," she said, opening the envelope. "Go to bed like a good boy while I
+read it."
+
+She wanted his kiss so much that she did not go near to him, and spoke
+with a lightness that was almost like a feigned indifference. He thrust
+his gay face through the doorway into the sunshine, and she saw the beads
+of perspiration on his smooth brow above his laughing, yet half-sleepy
+eyes.
+
+"Come and tuck me up afterwards!" he said, and vanished.
+
+Hermione made a little movement as if to follow him, but checked it and
+unfolded the letter.
+
+
+                                 "4, RUE D'ABDUL KADER, KAIROUAN.
+
+     MY DEAR FRIEND,--This will be one of my dreary notes, but you must
+     forgive me. Do you ever feel a heavy cloud of apprehension lowering
+     over you, a sensation of approaching calamity, as if you heard the
+     footsteps of a deadly enemy stealthily approaching you? Do you know
+     what it is to lose courage, to fear yourself, life, the future, to
+     long to hear a word of sympathy from a friendly voice, to long to
+     lay hold of a friendly hand? Are you ever like a child in the dark,
+     your intellect no weapon against the dread of formless things? The
+     African sun is shining here as I sit under a palm-tree writing,
+     with my servant, Zerzour, squatting beside me. It is so clear that
+     I can almost count the veins in the leaves of the palms, so warm
+     that Zerzour has thrown off his burnous and kept on only his linen
+     shirt. And yet I am cold and seem to be in blackness. I write to
+     you to gain some courage if I can. But I have gained none yet. I
+     believe there must be a physical cause for my malaise, and that I
+     am going to have some dreadful illness, and perhaps lay my bones
+     here in the shadow of the mosques among the sons of Islam. Write to
+     me. Is the garden of paradise blooming with flowers? Is the tree of
+     knowledge of good weighed down with fruit, and do you pluck the
+     fruit boldly and eat it every day? You told me in London to come
+     over and see you. I am not coming. Do not fear. But how I wish that
+     I could now, at this instant, see your strong face, touch your
+     courageous hand! There is a sensation of doom upon me. Laugh at me
+     as much as you like, but write to me. I feel cold--cold in the sun.
+
+                                                          EMILE."
+
+When she had finished reading this letter, Hermione stood quite still
+with it in her hand, gazing at the white paper on which this cry from
+Africa was traced. It seemed to her that--a cry from across the sea for
+help against some impending fate. She had often had melancholy letters
+from Artois in the past, expressing pessimistic views about life and
+literature, anxiety about some book which he was writing and which he
+thought was going to be a failure, anger against the follies of men, the
+turn of French politics, or the degeneration of the arts in modern times.
+Diatribes she was accustomed to, and a definite melancholy from one who
+had not a gay temperament. But this letter was different from all the
+others. She sat down and read it again. For the moment she had forgotten
+Maurice, and did not hear his movements in the adjoining room. She was in
+Africa under a palm-tree, looking into the face of a friend with keen
+anxiety, trying to read the immediate future for him there.
+
+"Maurice!" she called, presently, without getting up from her seat,
+"I've had such a strange letter from Emile. I'm afraid--I feel as if he
+were going to be dreadfully ill or have an accident."
+
+There was no reply.
+
+"Maurice!" she called again.
+
+Then she got up and looked into the bedroom. It was nearly dark, but she
+could see her husband's black head on the pillow and hear a sound of
+regular breathing. He was asleep already; she had not received his kiss
+or tucked him up. She felt absurdly unhappy, as if she had missed a
+pleasure that could never come to her again. That, she thought, is one of
+the penalties of a great love, the passionate regret it spends on the
+tiny things it has failed of. At this moment she fancied--no, she felt
+sure--that there would always be a shadow in her life. She had lost
+Maurice's kiss after his return from his first absence since their
+marriage. And a kiss from his lips still seemed to her a wonderful,
+almost a sacred thing, not only a physical act, but an emblem of that
+which was mysterious and lay behind the physical. Why had she not let him
+kiss her on the terrace? Her sensitive reserve had made her loss. For a
+moment she thought she wished she had the careless mind of a peasant.
+Lucrezia loved Sebastiano with passion, but she would have let him kiss
+her in public and been proud of it. What was the use of delicacy, of
+sensitiveness, in the great, coarse thing called life? Even Maurice had
+not shared her feeling. He was open as a boy, almost as a peasant boy.
+
+She began to wonder about him. She often wondered about him now in
+Sicily. In England she never had. She had thought there that she knew him
+as he, perhaps, could never know her. It seemed to her that she had been
+almost arrogant, filled with a pride of intellect. She was beginning to
+be humbler here, face to face with Etna.
+
+Let him sleep, mystery wrapped in the mystery of slumber!
+
+She sat down in the twilight, waiting till he should wake, watching the
+darkness of his hair upon the pillow.
+
+Some time passed, and presently she heard a noise upon the terrace. She
+got up softly, went into the sitting-room, and looked out. Lucrezia was
+laying the table for collazione.
+
+"Is it half-past one already?" she asked.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"But the padrone is still asleep!"
+
+"So is Gaspare in the hay. Come and see, signora."
+
+Lucrezia took Hermione by the hand and led her round the angle of the
+cottage. There, under the low roof of the out-house, dressed only in his
+shirt and trousers with his brown arms bare and his hair tumbled over his
+damp forehead, lay Gaspare on a heap of hay close to Tito, the donkey.
+Some hens were tripping and pecking by his legs, and a black cat was
+curled up in the hollow of his left armpit. He looked infinitely young,
+healthy, and comfortable, like an embodied carelessness that had flung
+itself down to its need.
+
+"I wish I could sleep like that," said Hermione.
+
+"Signora!" said Lucrezia, shocked. "You in the stable with that white
+dress! Mamma mia! And the hens!"
+
+"Hens, donkey, cat, hay, and all--I should love it. But I'm too old ever
+to sleep like that. Don't wake him!"
+
+Lucrezia was stepping over to Gaspare.
+
+"And I won't wake the padrone. Let them both sleep. They've been up all
+night. I'll eat alone. When they wake we'll manage something for them.
+Perhaps they'll sleep till evening, till dinner-time."
+
+"Gaspare will, signora. He can sleep the clock round when he's tired."
+
+"And the padrone too, I dare say. All the better."
+
+She spoke cheerfully, then went to sit down to her solitary meal.
+
+The letter of Artois was her only company. She read it again as she ate,
+and again felt as if it had been written by a man over whom some real
+misfortune was impending. The thought of his isolation in that remote
+African city pained her warm heart. She compared it with her own
+momentary solitude, and chided herself for minding--and she did mind--the
+lonely meal. How much she had--everything almost! And Artois, with his
+genius, his fame, his liberty--how little he had! An Arab servant for his
+companion, while she for hers had Maurice! Her heart glowed with
+thankfulness, and, feeling how rich she was, she felt a longing to give
+to others--a longing to make every one happy, a longing specially to make
+Emile happy. His letter was horribly sad. Each time she looked at it she
+was made sad by it, even apprehensive. She remembered their long and
+close friendship, how she had sympathized with all his struggles, how she
+had been proud of possessing his confidence and of being asked to advise
+him on points connected with his work. The past returned to her, kindling
+fires in her heart, till she longed to be near him and to shed their
+warmth on him. The African sun shone upon him and left him cold, numb.
+How wonderful it was, she thought, that the touch of a true friend's
+hand, the smile of the eyes of a friend, could succeed where the sun
+failed. Sometimes she thought of herself, of all human beings, as
+pygmies. Now she felt that she came of a race of giants, whose powers
+were illimitable. If only she could be under that palm-tree for a moment
+beside Emile, she would be able to test the power she knew was within
+her, the glorious power that the sun lacked, to shed light and heat
+through a human soul. With an instinctive gesture she stretched out her
+hand as if to give Artois the touch he longed for. It encountered only
+the air and dropped to her side. She got up with a sigh.
+
+"Poor old Emile!" she said to herself. "If only I could do something for
+him!"
+
+The thought of Maurice sleeping calmly close to her made her long to say
+"Thank you" for her great happiness by performing some action of
+usefulness, some action that would help another--Emile for choice--to
+happiness, or, at least, to calm.
+
+This longing was for a moment so keen in her that it was almost like an
+unconscious petition, like an unuttered prayer in the heart, "Give me an
+opportunity to show my gratitude."
+
+She stood by the wall for a moment, looking over into the ravine and at
+the mountain flank opposite. Etna was startlingly clear to-day. She
+fancied that if a fly were to settle upon the snow on its summit she
+would be able to see it. The sea was like a mirror in which lay the
+reflection of the unclouded sky. It was not far to Africa. She watched a
+bird pass towards the sea. Perhaps it was flying to Kairouan, and would
+settle at last on one of the white cupolas of the great mosque there, the
+Mosque of Djama Kebir.
+
+What could she do for Emile? She could at least write to him. She could
+renew her invitation to him to come to Sicily.
+
+"Lucrezia!" she called, softly, lest she might waken Maurice.
+
+"Signora?" said Lucrezia, appearing round the corner of the cottage.
+
+"Please bring me out a pen and ink and writing-paper, will you?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia was standing beside Hermione. Now she turned to go into the
+house. As she did so she said:
+
+"Ecco, Antonino from the post-office!"
+
+"Where?" asked Hermione.
+
+Lucrezia pointed to a little figure that was moving quickly along the
+mountain-path towards the cottage.
+
+"There, signora. But why should he come? It is not the hour for the post
+yet."
+
+"No. Perhaps it is a telegram. Yes, it must be a telegram."
+
+She glanced at the letter in her hand.
+
+"It's a telegram from Africa," she said, as if she knew.
+
+And at that moment she felt that she did know.
+
+Lucrezia regarded her with round-eyed amazement.
+
+"But, signora, how can you--"
+
+"There, Antonino has disappeared under the trees! We shall see him in a
+minute among the rocks. I'll go to meet him."
+
+And she went quickly to the archway, and looked down the path where the
+lizards were darting to and fro in the sunshine. Almost directly Antonino
+reappeared, a small boy climbing steadily up the steep pathway, with a
+leather bag slung over his shoulder.
+
+"Antonino!" she called to him. "Is it a telegram?"
+
+"Si, signora!" he cried out.
+
+He came up to her, panting, opened the bag, and gave her the folded
+paper.
+
+"Go and get something to drink," she said. "To eat, too, if you're
+hungry."
+
+Antonino ran off eagerly, while Hermione tore open the paper and read
+these words in French:
+
+     "Monsieur Artois dangerously ill; fear may not recover; he wished
+     you to know.
+
+                          MAX BERTON, Docteur Médecin, Kairouan."
+
+Hermione dropped the telegram. She did not feel at all surprised. Indeed,
+she felt that she had been expecting almost these very words, telling her
+of a tragedy at which the letter she still held in her hand had hinted.
+For a moment she stood there without being conscious of any special
+sensation. Then she stooped, picked up the telegram, and read it again.
+This time it seemed like an answer to that unuttered prayer in her heart:
+"Give me an opportunity to show my gratitude." She did not hesitate for
+a moment as to what she would do. She would go to Kairouan, to close the
+eyes of her friend if he must die, if not to nurse him back to life.
+
+Antonino was munching some bread and cheese and had one hand round a
+glass full of red wine.
+
+"I'm going to write an answer," she said to him, "and you must run with
+it."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Was it from Africa, signora?" asked Lucrezia.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Lucrezia's jaw fell, and she stared in superstitious amazement.
+
+"I wonder," Hermione thought, "if Maurice--"
+
+She went gently to the bedroom. He was still sleeping calmly. His
+attitude of luxurious repose, the sound of his quiet breathing, seemed
+strange to her eyes and ears at this moment, strange and almost horrible.
+For an instant she thought of waking him in order to tell him her news
+and consult with him about the journey. It never occurred to her to ask
+him whether there should be a journey. But something held her back, as
+one is held back from disturbing the slumber of a tired child, and she
+returned to the sitting-room, wrote out the following telegram:
+
+     "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, reaching Africa 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 the midst 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 among the 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 she was 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
+help Hermione. 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 a fire 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--when two 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.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+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 of understanding 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 was _The
+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 against a 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 could harm 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. How quickly 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 the village the people were
+gossiping at one another's doors, were lounging together in the piazza,
+were playing cards in the caffčs, 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!" "Ŕ 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 the festa, 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:
+
+               "Maju torna, maju veni
+               Cu li belli soi ciureri--"
+
+He tried to hum the tune, but it had left his memory. He longed to hear
+it once more under the olive-trees of the Sirens' Isle.
+
+Again his thought went to Hermione. Very soon she would be out there, far
+out on the silver of the sea. Had she wanted him to go with her? He knew
+that she had. Yet she had not asked him to go, had not hinted at his
+going. Even she had refused to let him go. And he had not pressed it.
+Something had held him back from insisting, something secret, and
+something secret had kept her from accepting his suggestion. She was
+going to her greatest friend, to the man she had known intimately, long
+before she had known him--Delarey--and he was left alone. In England he
+had never had a passing moment of jealousy of Artois; but now, to-night,
+mingled with his creeping resentment against the joys of the peasants, of
+those not far from him under the moon of Sicily, there was a sensation of
+jealousy which came from the knowledge that his wife was travelling to
+her friend. That friend might be dead, or she might nurse him back to
+life. Delarey thought of her by his bedside, ministering to him,
+performing the intimate offices of the attendant on a sick man, raising
+him up on his pillows, putting a cool hand on his burning forehead,
+sitting by him at night in the silence of a shadowy room, and quite
+alone.
+
+He thought of all this, and the Sicilian that was in him grew suddenly
+hot with a burning sense of anger, a burning desire for action,
+preventive or revengeful. It was quite unreasonable, as unreasonable as
+the vagrant impulse of a child, but it was strong as the full-grown
+determination of a man. Hermione had belonged to him. She was his. And
+the old Sicilian blood in him protested against that which would be if
+Artois were still alive when she reached Africa.
+
+But it was too late now. He could do nothing. He could only look at the
+shining sea on which the ship would bear her that very night.
+
+His inaction and solitude began to torture him. If he went in he knew he
+could not sleep. The mere thought of the festa would prevent him from
+sleeping. Again he looked at the lights of Castel Vecchio. He saw only
+one now, and imagined it set in the window of Pancrazio's house. He even
+fancied that down the mountain-side and across the ravine there floated
+to him the faint wail of the ceramella playing a dance measure.
+
+Suddenly he knew that he could not remain all night alone on the
+mountain-side.
+
+He went quickly into the cottage, got his soft hat, then went from room
+to room, closing the windows and barring the wooden shutters. When he had
+come out again upon the steps and locked the cottage door he stood for a
+moment hesitating with the large door-key in his hand. He said to himself
+that he was going to the festa at Castel Vecchio. Of course he was going
+there, to dance the country dances and join in the songs of Sicily. He
+slipped the key into his pocket and went down the steps to the terrace.
+But there he hesitated again. He took the key out of his pocket, looked
+at it as it lay in his hand, then put it down on the sill of the
+sitting-room window.
+
+"If any one comes, there isn't very much to steal," he thought. "And,
+perhaps--" Again he looked at the lights of Castel Vecchio, then down
+towards the sea. The star of the sea shone steadily and seemed to summon
+him. He left the key on the window-sill, with a quick gesture pulled his
+hat-brim down farther over his eyes, hastened along the terrace, and,
+turning to the left beyond the archway, took the path that led through
+the olive-trees towards Isola Bella and the sea.
+
+Through the wonderful silence of the night among the hills there came now
+a voice that was thrilling to his ears--the voice of youth by the sea
+calling to the youth that was in him.
+
+Hermione was travelling to her friend. Must he remain quite friendless?
+
+All the way down to the sea he heard the calling of the voice.
+
+
+
+X
+
+As dawn was breaking, Lucrezia and Gaspare climbed slowly up the
+mountain-side towards the cottage. Lucrezia's eyes were red, for she had
+just bidden good-bye to Sebastiano, who was sailing that day for the
+Lipari Isles, and she did not know how soon he would be back. Sebastiano
+had not cried. He loved change, and was radiant at the prospect of his
+voyage. But Lucrezia's heart was torn. She knew Sebastiano, knew his wild
+and adventurous spirit, his reckless passion for life, and the gifts it
+scatters at the feet of lusty youth. There were maidens in the Lipari
+Isles. They might be beautiful. She had scarcely been jealous of
+Sebastiano before her betrothal to him, for then she had had no rights
+over him, and she was filled with the spirit of humbleness that still
+dwells in the women of Sicily, the spirit that whispers "Man may do what
+he will." But now something had arisen within her to do battle with that
+spirit. She wanted Sebastiano for her very own, and the thought of his
+freedom when away tormented her.
+
+Gaspare comforted her in perfunctory fashion.
+
+"What does it matter?" he said. "When you are married you can keep him in
+the house, and make him spin the flax for you."
+
+And he laughed aloud. But when they drew near to the cottage he said:
+
+"Zitta, Lucrezia! The padrone is asleep. We must steal in softly and not
+waken him."
+
+On tiptoe they crept along the terrace.
+
+"He will have left the door open for us," whispered Gaspare. "He has the
+revolver beside him and will not have been afraid."
+
+But when they stood before the steps the door was shut. Gaspare tried it
+gently. It was locked.
+
+"Phew!" he whistled. "We cannot get in, for we cannot wake him."
+
+Lucrezia shivered. Sorrow had made her feel cold.
+
+"Mamma mia!" she began.
+
+But Gaspare's sharp eyes had spied the key lying on the window-sill. He
+darted to it and picked it up. Then he stared at the locked door and at
+Lucrezia.
+
+"But where is the padrone?" he said. "Oh, I know! He locked the door on
+the inside and then put the key out of the window. But why is the bedroom
+window shut? He always sleeps with it open!"
+
+Quickly he thrust the key into the lock, opened the door, and entered the
+dark sitting-room. Holding up a warning hand to keep Lucrezia quiet, he
+tiptoed to the bedroom door, opened it without noise, and disappeared,
+leaving Lucrezia outside. After a minute or two he came back.
+
+"It is all right. He is sleeping. Go to bed."
+
+Lucrezia turned to go.
+
+"And never mind getting up early to make the padrone's coffee," Gaspare
+added. "I will do it. I am not sleepy. I shall take the gun and go out
+after the birds."
+
+Lucrezia looked surprised. Gaspare was not in the habit of relieving her
+of her duties. On the contrary, he was a strict taskmaster. But she was
+tired and preoccupied. So she made no remark and went off to her room
+behind the house, walking heavily and untying the handkerchief that was
+round her head.
+
+When she had gone, Gaspare stood by the table, thinking deeply. He had
+lied to Lucrezia. The padrone was not asleep. His bed had not been slept
+in. Where had he gone? Where was he now?
+
+The Sicilian servant, if he cares for his padrone, feels as if he had a
+proprietor's interest in him. He belongs to his padrone and his padrone
+belongs to him. He will allow nobody to interfere with his possession. He
+is intensely jealous of any one who seeks to disturb the intimacy between
+his padrone and himself, or to enter into his padrone's life without
+frankly letting him know it and the reason for it. The departure of
+Hermione had given an additional impetus to Gaspare's always lively sense
+of proprietorship in Maurice. He felt as if he had been left in charge of
+his padrone, and had an almost sacred responsibility to deliver him up to
+Hermione happy and safe when she returned. This absence, therefore,
+startled and perturbed him--more--made him feel guilty of a lapse from
+his duty. Perhaps he should not have gone to the festa. True, he had
+asked the padrone to accompany him. But still--
+
+He went out onto the terrace and looked around him. The dawn was faint
+and pale. Wreaths of mist, like smoke trails, hung below him, obscuring
+the sea. The ghostly cone of Etna loomed into the sky, extricating itself
+from swaddling bands of clouds which shrouded its lower flanks. The air
+was chilly upon this height, and the aspect of things was gray and
+desolate, without temptation, without enchantment, to lure men out from
+their dwellings.
+
+What could have kept the padrone from his sleep till this hour?
+
+Gaspare shivered a little as he stared over the wall. He was
+thinking--thinking furiously. Although scarcely educated at all, he was
+exceedingly sharp-witted, and could read character almost as swiftly and
+surely as an Arab. At this moment he was busily recalling the book he had
+been reading for many weeks in Sicily, the book of his padrone's
+character, written out for him in words, in glances, in gestures, in
+likes and dislikes, most clearly in actions. Mentally he turned the
+leaves until he came to the night of the fishing, to the waning of the
+night, to the journey to the caves, to the dawn when he woke upon the
+sand and found that the padrone was not beside him. His brown hand
+tightened on the stick he held, his brown eyes stared with the glittering
+acuteness of a great bird's at the cloud trails hiding the sea below
+him--hiding the sea, and all that lay beside the sea.
+
+There was no one on the terrace. But there was a figure for a moment on
+the mountain-side, leaping downward. The ravine took it and hid it in a
+dark embrace. Gaspare had found what he sought, a clew to guide him. His
+hesitation was gone. In his uneducated and intuitive mind there was no
+longer any room for a doubt. He knew that his padrone was where he had
+been in that other dawn, when he slipped away from the cave where his
+companions were sleeping.
+
+Surefooted as a goat, and incited to abnormal activity by a driving
+spirit within him that throbbed with closely mingled curiosity, jealousy,
+and anger, Gaspare made short work of the path in the ravine. In a few
+minutes he came out on to the road by Isola Bella. On the shore was a
+group of fishermen, all of them friends of his, getting ready their
+fishing-tackle, and hauling down the boats to the gray sea for the
+morning's work. Some of them hailed him, but he took no notice, only
+pulled his soft hat down sideways over his cheek, and hurried on in the
+direction of Messina, keeping to the left side of the road and away from
+the shore, till he gained the summit of the hill from which the Caffč
+Berardi and the caves were visible. There he stopped for a moment and
+looked down. He saw no one upon the shore, but at some distance upon the
+sea there was a black dot, a fishing-boat. It was stationary. Gaspare
+knew that its occupant must be hauling in his net.
+
+"Salvatore is out then!" he muttered to himself, as he turned aside from
+the road onto the promontory, which was connected by the black wall of
+rock with the land where stood the house of the sirens. This wall,
+forbidding though it was, and descending sheer into the deep sea on
+either side, had no terrors for him. He dropped down to it with a sort of
+skilful carelessness, then squatted on a stone, and quickly unlaced his
+mountain boots, pulled his stockings off, slung them with the boots round
+his neck, and stood up on his bare feet. Then, balancing himself with his
+out-stretched arms, he stepped boldly upon the wall. It was very narrow.
+The sea surged through it. There was not space on it to walk
+straight-footed, even with only one foot at a time upon the rock. Gaspare
+was obliged to plant his feet sideways, the toes and heels pointing to
+the sea on either hand. But the length of the wall was short, and he went
+across it almost as quickly as if he had been walking upon the road.
+Heights and depths had no terrors for him in his confident youth. And he
+had been bred up among the rocks, and was a familiar friend of the sea. A
+drop into it would have only meant a morning bath. Having gained the
+farther side, he put on his stockings and boots, grasped his stick, and
+began to climb upward through the thickly growing trees towards the house
+of the sirens. His instinct had told him upon the terrace that the
+padrone was there. Uneducated people have often marvellously retentive
+memories for the things of every-day life. Gaspare remembered the
+padrone's question about the little light beside the sea, his answer to
+it, the way in which the padrone had looked towards the trees when, in
+the dawn, they stood upon the summit of the hill and he pointed out the
+caves where they were going to sleep. He remembered, too, from what
+direction the padrone came towards the caffč when the sun was up--and he
+knew.
+
+As he drew near to the cottage he walked carefully, though still swiftly,
+but when he reached it he paused, bent forward his head, and listened.
+He was in the tangle of coarse grass that grew right up to the north wall
+of the cottage, and close to the angle which hid from him the sea-side
+and the cottage door. At first he heard nothing except the faint murmur
+of the sea upon the rocks. His stillness now was as complete as had been
+his previous activity, and in the one he was as assured as in the other.
+Some five minutes passed. Again and again, with a measured monotony, came
+to him the regular lisp of the waves. The grass rustled against his legs
+as the little wind of morning pushed its way through it gently, and a
+bird chirped above his head in the olive-trees and was answered by
+another bird. And just then, as if in reply to the voices of the birds,
+he heard the sound of human voices. They were distant and faint almost as
+the lisp of the sea, and were surely coming towards him from the sea.
+
+When Gaspare realized that the speakers were not in the cottage he crept
+round the angle of the wall, slipped across the open space that fronted
+the cottage door, and, gaining the trees, stood still in almost exactly
+the place where Maurice had stood when he watched Maddalena in the dawn.
+
+The voices sounded again and nearer. There was a little laugh in a girl's
+voice, then the dry twang of the plucked strings of a guitar, then
+silence. After a minute the guitar strings twanged again, and a girl's
+voice began to sing a peasant song, "Zampagnaro."
+
+At the end of the verse there was an imitation of the ceramella by the
+voice, humming, or rather whining, bouche fermée. As it ceased a man's
+voice said:
+
+"Ancora! Ancora!"
+
+The girl's voice began the imitation again, and the man's voice joined in
+grotesquely, exaggerating the imitation farcically and closing it with a
+boyish shout.
+
+In response, standing under the trees, Gaspare shouted. He had meant to
+keep silence; but the twang of the guitar, with its suggestion of a
+festa, the singing voices, the youthful laughter, and the final
+exclamation ringing out in the dawn, overcame the angry and suspicious
+spirit that had hitherto dominated him. The boy's imp of fun was up and
+dancing within him. He could not drive it out or lay it to rest.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+His voice died away, and was answered by a silence that seemed like a
+startled thing holding its breath.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+He called again, lustily, leaped out from the trees, and went running
+across the open space to the edge of the plateau by the sea. A tiny path
+wound steeply down from here to the rocks below, and on it, just under
+the concealing crest of the land, stood the padrone with Maddalena. Their
+hands were linked together, as if they had caught at each other sharply
+for sympathy or help. Their faces were tense and their lips parted. But
+as they saw Gaspare's light figure leaping over the hill edge, his
+dancing eyes fixed shrewdly, with a sort of boyish scolding, upon them,
+their hands fell apart, their faces relaxed.
+
+"Gasparino!" said Maurice. "It was you who called!"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+He came up to them. Maddalena's oval face had flushed, and she dropped
+the full lids over her black eyes as she said:
+
+"Buon giorno, Gaspare."
+
+"Buon giorno, Donna Maddalena."
+
+Then they stood there for a moment in silence. Maurice was the first to
+speak again.
+
+"But why did you come here?" he said. "How did you know?"
+
+Already the sparkle of merriment had dropped out of Gaspare's face as the
+feeling of jealousy, of not having been completely trusted, returned to
+his mind.
+
+"Did not the signore wish me to know?" he said, almost gruffly, with a
+sort of sullen violence. "I am sorry."
+
+Maurice touched the back of his hand, giving it a gentle, half-humorous
+slap.
+
+"Don't be an ass, Gaspare. But how could you guess where I had gone?"
+
+"Where did you go before, signore, when you could not sleep?"
+
+At this thrust Maurice imitated Maddalena and reddened slightly. It
+seemed to him as if he had been living under glass while he had fancied
+himself enclosed in rock that was impenetrable by human eyes. He tried to
+laugh away his slight confusion.
+
+"Gaspare, you are the most birbante boy in Sicily!" he said. "You are
+like a Mago Africano."
+
+"Signorino, you should trust me," returned the boy, sullenly.
+
+His own words seemed to move him, as if their sound revealed to him the
+whole of the injury that had been inflicted upon his amour propre, and
+suddenly angry tears started into his eyes.
+
+"I thought I was a servant of confidence" (un servitore di confidenza),
+he added, bitterly.
+
+Maurice was amazed at the depth of feeling thus abruptly shown to him.
+This was the first time he had been permitted to look for a moment deep
+down into that strange volcano, a young and passionate Sicilian heart. As
+he looked, swift and short as was his glance, his amazement died away.
+Narcissus saw himself in the stream. Maurice saw, or believed he saw, his
+heart's image, trembling perhaps and indistinct, far down in the passion
+of Gaspare. So could he have been with a padrone had fate made his
+situation in life a different one. So could he have felt had something
+been concealed from him.
+
+Maurice said nothing in reply. Maddalena was there. They walked in
+silence to the cottage door, and there, rather like a detected
+school-boy, he bade her good-bye, and set out through the trees with
+Gaspare.
+
+"That's not the way, is it?" Maurice said, presently, as the boy turned
+to the left.
+
+"How did you come, signore?"
+
+"I!"
+
+He hesitated. Then he saw the uselessness of striving to keep up a
+master's pose with this servant of the sea and of the hills.
+
+"I came by water," he said, smiling. "I swam, Gasparino."
+
+The boy answered the smile, and suddenly the tension between them was
+broken, and they were at their ease again.
+
+"I will show you another way, signore, if you are not afraid."
+
+Maurice laughed out gayly.
+
+"The way of the rocks?" he said.
+
+"Si, signore. But you must go barefooted and be as nimble as a goat."
+
+"Do you doubt me, Gasparino?"
+
+He looked at the boy hard, with a deliberately quizzing kindness, that
+was gay but asked forgiveness, too, and surely promised amendment.
+
+"I have never doubted my padrone."
+
+They said nothing more till they were at the wall of rock. Then Gaspare
+seemed struck by hesitation.
+
+"Perhaps--" he began. "You are not accustomed to the rocks, signore,
+and--"
+
+"Silenzio!" cried Maurice, bending down and pulling off his boots and
+stockings.
+
+"Do like this, signore!"
+
+Gaspare slung his boots and stockings round his neck. Maurice imitated
+him.
+
+"And now give me your hand--so--without pulling."
+
+"But you hadn't--"
+
+"Give me your hand, signore!"
+
+It was an order. Maurice obeyed it, feeling that in these matters Gaspare
+had the right to command.
+
+"Walk as I do, signore, and keep step with me."
+
+"Bene!"
+
+"And look before you. Don't look down at the sea."
+
+"Va bene."
+
+A moment, and they were across. Maurice blew out his breath.
+
+"By Jove!" he said, in English.
+
+He sat down on the grass, put his hand on his knees, and looked back at
+the rock and at the precipices.
+
+"I'm glad I can do that!" he said.
+
+Something within him was revelling, was dancing a tarantella as the sun
+came up, lifting its blood-red rim above the sea-line in the east. He
+looked over the trees.
+
+"Maddalena saw us!" he cried.
+
+He had caught sight of her among the olive-trees watching them, with her
+two hands held flat against her breast.
+
+"Addio, Maddalena!"
+
+The girl started, waved her hand, drew back, and disappeared.
+
+"I'm glad she saw us."
+
+Gaspare laughed, but said nothing. They put on their boots and stockings,
+and started briskly off towards Monte Amato. When they had crossed the
+road, and gained the winding path that led eventually into the ravine,
+Maurice said:
+
+"Well, Gaspare?"
+
+"Well, signorino?"
+
+"Have you forgiven me?"
+
+"It is not for a servant to forgive his padrone, signorino," said the
+boy, but rather proudly.
+
+Maurice feared that his sense of injury was returning, and continued,
+hastily:
+
+"It was like this, Gaspare. When you and Lucrezia had gone I felt so dull
+all alone, and I thought, 'every one is singing and dancing and laughing
+except me.'"
+
+"But I asked you to accompany us, signorino," Gaspare exclaimed,
+reproachfully.
+
+"Yes, I know, but--"
+
+"But you thought we did not want you. Well, then, you do not know us!"
+
+"Now, Gaspare, don't be angry again. Remember that the padrona has gone
+away and that I depend on you for everything."
+
+At the last words Gaspare's face, which had been lowering, brightened up
+a little. But he was not yet entirely appeased.
+
+"You have Maddalena," he said.
+
+"She is only a girl."
+
+"Oh, girls are very nice."
+
+"Don't be ridiculous, Gaspare. I hardly know Maddalena."
+
+Gaspare laughed; not rudely, but as a boy laughs who is sure he knows the
+world from the outer shell to inner kernel.
+
+"Oh, signore, why did you go down to the sea instead of coming to the
+festa?"
+
+Maurice did not answer at once. He was asking himself Gaspare's question.
+Why had he gone to the Sirens' Isle? Gaspare continued:
+
+"May I say what I think, signore? You know I am Sicilian, and I know the
+Sicilians."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Strangers should be careful what they do in my country."
+
+"Madonna! You call me a stranger?"
+
+It was Maurice's turn to be angry. He spoke with sudden heat. The idea
+that he was a stranger--a straniero--in Sicily seemed to him
+ridiculous--almost offensive.
+
+"Well, signore, you have only been here a little while. I was born here
+and have never been anywhere else."
+
+"It is true. Go on then."
+
+"The men of Sicily are not like the English or the Germans. They are
+jealous of their women. I have been told that in your country, on festa
+days, if a man likes a girl and she likes him he can take her for a walk.
+Is it true?"
+
+"Quite true."
+
+"He cannot walk with her here. He cannot even walk with her down the
+street of Marechiaro alone. It would be a shame."
+
+"But there is no harm in it."
+
+"Who knows? It is not our custom. We walk with our friends and the girls
+walk with their friends. If Salvatore, the father of Maddalena, knew--"
+
+He did not finish his sentence, but, with sudden and startling violence,
+made the gesture of drawing out a knife and thrusting it upward into the
+body of an adversary. Maurice stopped on the path. He felt as if he had
+seen a murder.
+
+"Ecco!" said Gaspare, calmly, dropping his hand, and staring into
+Maurice's face with his enormous eyes, which never fell before the gaze
+of another.
+
+"But--but--I mean no harm to Maddalena."
+
+"It does not matter."
+
+"But she did not tell me. She is ready to talk with me."
+
+"She is a silly girl. She is flattered to see a stranger. She does not
+think. Girls never think."
+
+He spoke with utter contempt:
+
+"Have you seen Salvatore, signore?"
+
+"No--yes."
+
+"You have seen him?"
+
+"Not to speak to. When I came down the cottage was shut up. I waited--"
+
+"You hid, signore?"
+
+Maurice's face flushed. An angry word rose to his lips, but he checked it
+and laughed, remembering that he had to deal with a boy, and that
+Gaspare was devoted to him.
+
+"Well, I waited among the trees--birbante!"
+
+"And you saw Salvatore?"
+
+"He came out and went down to the fishing."
+
+"Salvatore is a terrible man. He used to beat his wife Teresa."
+
+"P'f! Would you have me be afraid of him?"
+
+Maurice's blood was up. Even his sense of romance was excited. He felt
+that he was in the coils of an adventure, and his heart leaped, but not
+with fear.
+
+"Fear is not for men. But the padrona has left you with me because she
+trusts me and because I know Sicily."
+
+It seemed to Maurice that he was with an inflexible chaperon, against
+whose dominion it would be difficult, if not useless, to struggle. They
+were walking on again, and had come into the ravine. Water was slipping
+down among the rocks, between the twisted trunks of the olive-trees. Its
+soft sound, and the cool dimness in this secret place, made Maurice
+suddenly realize that he had passed the night without sleep, and that he
+would be glad to rest. It was not the moment for combat, and it was not
+unpleasant, after all--so he phrased it in his mind--to be looked after,
+thought for, educated in the etiquette of the Enchanted Isle by a son of
+its soil, with its wild passions and its firm repressions linked together
+in his heart.
+
+"Gasparino," he said, meekly. "I want you to look after me. But don't be
+unkind to me. I'm older than you, I know, but I feel awfully young here,
+and I do want to have a little fun without doing any harm to anybody, or
+getting any harm myself. One thing I promise you, that I'll always trust
+you and tell you what I'm up to. There! Have you quite forgiven me now?"
+
+Gaspare's face became radiant. He felt that he had done his duty, and
+that he was now properly respected by one whom he looked up to and of
+whom he was not merely the servant, but also the lawful guardian.
+
+They went up to the cottage singing in the morning sunshine.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Maurice lifted his head lazily from the hands that served it as a pillow,
+and called out, sleepily:
+
+"Che cosa c'é?"
+
+"Where are you, signorino?"
+
+"Down here under the oak-trees."
+
+He sank back again, and looked up at the section of deep-blue sky that
+was visible through the leaves. How he loved the blue, and gloried in the
+first strong heat that girdled Sicily to-day, and whispered to his happy
+body that summer was near, the true and fearless summer that comes to
+southern lands. Through all his veins there crept a subtle sense of
+well-being, as if every drop of his blood were drowsily rejoicing. Three
+days had passed, had glided by, three radiant nights, warm, still,
+luxurious. And with each his sense of the south had increased, and with
+each his consciousness of being nearer to the breast of Sicily. In those
+days and nights he had not looked into a book or glanced at a paper. What
+had he done? He scarcely knew. He had lived and felt about him the
+fingers of the sun touching him like a lover. And he had chattered idly
+to Gaspare about Sicilian things, always Sicilian things; about the fairs
+and the festivals, Capo d'Anno and Carnevale, martedě grasso with its
+_Tavulata_, the solemn family banquet at which all the relations assemble
+and eat in company, the feasts of the different saints, the peasant
+marriages and baptisms, the superstitions--Gaspare did not call them
+so--that are alive in Sicily, and that will surely live till Sicily is
+no more; the fear of the evil-eye and of spells, and the best means of
+warding them off, the "guaj di lu linu," the interpretation of dreams,
+the power of the Mafia, the legends of the brigands, and the vanished
+glory of Musolino. Gaspare talked without reserve to his padrone, as to
+another Sicilian, and Maurice was never weary of listening. All that was
+of Sicily caught his mind and heart, was full of meaning to him, and of
+irresistible fascination. He had heard the call of the blood once for all
+and had once for all responded to it.
+
+But the nights he had loved best. For then he slept under the stars. When
+ten o'clock struck he and Gaspare carried out one of the white beds onto
+the terrace, and he slipped into it and lay looking up at the clear sky,
+and at the dimness of the mountain flank, and at the still silhouettes of
+the trees, till sleep took him, while Gaspare, rolled up in a rug of many
+colors, snuggled up on the seat by the wall with his head on a cushion
+brought for him by the respectful Lucrezia. And they awoke at dawn to see
+the last star fade above the cone of Etna, and the first spears of the
+sun thrust up out of the stillness of the sea.
+
+"Signorino, ecco la posta!"
+
+And Gaspare came running down from the terrace, the wide brim of his
+white linen hat flapping round his sun-browned face.
+
+"I don't want it, Gaspare. I don't want anything."
+
+"But I think there's a letter from the signora!"
+
+"From Africa?"
+
+Maurice sat up and held out his hand.
+
+"Yes, it is from Kairouan. Sit down, Gaspare, and I'll tell you what the
+padrona says."
+
+Gaspare squatted on his haunches like an Oriental, not touching the
+ground with his body, and looked eagerly at the letter that had come
+across the sea. He adored his padrona, and was longing for news of her.
+Already he had begun to send her picture post-cards, laboriously written
+over. "Tanti saluti carissima Signora Pertruni, a rividici, e suno il suo
+servo fidelisimo per sempre--Martucci Gaspare. Adio! Adio! Ciao! Ciao!"
+What would she say? And what message would she send to him? His eyes
+sparkled with affectionate expectation.
+
+                                      "HOTEL DE FRANCE, KAIROUAN.
+
+     MY DEAREST,--I cannot write very much, for all my moments ought to
+     be given up to nursing Emile. Thank God, I arrived in time. Oh,
+     Maurice, when I saw him I can't tell you how thankful I was that I
+     had not hesitated to make the journey, that I had acted at once on
+     my first impulse to come here. And how I blessed God for having
+     given me an unselfish husband who trusted me completely, and who
+     could understand what true friendship between man and woman means,
+     and what one owes to a friend. You might so easily have
+     misunderstood, and you are so blessedly understanding. Thank you,
+     dearest, for seeing that it was right of me to go, and for thinking
+     of nothing but that. I feel so proud of you, and so proud to be
+     your wife. Well, I caught the train at Tunis mercifully, and got
+     here at evening. He is frightfully ill. I hardly recognized him.
+     But his mind is quite clear, though he suffers terribly. He was
+     poisoned by eating some tinned food, and peritonitis has set in. We
+     can't tell yet whether he will live or die. When he saw me come in
+     he gave me such a look of gratitude, although he was writhing with
+     pain, that I couldn't help crying. It made me feel so ashamed of
+     having had any hesitation in my heart about coming away from our
+     home and our happiness. And it was difficult to give it all up, to
+     come out of paradise. That last night I felt as if I simply
+     couldn't leave you, my darling. But I'm glad and thankful I've done
+     it. I have to do everything for him. The doctor's rather an ass,
+     very French and excitable, but he does his best. But I have to see
+     to everything, and be always there to put on the poultices and the
+     ice, and--poor fellow, he does suffer so, but he's awfully brave
+     and determined to live. He says he will live if it's only to prove
+     that I came in time to save him. And yet, when I look at him, I
+     feel as if--but I won't give up hope. The heat here is terrible,
+     and tries him very much now he is so desperately ill, and the
+     flies--but I don't want to bother you with my troubles. They're not
+     very great--only one. Do you guess what that is? I scarcely dare to
+     think of Sicily. Whenever I do I feel such a horrible ache in my
+     heart. It seems to me as if I had not seen your face or touched
+     your hand for centuries, and sometimes--and that's the worst of
+     all--as if I never should again, as if our time together and our
+     love were a beautiful dream, and God would never allow me to dream
+     it again. That's a little morbid, I know, but I think it's always
+     like that with a great happiness, a happiness that is quite
+     complete. It seems almost a miracle to have had it even for a
+     moment, and one can scarcely believe that one will be allowed to
+     have it again. But, please God, we will. We'll sit on the terrace
+     again together, and see the stars come out, and--The doctor's come
+     and I must stop. I'll write again almost directly. Good-night, my
+     dearest. Buon riposo. Do you remember when you first heard that?
+     Somehow, since then I always connect the words with you. I won't
+     send my love, because it's all in Sicily with you. I'll send it
+     instead to Gaspare. Tell him I feel happy that he is with the
+     padrone, because I know how faithful and devoted he is. Tanti
+     saluti a Lucrezia. Oh, Maurice, pray that I may soon be back. You
+     do want me, don't you?
+                                                     HERMIONE."
+
+Maurice looked up from the letter and met Gaspare's questioning eyes.
+
+"There's something for you," he said.
+
+And he read in Italian Hermione's message. Gaspare beamed with pride and
+pleasure.
+
+"And the sick signore?" he asked. "Is he better?"
+
+Maurice explained how things were.
+
+"The signora is longing to come back to us," he said.
+
+"Of course she is," said Gaspare, calmly.
+
+Then suddenly he jumped up.
+
+"Signorino," he said. "I am going to write a letter to the signora. She
+will like to have a letter from me. She will think she is in Sicily."
+
+"And when you have finished, I will write," said Maurice.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+And Gaspare ran off up the hill towards the cottage, leaving his master
+alone.
+
+Maurice began to read the letter again, slowly. It made him feel almost
+as if he were with Hermione. He seemed to see her as he read, and he
+smiled. How good she was and true, and how enthusiastic! When he had
+finished the second reading of the letter he laid it down, and put his
+hands behind his head again, and looked up at the quivering blue. Then he
+thought of Artois. He remembered his tall figure, his robust limbs, his
+handsome, powerful face. It was strange to think that he was desperately
+ill, perhaps dying. Death--what must that be like? How deep the blue
+looked, as if there were thousands of miles of it, as if it stretched on
+and on forever! Artois, perhaps, was dying, but he felt as if he could
+never die, never even be ill. He stretched his body on the warm ground.
+The blue seemed to deny the fact of death. He tried to imagine Artois in
+bed in the heat of Africa, with the flies buzzing round him. Then he
+looked again at the letter, and reread that part in which Hermione wrote
+of her duties as sick-nurse.
+
+"I have to see to everything, and be always there to put on the poultices
+and the ice."
+
+He read those words again and again, and once more he was conscious of a
+stirring of anger, of revolt, such as he had felt on the night after
+Hermione's departure when he was alone on the terrace. She was his wife,
+his woman. What right had she to be tending another man? His imagination
+began to work quickly now, and he frowned as he looked up at the blue. He
+forgot all the rest of Hermione's letter, all her love of him and her
+longing to be back in Sicily with him, and thought only of her friendship
+for Artois, of her ministrations to Artois. And something within him
+sickened at the thought of the intimacy between patient and nurse, raged
+against it, till he felt revengeful. The wild unreasonableness of his
+feeling did not occur to him now. He hated that his wife should be
+performing these offices for Artois; he hated that she had chosen to go
+to him, that she had considered it to be her duty to go.
+
+Had it been only a sense of duty that had called her to Africa?
+
+When he asked himself this question he could not hesitate what answer to
+give. Even this new jealousy, this jealousy of the Sicilian within him,
+could not trick him into the belief that Hermione had wanted to leave
+him.
+
+Yet his feeling of bitterness, of being wronged, persisted and grew.
+
+When, after a very long time, Gaspare came to show him a letter written
+in large, round hand, he was still hot with the sense of injury. And a
+new question was beginning to torment him. What must Artois think?
+
+"Aren't you going to write, signorino?" asked Gaspare, when Maurice had
+read his letter and approved it.
+
+"I?" he said.
+
+He saw an expression of surprise on Gaspare's face.
+
+"Yes, of course. I'll write now. Help me up. I feel so lazy!"
+
+Gaspare seized his hands and pulled, laughing. Maurice stood up and
+stretched.
+
+"You are more lazy than I, signore," said Gaspare. "Shall I write for
+you, too?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+He spoke abstractedly.
+
+"Don't you know what to say?"
+
+Maurice looked at him swiftly. The boy had divined the truth. In his
+present mood it would be difficult for him to write to Hermione. Still,
+he must do it. He went up to the cottage and sat down at the
+writing-table with Hermione's letter beside him.
+
+He read it again carefully, then began to write. Now he was faintly aware
+of the unreason of his previous mood and quite resolved not to express
+it, but while he was writing of his every-day life in Sicily a vision of
+the sick-room in Africa came before him again. He saw his wife shut in
+with Artois, tending him. It was night, warm and dark. The sick man was
+hot with fever, and Hermione bent over him and laid her cool hand on his
+forehead.
+
+Abruptly Maurice finished his letter and thrust it into an envelope.
+
+"Here, Gaspare!" he said. "Take the donkey and ride down with these to
+the post."
+
+"How quick you have been, signore! I believe my letter to the signora is
+longer than yours."
+
+"Perhaps it is. I don't know. Off with you!"
+
+When Gaspare was gone, Maurice felt restless, almost as he had felt on
+the night when he had been left alone on the terrace. Then he had been
+companioned by a sensation of desertion, and had longed to break out into
+some new life, to take an ally against the secret enemy who was attacking
+him. He had wanted to have his Emile Artois as Hermione had hers. That
+was the truth of the matter. And his want had led him down to the sea.
+And now again he looked towards the sea, and again there was a call from
+it that summoned him.
+
+He had not seen Maddalena since Gaspare came to seek him in the Sirens'
+Isle. He had scarcely wanted to see her. The days had glided by in the
+company of Gaspare, and no moment of them had been heavy or had lagged
+upon its way.
+
+But now he heard again the call from the sea.
+
+Hermione was with her friend. Why should not he have his? But he did not
+go down the path to the ravine, for he thought of Gaspare. He had tricked
+him once, while he slept in the cave, and once Gaspare had tracked him to
+the sirens' house. They had spoken of the matter of Maddalena. He knew
+Gaspare. If he went off now to see Maddalena the boy would think that the
+sending him to the post was a pretext, that he had been deliberately got
+out of the way. Such a crime could never be forgiven. Maurice knew enough
+about the Sicilian character to be fully aware of that. And what had he
+to hide? Nothing. He must wait for Gaspare, and then he could set out for
+the sea.
+
+It seemed to him a long time before he saw Tito, the donkey, tripping
+among the stones, and heard Gaspare's voice hailing him from below. He
+was impatient to be off, and he shouted out:
+
+"Presto, Gaspare, presto!"
+
+He saw the boy's arm swing as he tapped Tito behind with his switch, and
+the donkey's legs moving in a canter.
+
+"What is it, signorino? Has anything happened?"
+
+"No. But--Gaspare, I'm going down to the sea."
+
+"To bathe?"
+
+"I may bathe. I'm not sure. It depends upon how I go."
+
+"You are going to the Casa delle Sirene?"
+
+Maurice nodded.
+
+"I didn't care to go off while you were away."
+
+"Do you wish me to come with you, signorino?"
+
+The boy's great eyes were searching him, yet he did not feel
+uncomfortable, although he wished to stand well with Gaspare. They were
+near akin, although different in rank and education. Between their minds
+there was a freemasonry of the south.
+
+"Do you want to come?" he said.
+
+"It's as you like, signore."
+
+He was silent for a moment; then he added:
+
+"Salvatore might be there now. Do you want him to see you?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+A project began to form in his mind. If he took Gaspare with him they
+might go to the cottage more naturally. Gaspare knew Salvatore and could
+introduce him, could say--well, that he wanted sometimes to go out
+fishing and would take Salvatore's boat. Salvatore would see a prospect
+of money. And he--Maurice--did want to go out fishing. Suddenly he knew
+it. His spirits rose and he clapped Gaspare on the back.
+
+"Of course I do. I want to know Salvatore. Come along. We'll take his
+boat one day and go out fishing."
+
+Gaspare's grave face relaxed in a sly smile.
+
+"Signorino!" he said, shaking his hand to and fro close to his nose.
+"Birbante!"
+
+There was a world of meaning in his voice. Maurice laughed joyously. He
+began to feel like an ingenious school-boy who was going to have a lark.
+There was neither thought of evil nor even a secret stirring of desire
+for it in him.
+
+"A rivederci, Lucrezia!" he cried.
+
+And they set off.
+
+When they were not far from the sea, Gaspare said:
+
+"Signorino, why do you like to come here? What is the good of it?"
+
+They had been walking in silence. Evidently these questions were the
+result of a process of thought which had been going on in the boy's mind.
+
+"The good!" said Maurice. "What is the harm?"
+
+"Well, here in Sicily, when a man goes to see a girl it is because he
+wants to love her."
+
+"In England it is different, Gaspare. In England men and women can be
+friends. Why not?"
+
+"You want just to be a friend of Maddalena?"
+
+"Of course. I like to talk to the people. I want to understand them. Why
+shouldn't I be friends with Maddalena as--as I am with Lucrezia?"
+
+"Oh, Lucrezia is your servant."
+
+"It's all the same."
+
+"But perhaps Maddalena doesn't know. We are Sicilians here, signore."
+
+"What do you mean? That Maddalena might--nonsense, Gaspare!"
+
+There was a sound as of sudden pleasure, even sudden triumph, in his
+voice.
+
+"Are you sure you understand our girls, signore?"
+
+"If Maddalena does like me there's no harm in it. She knows who I am now.
+She knows I--she knows there is the signora."
+
+"Si, signore. There is the signora. She is in Africa, but she is coming
+back."
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"When the sick signore gets well?"
+
+Maurice said nothing. He felt sure Gaspare was wondering again, wondering
+that Hermione was in Africa.
+
+"I cannot understand how it is in England," continued the boy. "Here it
+is all quite different."
+
+Again jealousy stirred in Maurice and a sensation almost of shame. For a
+moment he felt like a Sicilian husband at whom his neighbors point the
+two fingers of scorn, and he said something in his wrath which was
+unworthy.
+
+"You see how it is," he said. "If the signora can go to Africa to see her
+friend, I can come down here to see mine. That is how it is with the
+English."
+
+He did not even try to keep the jealousy out of his voice, his manner.
+Gaspare leaped to it.
+
+"You did not like the signora to go to Africa!"
+
+"Oh, she will come back. It's all right," Maurice answered, hastily.
+"But, while she is there, it would be absurd if I might not speak to any
+one."
+
+Gaspare's burden of doubt, perhaps laid on his young shoulders by his
+loyalty to his padrona, was evidently lightened.
+
+"I see, signore," he said. "You can each have a friend. But have you
+explained to Maddalena?"
+
+"If you think it necessary, I will explain."
+
+"It would be better, because she is Sicilian and she must think you love
+her."
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+The boy looked at him keenly and smiled.
+
+"You would like her to think that?"
+
+Maurice denied it vigorously, but Gaspare only shook his head and said:
+
+"I know, I know. Girls are nicest when they think that, because they are
+pleased and they want us to go on. You think I see nothing, signorino,
+but I saw it all in Maddalena's face. Per Dio!"
+
+And he laughed aloud, with the delight of a boy who has discovered
+something, and feels that he is clever and a man. And Maurice laughed
+too, not without a pride that was joyous. The heart of his youth, the
+wild heart, bounded within him, and the glory of the sun, and the
+passionate blue of the sea seemed suddenly deeper, more intense, more
+sympathetic, as if they felt with him, as if they knew the rapture of
+youth, as if they were created to call it forth, to condone its
+carelessness, to urge it to some almost fierce fulfilment.
+
+"Salvatore is there, signorino."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I saw the smoke from his pipe. Look, there it is again!"
+
+A tiny trail of smoke curled up; and faded in the blue.
+
+"I will go first because of Maddalena. Girls are silly. If I do this at
+her she will understand. If not she may show her father you have been
+here before."
+
+He closed one eye in a large and expressive wink.
+
+"Birbante!"
+
+"It is good to be birbante sometimes."
+
+He went out from the trees and Maurice heard his voice, then a man's,
+then Maddalena's. He waited where he was till he heard Gaspare say:
+
+"The padrone is just behind. Signorino, where are you?"
+
+"Here!" he answered, coming into the open with a careless air.
+
+Before the cottage door in the sunshine a great fishing-net was drying,
+fastened to two wooden stakes. Near it stood Salvatore, dressed in a
+dark-blue jersey, with a soft black hat tilted over his left ear, above
+which was stuck a yellow flower. Maddalena was in the doorway looking
+very demure. It was evident that the wink of Gaspare had been seen and
+comprehended. She stole a glance at Maurice but did not move. Her father
+took off his hat with an almost wildly polite gesture, and said, in a
+loud voice:
+
+"Buona sera, signore."
+
+"Buona sera," replied Maurice, holding out his hand.
+
+Salvatore took it in a large grasp.
+
+"You are the signore who lives up on Monte Amato with the English lady?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I know. She has gone to Africa."
+
+He stared at Maurice while he spoke, with small, twinkling eyes, round
+which was a minute and intricate web of wrinkles, and again Maurice felt
+almost--or was it quite?--ashamed. What were these Sicilians thinking of
+him?
+
+"The signora will be back almost directly," he said. "Is this your
+daughter?"
+
+"Yes, Maddalena. Bring a chair for the signore, Maddalena."
+
+Maddalena obeyed. There was a slight flush on her face and she did not
+look at Maurice. Gaspare stood pulling gently at the stretched-out net,
+and smiling. That he enjoyed the mild deceit of the situation was
+evident. Maurice, too, felt amused and quite at his ease now. His
+sensation of shame had fleeted away, leaving only a conviction that
+Hermione's absence gave him a right to snatch all the pleasure he could
+from the hands of the passing hour.
+
+He drew out his cigar-case and offered it to Salvatore.
+
+"One day I want to come fishing with you if you'll take me," he said.
+
+Salvatore looked eager. A prospect of money floated before him:
+
+"I can show you fine sport, signore," he answered, taking one of the long
+Havanas and examining it with almost voluptuous interest as he turned it
+round and round in his salty, brown fingers. "But you should come out at
+dawn, and it is far from the mountain to the sea."
+
+"Couldn't I sleep here, so as to be ready?"
+
+He stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking at her feet, and twisting
+the front of her short dress, but her lips were twitching with a smile
+which she tried to repress.
+
+"Couldn't I sleep here to-night?" he added, boldly.
+
+Salvatore looked more eager. He loved money almost as an Arab loves it,
+with anxious greed. Doubtless Arab blood ran in his veins. It was easy to
+see from whom Maddalena had inherited her Eastern appearance. She
+reproduced, on a diminished scale, her father's outline of face, but that
+which was gentle, mysterious, and alluring in her, in him was informed
+with a rugged wildness. There was something bird-like and predatory in
+his boldly curving nose with its narrow nostrils, in his hard-lipped
+mouth, full of splendid teeth, in his sharp and pushing chin. His whole
+body, wide-shouldered and deep-chested, as befitted a man of the sea,
+looked savage and fierce, but full of an intensity of manhood that was
+striking, and his gestures and movements, the glance of his penetrating
+eyes, the turn of his well-poised head, revealed a primitive and
+passionate nature, a nature with something of the dagger in it, steely,
+sharp, and deadly.
+
+"But, signore, our home is very poor. Look, signore!"
+
+A turkey strutted out through the doorway, elongating its neck and
+looking nervously intent.
+
+"Ps--sh--sh--sh!"
+
+He shooed it away, furiously waving his arms.
+
+"And what could you eat? There is only bread and wine."
+
+"And the yellow cheese!" said Maurice.
+
+"The--?" Salvatore looked sharply interrogative.
+
+"I mean, there is always cheese, isn't there, in Sicily, cheese and
+macaroni? But if there isn't, it's all right. Anything will do for me,
+and I'll buy all the fish we take from you, and Maddalena here shall cook
+it for us when we come back from the sea. Will you, Maddalena?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The answer came in a very small voice.
+
+"The signore is too good."
+
+Salvatore was looking openly voracious now.
+
+"I can sleep on the floor."
+
+"No, signore. We have beds, we have two fine beds. Come in and see."
+
+With not a little pride he led Maurice into the cottage, and showed him
+the bed on which he had already slept.
+
+"That will be for the signore, Gaspare."
+
+"Si--č molto bello."
+
+"Maddalena and I--we will sleep in the outer room."
+
+"And I, Salvatore?" demanded the boy.
+
+"You! Do you stay too?"
+
+"Of course. Don't I stay, signore?"
+
+"Yes, if Lucrezia won't be frightened."
+
+"It does not matter if she is. When we do not come back she will keep
+Guglielmo, the contadino."
+
+"Of course you must stay. You can sleep with me. And to-night we'll play
+cards and sing and dance. Have you got any cards, Salvatore?"
+
+"Si, signore. They are dirty, but--"
+
+"That's all right. And we'll sit outside and tell stories, stories of
+brigands and the sea. Salvatore, when you know me, you'll know I'm a true
+Sicilian."
+
+He grasped Salvatore's hand, but he looked at Maddalena.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Night had come to the Sirens' Isle--a night that was warm, gentle, and
+caressing. In the cottage two candles were lit, and the wick was burning
+in the glass before the Madonna. Outside the cottage door, on the flat
+bit of ground that faced the wide sea, Salvatore and his daughter,
+Maurice and Gaspare, were seated round the table finishing their simple
+meal, for which Salvatore had many times apologized. Their merry voices,
+their hearty laughter rang out in the darkness, and below the sea made
+answer, murmuring against the rocks.
+
+At the same moment in an Arab house Hermione bent over a sick man,
+praying against death, whose footsteps she seemed already to hear coming
+into the room and approaching the bed on which he tossed, white with
+agony. And when he was quiet for a little and ceased from moving, she sat
+with her hand on his and thought of Sicily, and pictured her husband
+alone under the stars upon the terrace before the priest's house, and
+imagined him thinking of her. The dry leaves of a palm-tree under the
+window of the room creaked in the light wind that blew over the flats,
+and she strove to hear the delicate rustling of the leaves of
+olive-trees.
+
+Salvatore had little food to offer his guests, only bread, cheese, and
+small, black olives; but there was plenty of good red wine, and when the
+time of brindisi was come Salvatore and Gaspare called for health after
+health, and rivalled each other in wild poetic efforts, improvising
+extravagant compliments to Maurice, to the absent signora, to Maddalena,
+and even to themselves. And with each toast the wine went down till
+Maurice called a halt.
+
+"I am a real Sicilian," he said. "But if I drink any more I shall be
+under the table. Get out the cards, Salvatore. Sette e mezzo, and I'll
+put down the stakes. No one to go above twenty-five centesimi, with fifty
+for the doubling. Gaspare's sure to win. He always does. And I've just
+one cigar apiece. There's no wind. Bring out the candles and let's play
+out here."
+
+Gaspare ran for the candles while Salvatore got the cards, well-thumbed
+and dirty. Maddalena's long eyes were dancing. Such a festa as this was
+rare in her life, for, dwelling far from the village, she seldom went to
+any dance or festivity. Her blood was warm with the wine and with joy,
+and the youth in her seemed to flow like the sea in a flood-tide.
+Scarcely ever before had she seen her harsh father so riotously gay, so
+easy with a stranger, and she knew in her heart that this was her
+festival. Maurice's merry and ardent eyes told her that, and Gaspare's
+smiling glances of boyish understanding. She felt excited, almost
+light-headed, childishly proud of herself. If only some of the girls of
+Marechiaro could see, could know!
+
+When the cards were thrown upon the table, and Maurice had dealt out a
+lira to each one of the players as stakes, and cried, "Maddalena and I'll
+share against you, Salvatore, and Gaspare!" she felt that she had nothing
+more to wish for, that she was perfectly happy. But she was happier still
+when, after a series of games, Maurice pushed back his chair and said:
+
+"I've had enough. Salvatore, you are like Gaspare, you have the devil's
+luck. Together you can't be beaten. But now you play against each other
+and let's see who wins. I'll put down twenty-five lire. Play till one of
+you's won every soldo of it. Play all night if you like."
+
+And he counted out the little paper notes on the table, giving two to
+Salvatore and two to Gaspare, and putting one under a candlestick.
+
+"I'll keep the score," he added, pulling out a pencil and a sheet of
+paper. "No play higher than fifty, with a lira when one of you makes
+'sette e mezzo' with under four cards."
+
+"Per Dio!" cried Gaspare, flushed with excitement. "Avanti, Salvatore!"
+
+"Avanti, Avanti!" cried Salvatore, in answer, pulling his chair close up
+to the table, and leaning forward, looking like a handsome bird of prey
+in the faint candlelight.
+
+They cut for deal and began to play, while Maddalena and Maurice watched.
+
+When Sicilians gamble they forget everything but the game and the money
+which it brings to them or takes from them. Salvatore and Gaspare were at
+once passionately intent on their cards, and as the night drew on and
+fortune favored first one and then the other, they lost all thought of
+everything except the twenty-five lire which were at stake. When
+Maddalena slipped away into the darkness they did not notice her
+departure, and when Maurice laid down the paper on which he had tried to
+keep the score, and followed her, they were indifferent. They needed no
+score-keeper, for they had Sicilian memories for money matters. Over the
+table they leaned, the two candles, now burning low, illuminating their
+intense faces, their violent eyes, their brown hands that dealt and
+gathered up the cards, and held them warily, alert for the cheating that
+in Sicily, when possible, is ever part of the game.
+
+"Carta da cinquanta!"
+
+They had forgotten Maurice's limit for the stakes.
+
+"Carta da cento!"
+
+Their voices died away from Maurice's ears as he stole through the
+darkness seeking Maddalena.
+
+Where had she gone, and why? The last question he could surely answer,
+for as she stole past him silently, her long, mysterious eyes, that
+seemed to hold in their depths some enigma of the East, had rested on his
+with a glance that was an invitation. They had not boldly summoned him.
+They had lured him, as an echo might, pathetic in its thrilling frailty.
+And now, as he walked softly over the dry grass, he thought of those eyes
+as he had first seen them in the pale light that had preceded the dawn.
+Then they had been full of curiosity, like a young animal's. Now surely
+they were changed. Once they had asked a question. They delivered a
+summons to-night. What was in them to-night? The mystery of young
+maidenhood, southern, sunlit, on the threshold of experience, waking to
+curious knowledge, to a definite consciousness of the meaning of its
+dreams, of the truth of its desires.
+
+When he was out of hearing of the card-players Maurice stood still. He
+felt the breath of the sea on his face. He heard the murmur of the sea
+everywhere around him, a murmur that in its level monotony excited him,
+thrilled him, as the level monotony of desert music excites the African
+in the still places of the sand. His pulses were beating, and there was
+an almost savage light in his eyes. Something in the atmosphere of the
+sea-bound retreat made him feel emancipated, as if he had stepped out of
+the prison of civilized life into a larger, more thoughtless existence,
+an existence for which his inner nature fitted him, for which he had
+surely been meant all these years that he had lived, unconscious of what
+he really was and of what he really needed.
+
+"How happy I could have been as a Sicilian fisherman!" he thought. "How
+happy I could be now!"
+
+"St! St!"
+
+He looked round quickly.
+
+"St! St!"
+
+It must be Maddalena, but where was she? He moved forward till he was at
+the edge of the land where the tiny path wound steeply downward to the
+sea. There she was standing with her face turned in his direction, and
+her lips opened to repeat the little summoning sound.
+
+"How did you know I was there?" he said, whispering, as he joined her.
+"Did you hear me come?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"Then--"
+
+"Signorino, I felt that you were there."
+
+He smiled. It pleased him to think that he threw out something, some
+invisible thread, perhaps, that reached her and told her of his nearness.
+Such communication made sympathy. He did not say it to himself, but his
+sensation to-night was that everything was in sympathy with him, the
+night with its stars, the sea with its airs and voices, Maddalena with
+her long eyes and her brown hands, and her knowledge of his presence when
+she did not see or hear him.
+
+"Let us go down to the sea," he said.
+
+He longed to be nearer to that low and level sound that moved and excited
+him in the night.
+
+"Father's boat is there," she said. "It is so calm to-night that he did
+not bring it round into the bay."
+
+"If we go out in it for a minute, will he mind?"
+
+A sly look came into her face.
+
+"He will not know," she said. "With all that money Gaspare and he will
+play till dawn. Per Dio, signore, you are birbante!"
+
+She gave a little low laugh.
+
+"So you think I--"
+
+He stopped. What need was there to go on? She had read him and was openly
+rejoicing in what she thought his slyness.
+
+"And my father," she added, "is a fox of the sea, signore. Ask Gaspare if
+there is another who is like him. You will see! When they stop playing at
+dawn the twenty-five lire will be in his pocket!"
+
+She spoke with pride.
+
+"But Gaspare is so lucky," said Maurice.
+
+"Gaspare is only a boy. How can he cheat better than my father?"
+
+"They cheat, then!"
+
+"Of course, when they can. Why not, madonna!"
+
+Maurice burst out laughing.
+
+"And you call me birbante!" he said.
+
+"To know what my father loves best! Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+She shook her out-stretched forefinger to and fro near her nose, smiling,
+with her head a little on one side like a crafty child.
+
+"But why, Maddalena--why should I wish your father to play cards till the
+dawn. Tell me that! Why should not I wish him, all of us, to go to bed?"
+
+"You are not sleepy, signorino!"
+
+"I shall be in the morning when it's time to fish."
+
+"Then perhaps you will not fish."
+
+"But I must. That is why I have stayed here to-night, to be ready to go
+to sea in the morning."
+
+She said nothing, only smiled again. He felt a longing to shake her in
+joke. She was such a child now. And yet a few minutes ago her dark eyes
+had lured him, and he had felt almost as if in seeking her he sought a
+mystery.
+
+"Don't you believe me?" he asked.
+
+But she only answered, with her little gesture of smiling rebuke:
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+He did not protest, for now they were down by the sea, and saw the
+fishing-boats swaying gently on the water.
+
+"Get in Maddalena. I will row."
+
+He untied the rope, while she stepped lightly in, then he pushed the boat
+off, jumping in himself from the rocks.
+
+"You are like a fisherman, signore," said Maddalena.
+
+He smiled and drew the great bladed oars slowly through the calm water,
+leaning towards her with each stroke and looking into her eyes.
+
+"I wish I were really a fisherman," he said, "like your father!"
+
+"Why, signore?" she asked, in astonishment.
+
+"Because it's a free life, because it's a life I should love."
+
+She still looked at him with surprise.
+
+"But a fisherman has few soldi, signorino."
+
+"Maddalena," he said, letting the oars drift in the water, "there's only
+one good thing in the world, and that is to be free in a life that is
+natural to one."
+
+He drew up his feet onto the wooden bench and clasped his hands round his
+knees, and sat thus, looking at her while she faced him in the stern of
+the boat. He had not turned the boat round. So Maddalena had her face
+towards the land, while his was set towards the open sea.
+
+"It isn't having many soldi that makes happiness," he went on. "Gaspare
+thinks it is, and Lucrezia, and I dare say your father would--"
+
+"Oh yes, signore! In Sicily we all think so!"
+
+"And so they do in England. But it isn't true."
+
+"But if you have many soldi you can do anything."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"No you can't. I have plenty of soldi, but I can't always live here, I
+can't always live as I do now. Some day I shall have to go away from
+Sicily--I shall have to go back and live in London."
+
+As he said the last words he seemed to see London rise up before him in
+the night, with shadowy domes and towers and chimneys; he seemed to hear
+through the exquisite silence of night upon the sea the mutter of its
+many voices.
+
+"It's beastly there! It's beastly!"
+
+And he set his teeth almost viciously.
+
+"Why must you go, then, signorino?"
+
+"Why? Oh, I have work to do."
+
+"But if you are rich why must you work?"
+
+"Well--I--I can't explain in Italian. But my father expects me to."
+
+"To get more rich?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose."
+
+"But if you are rich why cannot you live as you please?"
+
+"I don't know, Maddalena. But the rich scarcely ever live really as they
+please, I think. Their soldi won't let them, perhaps."
+
+"I don't understand, signore."
+
+"Well, a man must do something, must get on, and if I lived always here I
+should do nothing but enjoy myself."
+
+He was silent for a minute. Then he said:
+
+"And that's all I want to do, just to enjoy myself here in the sun."
+
+"Are you happy here, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, tremendously happy."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why--because it's Sicily here! Aren't you happy?"
+
+"I don't know, signorino."
+
+She said it with simplicity and looked at him almost as if she were
+inquiring of him whether she were happy or not. That look tempted him.
+
+"Don't you know whether you are happy to-night?" he asked, putting an
+emphasis on the last word, and looking at her more steadily, almost
+cruelly.
+
+"Oh, to-night--it is a festa."
+
+"A festa? Why?"
+
+"Why? Because it is different from other nights. On other nights I am
+alone with my father."
+
+"And to-night you are alone with me. Does that make it a festa?"
+
+She looked down.
+
+"I don't know, signorino."
+
+The childish merriment and slyness had gone out of her now, and there was
+a softness almost of sentimentality in her attitude, as she drooped her
+head and moved one hand to and fro on the gunwale of the boat, touching
+the wood, now here, now there, as if she were picking up something and
+dropping it gently into the sea.
+
+Suddenly Maurice wondered about Maddalena. He wondered whether she had
+ever had a Sicilian lover, whether she had one now.
+
+"You are not 'promised,' are you, Maddalena?" he asked, leaning a little
+nearer to her. He saw the red come into her brown skin. She shook her
+head without looking up or speaking.
+
+"I wonder why," he said. "I think--I think there must be men who want
+you."
+
+She slightly raised her head.
+
+"Oh yes, there are, signore. But--but I must wait till my father chooses
+one."
+
+"Your father will choose the man who is to be your husband?"
+
+"Of course, signore."
+
+"But perhaps you won't like him."
+
+"Oh, I shall have to like him, signore."
+
+She did not speak with any bitterness or sarcasm, but with perfect
+simplicity. A feeling of pity that was certainly not Sicilian but that
+came from the English blood in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena
+looked so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so ready to be
+cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with the ardor that is the tender
+cruelty of passion, that her childlike submission to the Sicilian code
+woke in him an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some
+hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his
+fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make her toil
+till her beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled
+withered, sun-dried hag, while she was yet young in years.
+
+"I wish," he said--"I wish, when you have to marry, I could choose your
+husband, Maddalena."
+
+She lifted her head quite up and regarded him with wonder.
+
+"You, signorino! Why?"
+
+"Because I would choose a man who would be very good to you, who would
+love you and work for you and always think of you, and never look at
+another woman. That is how your husband should be."
+
+She looked more wondering.
+
+"Are you like that, then, signore?" she asked. "With the signora?"
+
+Maurice unclasped his hands from his knees, and dropped his feet down
+from the bench.
+
+"I!" he said, in a voice that had changed. "Oh--yes--I don't know."
+
+He took the oars again and began to row farther out to sea.
+
+"I was talking about you," he said, almost roughly.
+
+"I have never seen your signora," said Maddalena. "What is she like?"
+Maurice saw Hermione before him in the night, tall, flat, with her long
+arms, her rugged, intelligent face, her enthusiastic brown eyes.
+
+"Is she pretty?" continued Maddalena. "Is she as young as I am?"
+
+"She is good, Maddalena," Maurice answered.
+
+"Is she santa?"
+
+"I don't mean that. But she is good to every one."
+
+"But is she pretty, too?" she persisted. "And young?"
+
+"She is not at all old. Some day you shall see--"
+
+He checked himself. He had been going to say, "Some day you shall see
+her."
+
+"And she is very clever," he said, after a moment.
+
+"Clever?" said Maddalena, evidently not understanding what he meant.
+
+"She can understand many things and she has read many books."
+
+"But what is the good of that? Why should a girl read many books?"
+
+"She is not a girl."
+
+"Not a girl!"
+
+She looked at him with amazed eyes and her voice was full of amazement.
+
+"How old are you, signorino?" she asked.
+
+"How old do you think?"
+
+She considered him carefully for a long time.
+
+"Old enough to make the visit," she said, at length.
+
+"The visit?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What? Oh, do you mean to be a soldier?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"That would be twenty, wouldn't it?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I am older than that. I am twenty-four."
+
+"Truly?"
+
+"Truly."
+
+"And is the signora twenty-four, too?"
+
+"Maddalena!" Maurice exclaimed, with a sudden impatience that was almost
+fierce. "Why do you keep on talking about the signora to-night? This is
+your festa. The signora is in Africa, a long way off--there--across the
+sea." He stretched out his arm, and pointed towards the wide waters above
+which the stars were watching. "When she comes back you can see her, if
+you wish--but now--"
+
+"When is she coming back?" asked the girl.
+
+There was an odd pertinacity in her character, almost an obstinacy,
+despite her young softness and gentleness.
+
+"I don't know," Maurice said, with difficulty controlling his gathering
+impatience.
+
+"Why did she go away?"
+
+"To nurse some one who is ill."
+
+"She went all alone across the sea?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Maddalena turned and looked into the dimness of the sea with a sort of
+awe.
+
+"I should be afraid," she said, after a pause.
+
+And she shivered slightly.
+
+Maurice had let go the oars again. He felt a longing to put his arm round
+her when he saw her shiver. The night created many longings in him, a
+confusion of longings, of which he was just becoming aware.
+
+"You are a child," he said, "and have never been away from your 'paese.'"
+
+"Yes, I have."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I have been to the fair of San Felice."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Oh--San Felice! And did you go in the train?"
+
+"Oh no, signore. I went on a donkey. It was last year, in June. It was
+beautiful. There were women there in blue silk dresses with ear-rings as
+long as that"--she measured their length in the air with her brown
+fingers--"and there was a boy from Napoli, a real Napolitano, who sang
+and danced as we do not dance here. I was very happy that day. And I was
+given an image of Sant' Abbondio."
+
+She looked at him with a sort of dignity, as if expecting him to be
+impressed.
+
+"Carissima!" he whispered, almost under his breath.
+
+Her little air of pride, as of a travelled person, enchanted him, even
+touched him, he scarcely knew why, as he had never been enchanted or
+touched by any London beauty.
+
+"I wish I had been at the fair with you. I would have given you--"
+
+"What, signorino?" she interrupted, eagerly.
+
+"A blue silk dress and a pair of ear-rings longer--much longer--than
+those women wore."
+
+"Really, signorino? Really?"
+
+"Really and truly! Do you doubt me?"
+
+"No."
+
+She sighed.
+
+"How I wish you had been there! But this year--"
+
+She stopped, hesitating.
+
+"Yes--this year?"
+
+"In June there will be the fair again."
+
+He moved from his seat, softly and swiftly, turned the boat's prow
+towards the open sea, then went and sat down by her in the stern.
+
+"We will go there," he said, "you and I and Gaspare--"
+
+"And my father."
+
+"All of us together."
+
+"And if the signora is back?"
+
+Maurice was conscious of a desire that startled him like a sudden stab
+from something small and sharp--the desire that on that day Hermione
+should not be with him in Sicily.
+
+"I dare say the signora will not be back."
+
+"But if she is, will she come, too?"
+
+"Do you think you would like it better if she came?"
+
+He was so close to her now that his shoulder touched hers. Their faces
+were set seaward and were kissed by the breath of the sea. Their eyes saw
+the same stars and were kissed by the light of the stars. And the subtle
+murmur of the tide spoke to them both as if they were one.
+
+"Do you?" he repeated. "Do you think so?"
+
+"Chi lo sa?" she responded.
+
+He thought, when she said that, that her voice sounded less simple than
+before.
+
+"You do know!" he said.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You do!" he repeated.
+
+He stretched out his hand and took her hand. He had to take it.
+
+"Why don't you tell me?"
+
+She had turned her head away from him, and now, speaking as if to the
+sea, she said:
+
+"Perhaps if she was there you could not give me the blue silk dress and
+the--and the ear-rings. Perhaps she would not like it."
+
+For a moment he thought he was disappointed by her answer. Then he knew
+that he loved it, for its utter naturalness, its laughable naďveté. It
+seemed, too, to set him right in his own eyes, to sweep away a creeping
+feeling that had been beginning to trouble him. He was playing with a
+child. That was all. There was no harm in it. And when he had kissed her
+in the dawn he had been kissing a child, playfully, kindly, as a big
+brother might. And if he kissed her now it would mean nothing to her. And
+if it did mean something--just a little more--to him, that did not
+matter.
+
+"Bambina mia!" he said.
+
+"I am not a bambina," she said, turning towards him again.
+
+"Yes you are."
+
+"Then you are a bambino."
+
+"Why not? I feel like a boy to-night, like a naughty little boy."
+
+"Naughty, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, because I want to do something that I ought not to do."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"This, Maddalena."
+
+And he kissed her. It was the first time he had kissed her in darkness,
+for on his second visit to the sirens' house he had only taken her hand
+and held it, and that was nothing. The kiss in the dawn had been light,
+gay, a sort of laughing good-bye to a kind hostess who was of a class
+that, he supposed, thought little of kisses. But this kiss in the night,
+on the sea, was different. Only when he had given it did he understand
+how different it was, how much more it meant to him. For Maddalena
+returned it gently with her warm young lips, and her response stirred
+something at his heart that was surely the very essence of the life
+within him.
+
+He held her hands.
+
+"Maddalena!" he said, and there was in his voice a startled sound.
+"Maddalena!"
+
+Again Hermione had risen up before him in the night, almost as one who
+walked upon the sea. He was conscious of wrong-doing. The innocence of
+his relation with Maddalena seemed suddenly to be tarnished, and the
+happiness of the starry night to be clouded. He felt like one who, in
+summer, becomes aware of a heaviness creeping into the atmosphere, the
+message of a coming tempest that will presently transform the face of
+nature. Surely there was a mist before the faces of the stars.
+
+She said nothing, only looked at him as if she wanted to know many things
+which only he could tell her, which he had begun to tell her. That was
+her fascination for his leaping youth, his wild heart of youth--this
+ignorance and this desire to know. He had sat in spirit at the feet of
+Hermione and loved her with a sort of boyish humbleness. Now one sat at
+his feet. And the attitude woke up in him a desire that was fierce in its
+intensity--the desire to teach Maddalena the great realities of love.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+Faintly there came to them a cry across the sea.
+
+"Gaspare!" Maurice said.
+
+He turned his head. In the darkness, high up, he saw a light, descending,
+ascending, then describing a wild circle.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+"Row back, signorino! They have done playing, and my father will be
+angry."
+
+He moved, took the oars, and sent the boat towards the island. The
+physical exertion calmed him, restored him to himself.
+
+"After all," he thought, "there is no harm in it."
+
+And he laughed.
+
+"Which has won, Maddalena?" he said, looking back at her over his
+shoulder, for he was standing up and rowing with his face towards the
+land.
+
+"I hope it is my father, signorino. If he has got the money he will not
+be angry; but if Gaspare has it--"
+
+"Your father is a fox of the sea, and can cheat better than a boy. Don't
+be frightened."
+
+When they reached the land, Salvatore and Gaspare met them. Gaspare's
+face was glum, but Salvatore's small eyes were sparkling.
+
+"I have won it all--all!" he said. "Ecco!"
+
+And he held out his hand with the notes.
+
+"Salvatore is birbante!" said Gaspare, sullenly. "He did not win it
+fairly. I saw him--"
+
+"Never mind, Gaspare!" said Maurice.
+
+He put his hand on the boy's shoulder.
+
+"To-morrow I'll give you the same," he whispered.
+
+"And now," he added, aloud, "let's go to bed. I've been rowing Maddalena
+round the island and I'm tired. I shall sleep like a top."
+
+As they went up the steep path he took Salvatore familiarly by the arm.
+
+"You are too clever, Salvatore," he said. "You play too well for
+Gaspare."
+
+Salvatore chuckled and handled the five-lire notes voluptuously.
+
+"Cci basu li manu!" he said. "Cci basu li manu!"
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Maurice lay on the big bed in the inner room of the siren's house, under
+the tiny light that burned before Maria Addolorata. The door of the house
+was shut, and he heard no more the murmur of the sea. Gaspare was curled
+up on the floor, on a bed made of some old sacking, with his head buried
+in his jacket, which he had taken off to use as a pillow. In the far room
+Maddalena and her father were asleep. Maurice could hear their breathing,
+Maddalena's light and faint, Salvatore's heavy and whistling, and
+degenerating now and then into a sort of stifled snore. But sleep did not
+come to Maurice. His eyes were open, and his clasped hands supported his
+head. He was thinking, thinking almost angrily.
+
+He loved joy as few Englishmen love it, but as many southerners love it.
+His nature needed joy, was made to be joyous. And such natures resent the
+intrusion into their existence of any complications which make for
+tragedy as northern natures seldom resent anything. To-night Maurice had
+a grievance against fate, and he was considering it wrathfully and not
+without confusion.
+
+Since he had kissed Maddalena in the night he was disturbed, almost
+unhappy. And yet he was surely face to face with something that was more
+than happiness. The dancing faun was dimly aware that in his nature there
+was not only the capacity for gayety, for the performance of the
+tarantella, but also a capacity for violence which he had never been
+conscious of when he was in England. It had surely been developed within
+him by the sun, by the coming of the heat in this delicious land. It was
+like an intoxication of the blood, something that went to head as well as
+heart. He wondered what it meant, what it might lead him to. Perhaps he
+had been faintly aware of its beginnings on that day when jealousy dawned
+within him as he thought of his wife, his woman, nursing her friend in
+Africa. Now it was gathering strength like a stream flooded by rains, but
+it was taking a different direction in its course.
+
+He turned upon the pillow so that he could see the light burning before
+the Madonna. The face of the Madonna was faintly visible--a long, meek
+face with downcast eyes. Maddalena crossed herself often when she looked
+at that face. Maurice put up his hand to make the sign, then dropped it
+with a heavy sigh. He was not a Catholic. His religion--what was it?
+Sunworship perhaps, the worship of the body, the worship of whim. He did
+not know or care much. He felt so full of life and energy that the far,
+far future after death scarcely interested him. The present was his
+concern, the present after that kiss in the night. He had loved Hermione.
+Surely he loved her now. He did love her now. And yet when he had kissed
+her he had never been shaken by the headstrong sensation that had hold of
+him to-night, the desire to run wild in love. He looked up to Hermione.
+The feeling of reverence had been a governing factor in his love for her.
+Now it seemed to him that a feeling of reverence was a barrier in the
+path of love, something to create awe, admiration, respect, but scarcely
+the passion that irresistibly draws man to woman. And yet he did love
+Hermione. He was confused, horribly confused.
+
+For he knew that his longing was towards Maddalena.
+
+He would like to rise up in the dawn, to take her in his arms, to carry
+her off in a boat upon the sea, or to set her on a mule and lead her up
+far away into the recesses of the mountains. By rocky paths he would lead
+her, beyond the olives and the vines, beyond the last cottage of the
+contadini, up to some eyrie from which they could look down upon the
+sunlit world. He wanted to be in wildness with her, inexorably divided
+from all the trammels of civilization. A desire of savagery had hold upon
+him to-night. He did not go into detail. He did not think of how they
+would pass their days. Everything presented itself to him broadly,
+tumultuously, with a surging, onward movement of almost desperate
+advance.
+
+He wanted to teach those dark, inquiring young eyes all that they asked
+to know, to set in them the light of knowledge, to make them a woman's
+eyes.
+
+And that he could never do.
+
+His whole body was throbbing with heat, and tingling with a desire of
+movement, of activity. The knowledge that all this beating energy was
+doomed to uselessness, was born to do nothing, tortured him.
+
+He tried to think steadily of Hermione, but he found the effort a
+difficult one. She was remote from his body, and that physical remoteness
+seemed to set her far from his spirit, too. In him, though he did not
+know it, was awake to-night the fickleness of the south, of the southern
+spirit that forgets so quickly what is no longer near to the southern
+body. The sun makes bodily men, makes very strong the chariot of the
+flesh. Sight and touch are needful, the actions of the body, to keep the
+truly southern spirit true. Maurice could neither touch nor see Hermione.
+In her unselfishness she had committed the error of dividing herself from
+him. The natural consequences of that self-sacrifice were springing up
+now like the little yellow flowers in the grasses of the lemon groves.
+With all her keen intelligence she made the mistake of the enthusiast,
+that of reading into those whom she loved her own shining qualities, of
+seeing her own sincerities, her own faithfulness, her own strength, her
+own utter loyalty looking out on her from them. She would probably have
+denied that this was so, but so it was. At this very moment in Africa,
+while she watched at the bedside of Artois, she was thinking of her
+husband's love for her, loyalty to her, and silently blessing him for it;
+she was thanking God that she had drawn such a prize in the lottery of
+life. And had she been already separated from Maurice for six months she
+would never have dreamed of doubting his perfect loyalty now that he had
+once loved her and taken her to be his. The "all in all or not at all"
+nature had been given to Hermione. She must live, rejoice, suffer, die,
+according to that nature. She knew much, but she did not know how to hold
+herself back, how to be cautious where she loved, how to dissect the
+thing she delighted in. She would never know that, so she would never
+really know her husband, as Artois might learn to know him, even had
+already known him. She would never fully understand the tremendous
+barriers set up between people by the different strains of blood in them,
+the stern dividing lines that are drawn between the different races of
+the earth. Her nature told her that love can conquer all things. She was
+too enthusiastic to be always far-seeing.
+
+So now, while Maurice lay beneath the tiny light in the house of the
+sirens and was shaken by the wildness of desire, and thought of a
+mountain pilgrimage far up towards the sun with Maddalena in his arms,
+she sat by Artois's bed and smiled to herself as she pictured the house
+of the priest, watched over by the stars of Sicily, and by her many
+prayers. Maurice was there, she knew, waiting for her return, longing for
+it as she longed for it. Artois turned on his pillow wearily, saw her,
+and smiled.
+
+"You oughtn't to be here," he whispered. "But I am glad you are here."
+
+"And I am glad, I am thankful I am here!" she said, truly.
+
+"If there is a God," he said, "He will bless you for this!"
+
+"Hush! You must try to sleep."
+
+She laid her hand in his.
+
+"God has blessed me," she thought, "for all my poor little attempts at
+goodness, how far, far more than I deserve!"
+
+And the gratitude within her was almost like an ache, like a beautiful
+pain of the heart.
+
+In the morning Maurice put to sea with Gaspare and Salvatore. He knew the
+silvery calm of dawn on a day of sirocco. Everything was very still, in a
+warm and heavy stillness of silver that made the sweat run down at the
+least movement or effort. Masses of white, feathery vapors floated low in
+the sky above the sea, concealing the flanks of the mountains, but
+leaving their summits clear. And these vapors, hanging like veils with
+tattered edges, created a strange privacy upon the sea, an atmosphere of
+eternal mysteries. As the boat went out from the shore, urged by the
+powerful arms of Salvatore, its occupants were silent. The merriment and
+the ardor of the night, the passion of cards and of desire, were gone, as
+if they had been sucked up into the smoky wonder of the clouds, or sucked
+down into the silver wonder of the sea.
+
+Gaspare looked drowsy and less happy than usual. He had not yet recovered
+from his indignation at the success of Salvatore's cheating, and Maurice,
+who had not slept, felt the bounding life, the bounding fire of his youth
+held in check as by the action of a spell. The carelessness of
+excitement, of passion, was replaced by another carelessness--the
+carelessness of dream. It seemed to him now as if nothing mattered or
+ever could matter. On the calm silver of a hushed and breathless sea,
+beneath dense white vapors that hid the sky, he was going out slowly,
+almost noiselessly, to a fate of which he knew nothing, to a quiet
+emptiness, to a region which held no voices to call him this way or that,
+no hands to hold him, no eyes to regard him. His face was damp with
+sweat. He leaned over the gunwale and trailed his hand in the sea. It
+seemed to him unnaturally warm. He glanced up at the clouds. Heaven was
+blotted out. Was there a heaven? Last night he had thought there must
+be--but that was long ago. Was he sad? He scarcely knew. He was dull, as
+if the blood in him had run almost dry. He was like a sapless tree.
+Hermione and Maddalena--what were they? Shadows rather than women. He
+looked steadily at the sea. Was it the same element upon which he had
+been only a few hours ago under the stars with Maddalena? He could
+scarcely believe that it was the same. Sirocco had him fast, sirocco that
+leaves many Sicilians unchanged, unaffected, but that binds the stranger
+with cords of cotton wool which keep him like a net of steel.
+
+Gaspare lay down in the bottom of the boat, buried his face in his arms,
+and gave himself again to sleep. Salvatore looked at him, and then at
+Maurice, and smiled with a fine irony.
+
+"He thought he would win, signore."
+
+"Cosa?" said Maurice, startled by the sound of a voice.
+
+"He thought that he could play better than I, signore."
+
+Salvatore closed one eye, and stuck his tongue a little out of the left
+side of his mouth, then drew it in with a clicking noise.
+
+"No one gets the better of me," he said. "They may try. Many have tried,
+but in the end--"
+
+He shook his head, took his right hand from the oar and flapped it up and
+down, then brought it downward with force, as if beating some one, or
+something, to his feet.
+
+"I see," Maurice said, dully. "I see."
+
+He thought to himself that he had been cleverer than Salvatore the
+preceding night, but he felt no sense of triumph. He had divined the
+fisherman's passion and turned it to his purpose. But what of that? Let
+the man rejoice, if he could, in this dream. Let all men do what they
+wished to do so long as he could be undisturbed. He looked again at the
+sea, dropped his hand into it once more.
+
+"Shall I let down a line, signore?"
+
+Salvatore's keen eyes were upon him. He shook his head.
+
+"Not yet. I--" He hesitated.
+
+The still silver of the sea drew him. He touched his forehead with his
+hand and felt the dampness on it.
+
+"I'm going in," he said.
+
+"Can you swim, signore?"
+
+"Yes, like a fish. Don't follow me with the boat. Just let me swim out
+and come back. If I want you I'll call. But don't follow me."
+
+Salvatore nodded appreciatively. He liked a good swimmer, a real man of
+the sea.
+
+"And don't wake Gaspare, or he'll be after me."
+
+"Va bene!"
+
+Maurice stripped off his clothes, all the time looking at the sea. Then
+he sat down on the gunwale of the boat with his feet in the water.
+Salvatore had stopped rowing. Gaspare still slept.
+
+It was curious to be going to give one's self to this silent silver thing
+that waited so calmly for the gift. He felt a sort of dull voluptuousness
+stealing over him as he stared at the water. He wanted to get away from
+his companions, from the boat, to be quite alone with sirocco.
+
+"Addio Salvatore!" he said, in a low voice.
+
+"A rivederci, signore."
+
+He let himself down slowly into the water, feet foremost, and swam
+slowly away into the dream that lay before him.
+
+Even now that he was in it the water felt strangely warm. He had not let
+his head go under, and the sweat was still on his face. The boat lay
+behind him. He did not think of it. He had forgotten it. He felt himself
+to be alone, utterly alone with the sea.
+
+He had always loved the sea, but in a boyish, wholly natural way, as a
+delightful element, health-giving, pleasure-giving, associating it with
+holiday times, with bathing, fishing, boating, with sails on moonlight
+nights, with yacht-races about the Isle of Wight in the company of gay
+comrades. This sea of Sicily seemed different to him to-day from other
+seas, more mysterious and more fascinating, a sea of sirens about a
+Sirens' Isle. Mechanically he swam through it, scarcely moving his arms,
+with his chin low in the water--out towards the horizon-line.
+
+He was swimming towards Africa.
+
+Presently that thought came into his mind, that he was swimming towards
+Africa and Hermione, and away from Maddalena. It seemed to him, then, as
+if the two women on the opposite shores of this sea must know, Hermione
+that he was coming to her, Maddalena that he was abandoning her, and he
+began to think of them both as intent upon his journey, the one feeling
+him approach, the other feeling him recede. He swam more slowly. A
+curious melancholy had overtaken him, a deep depression of the spirit,
+such as often alternates in the Sicilian character with the lively gayety
+that is sent down upon its children by the sun. This lonely progress in
+the sea was prophetic. He must leave Maddalena. His friendship with her
+must come to an end, and soon. Hermione would return, and then, in no
+long time, they would leave the Casa del Prete and go back to England.
+They would settle down somewhere, probably in London, and he would take
+up his work with his father, and the Sicilian dream would be over.
+
+The vapors that hid the sky seemed to drop a little lower down towards
+the sea, as if they were going to enclose him.
+
+The Sicilian dream would be over. Was that possible? He felt as if the
+earth of Sicily would not let him go, as if, should the earth resign him,
+the sea of Sicily would keep him. He dwelt on this last fancy, this
+keeping of him by the sea. That would be strange, a quiet end to all
+things. Never before had he consciously contemplated his own death. The
+deep melancholy poured into him by sirocco caused him to do so now.
+Almost voluptuously he thought of death, a death in the sea of Sicily
+near the rocks of the isle of the sirens. The light would be kindled in
+the sirens' house and his eyes would not see it. They would be closed by
+the cold fingers of the sea. And Maddalena? The first time she had seen
+him she had seen him sinking in the sea. How strange if it should be so
+at the end, if the last time she saw him she saw him sinking in the sea.
+She had cried out. Would she cry out again or would she keep silence? He
+wondered. For a moment he felt as if it were ordained that thus he should
+die, and he let his body sink in the water, throwing up his hands. He
+went down, very far down, but he felt that Maddalena's eyes followed him
+and that in them he saw terrors enthroned.
+
+Gaspare stirred in the boat, lifted his head from his arms and looked
+sleepily around him. He saw Salvatore lighting a pipe, bending forward
+over a spluttering match which he held in a cage made of his joined
+hands. He glanced away from him still sleepily, seeking the padrone, but
+he saw only the empty seats of the boat, the oars, the coiled-up nets,
+and lines for the fish.
+
+"Dove--?" he began.
+
+He sat up, stared wildly round.
+
+"Dov'č il padrone?" he cried out, shrilly.
+
+Salvatore started and dropped the match. Gaspare sprang at him.
+
+"Dov'č il padrone? Dov'č il padrone?"
+
+"Sangue di--" began Salvatore.
+
+But the oath died upon his lips. His keen eyes had swept the sea and
+perceived that it was empty. From its silver the black dot which he had
+been admiringly watching had disappeared. Gaspare had waked, had asked
+his fierce question just as Maurice threw up his hands and sank down in
+his travesty of death.
+
+"He was there! Madonna! He was there swimming a moment ago!" exclaimed
+Salvatore.
+
+As he spoke he seized the oars, and with furious strokes propelled the
+boat in the direction Maurice had taken. But Gaspare would not wait. His
+instinct forbade him to remain inactive.
+
+"May the Madonna turn her face from thee in the hour of thy death!" he
+yelled at Salvatore.
+
+Then, with all his clothes on, he went over the side into the sea.
+
+Maurice was an accomplished swimmer, and had ardently practised swimming
+under water when he was a boy. He could hold his breath for an
+exceptionally long time, and now he strove to beat all his previous
+records. With a few strokes he came up from the depths of the sea towards
+the surface, then began swimming under water, swimming vigorously, though
+in what direction he knew not. At last he felt the imperative need of
+air, and, coming up into the light again, he gasped, shook his head,
+lifted his eyelids that were heavy with the pressure of the water, heard
+a shrill cry, and felt a hand grasp him fiercely.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+"Gaspare!" he gulped.
+
+He had not fully drawn breath yet.
+
+"Madonna! Madonna!"
+
+The hand still held him. The fingers were dug into his flesh. Then he
+heard a shout, and the boat came up with Salvatore leaning over its side,
+glaring down at him with fierce anxiety. He grasped the gunwale with both
+hands. Gaspare trod water, caught him by the legs, and violently assisted
+him upward. He tumbled over the side into the boat. Gaspare came after
+him, sank down in the bottom of the boat, caught him by the arms, stared
+into his face, saw him smiling.
+
+"Sta bene Lei?" he cried. "Sta bene?"
+
+"Benissimo."
+
+The boy let go of him and, still staring at him, burst into a passion of
+tears that seemed almost angry.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it? What's the matter?"
+
+He put out his hand to touch the boy's dripping clothes.
+
+"What has happened?"
+
+"Niente! Niente!" said Gaspare, between violent sobs. "Mamma mia! Mamma
+mia!"
+
+He threw himself down in the bottom of the boat and wept stormily,
+without shame, without any attempt to check or conceal his emotion. As in
+the tarantella he had given himself up utterly to joy, so now he gave
+himself up utterly to something that seemed like despair. He cried
+loudly. His whole body shook. The sea-water ran down from his matted hair
+and mingled with the tears that rushed over his brown cheeks.
+
+"What is it?" Maurice asked of Salvatore.
+
+"He thought the sea had taken you, signore."
+
+"That was it? Gaspare--"
+
+"Let him alone. Per Dio, signore, you gave me a fright, too."
+
+"I was only swimming under water."
+
+He looked at Gaspare. He longed to do something to comfort him, but he
+realized that such violence could not be checked by anything. It must
+wear itself out.
+
+"And he thought I was dead!"
+
+"Per Dio! And if you had been!"
+
+He wrinkled up his face and spat.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Has he got a knife on him?"
+
+He threw out his hand towards Gaspare.
+
+"I don't know to-day. He generally has."
+
+"I should have had it in me by now," said Salvatore.
+
+And he smiled at the weeping boy almost sweetly, as if he could have
+found it in his heart to caress such a murderer.
+
+"Row in to land," Maurice said.
+
+He began to put on his clothes. Salvatore turned the boat round and they
+drew near to the rocks. The vapors were lifting now, gathering themselves
+up to reveal the blue of the sky, but the sea was still gray and
+mysterious, and the land looked like a land in a dream. Presently Gaspare
+put his fists to his eyes, lifted his head, and sat up. He looked at his
+master gloomily, as if in rebuke, and under this glance Maurice began to
+feel guilty, as if he had done something wrong in yielding to his strange
+impulses in the sea.
+
+"I was only swimming under water, Gaspare," he said, apologetically.
+
+The boy said nothing.
+
+"I know now," continued Maurice, "that I shall never come to any harm
+with you to look after me."
+
+Still Gaspare said nothing. He sat there on the floor of the boat with
+his dripping clothes clinging to his body, staring before him as if he
+were too deeply immersed in gloomy thoughts to hear what was being said
+to him.
+
+"Gaspare!" Maurice exclaimed, moved by a sudden impulse. "Do you think
+you would be very unhappy away from your 'paese'?"
+
+Gaspare shifted forward suddenly. A light gleamed in his eyes.
+
+"D'you think you could be happy with me in England?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Si, signore!"
+
+"When we have to go away from Sicily I shall ask the signora to let me
+take you with us."
+
+Gaspare said nothing, but he looked at Salvatore, and his wet face was
+like a song of pride and triumph.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+That day, ere he started with Gaspare for the house of the priest,
+Maurice made a promise to Maddalena. He pledged himself to go with her
+and her father to the great fair of San Felice, which takes place
+annually in the early days of June, when the throng of tourists has
+departed, and the long heats of the summer have not yet fully set in. He
+gave this promise in the presence of Salvatore and Gaspare, and while he
+did so he was making up his mind to something. That day at the fair
+should be the day of his farewell to Maddalena. Hermione must surely be
+coming back in June. It was impossible that she could remain in Kairouan
+later. The fury of the African summer would force her to leave the sacred
+city, her mission of salvation either accomplished or rendered forever
+futile by the death of her friend. And then, when Hermione came, within a
+short time no doubt they would start for England, taking Gaspare with
+them. For Maurice really meant to keep the boy in their service. After
+the strange scene of the morning he felt as if Gaspare were one of the
+family, a retainer with whose devoted protection he could never dispense.
+Hermione, he was sure, would not object.
+
+Hermione would not object. As he thought that, Maurice was conscious of a
+feeling such as sometimes moves a child, upon whom a parent or guardian
+has laid a gently restraining hand, violently to shrug his shoulders and
+twist his body in the effort to get away and run wild in freedom. He knew
+how utterly unreasonable and contemptible his sensation was, yet he had
+it. The sun had bred in him not merely a passion for complete personal
+liberty, but for something more, for lawlessness. For a moment he envied
+Gaspare, the peasant boy, whose ardent youth was burdened with so few
+duties to society, with so few obligations.
+
+What was expected of Gaspare? Only a willing service, well paid, which he
+could leave forever at any moment he pleased. To his family he must, no
+doubt, give some of his earnings, but in return he was looked up to by
+all, even by his father, as a little god. And in everything else was not
+he free, wonderfully free in this island of the south, able to be
+careless, unrestrained, wild as a young hawk, yet to remain uncondemned,
+unwondered at?
+
+And he--Maurice?
+
+He thought of Hermione's ardent and tenderly observant eyes with a sort
+of terror. If she could know or even suspect his feelings of the previous
+night, what a tragedy he would be at once involved in! The very splendor
+of Hermione's nature, the generous nobility of her character, would make
+that tragedy the more poignant. She felt with such intensity, she thought
+she had so much. Careless though his own nature was, doubly careless here
+in Sicily, Maurice almost sickened at the idea of her ever suspecting the
+truth, that he was capable of being strongly drawn towards a girl like
+Maddalena, that he could feel as if a peasant who could neither read nor
+write caught at something within him that was like the essence of his
+life, like the core of that by which he enjoyed, suffered, desired.
+
+But, of course, she would never suspect. And he laughed at himself, and
+made the promise about the fair, and, having made it and his resolution
+in regard to it, almost violently resolved to take no thought for the
+morrow, but to live carelessly and with gayety the days that lay before
+him, the few more days of his utter freedom in Sicily.
+
+After all, he was doing no wrong. He had lived and was going to live
+innocently. And now that he realized things, realized himself, he would
+be reasonable. He would be careless, gay--yes, but not reckless, not
+utterly reckless as he felt inclined to be.
+
+"What day of June is the fair?" he asked, looking at Maddalena.
+
+"The 11th of June, signore," said Salvatore. "There will be many donkeys
+there--good donkeys."
+
+Gaspare began to look fierce.
+
+"I think of buying a donkey," added Salvatore, carelessly, with his
+small, shrewd eyes fixed upon Maurice's face.
+
+Gaspare muttered something unintelligible.
+
+"How much do they cost?" said Maurice.
+
+"For a hundred lire you can get a very good donkey. It would be useful to
+Maddalena. She could go to the village sometimes then--she could go to
+Marechiaro to gossip with the neighbors."
+
+"Has Maddalena broken her legs--Madonna!" burst forth Gaspare.
+
+"Come along, Gaspare!" said Maurice, hastily.
+
+He bade good-bye to the fisherman and his daughter, and set off with
+Gaspare through the trees.
+
+"Be nice to Salvatore," said Maurice, as they went down towards the rocky
+wall.
+
+"But he wants to make you give him a donkey, signorino. You do not know
+him. When he is with you at the fair he will--"
+
+"Never mind. I say, Gaspare, I want--I want that day at the fair to be a
+real festa. Don't let's have any row on that day."
+
+Gaspare looked at him with surprised, inquiring eyes, as if struck by his
+serious voice, by the insisting pressure in it.
+
+"Why that day specially, signorino?" he asked, after a pause.
+
+"Oh, well--it will be my last day of--I mean that the signora will be
+coming back from Africa by then, and we shall--"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"We sha'n't be able to run quite so wild as we do now, you see. And,
+besides, we shall be going to England very soon then."
+
+Gaspare's face lighted up.
+
+"Shall I see London, signorino?"
+
+"Yes," said Maurice.
+
+He felt a sickness at his heart.
+
+"I should like to live in London always," said Gaspare, excitedly.
+
+"In London! You don't know it. In London you will scarcely ever see the
+sun."
+
+"Aren't there theatres in London, signorino?"
+
+"Theatres? Yes, of course. But there is no sea, Gaspare, there are no
+mountains."
+
+"Are there many soldiers? Are there beautiful women?"
+
+"Oh, there are plenty of soldiers and women."
+
+"I should like always to live in London," repeated Gaspare, firmly.
+
+"Well--perhaps you will. But--remember--we are all to be happy at the
+fair of San Felice."
+
+"Si, signore. But be careful, or Salvatore will make you buy him a
+donkey. He had a wine-shop once, long ago, in Marechiaro, and the
+wine--Per Dio, it was always vino battezzato!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Salvatore always put water in it. He is cattivo--and when he is angry--"
+
+"I know. You told me. But it doesn't matter. We shall soon be going away,
+and then we sha'n't see him any more."
+
+"Signorino?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You--do you want to stay here always?"
+
+"I like being here."
+
+"Why do you want to stay?"
+
+For once Maurice felt as if he could not meet the boy's great, steady
+eyes frankly. He looked away.
+
+"I like the sun," he answered. "I love it! I should like to live in the
+sunshine forever."
+
+"And I should like to live always in London," reiterated Gaspare. "You
+want to live here because you have always been in London, and I want to
+live in London because I have always been here. Ecco!"
+
+Maurice tried to laugh.
+
+"Perhaps that is it. We wish for what we can't have. Dio mio!"
+
+He threw out his arms.
+
+"But, anyhow, I've not done with Sicily yet! Come on, Gaspare! Now for
+the rocks! Ciao! Ciao! Ciao! Morettina bella ciao!"
+
+He burst out into a song, but his voice hardly rang true, and Gaspare
+looked at him again with a keen inquiry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Artois was not yet destined to die. He said that Hermione would not let
+him die, that with her by his side it was useless for Death to approach
+him, to desire him, to claim him. Perhaps her courage gave to him the
+will to struggle against his enemy. The French doctor, deeply, almost
+sentimentally interested in the ardent woman who spoke his language with
+perfection and carried out such instructions of his as she considered
+sensible, with delicate care and strong thoroughness, thought and said
+so.
+
+"But for madame," he said to Artois, "you would have died, monsieur. And
+why? Because till she came you had not the will to live. And it is the
+will to live that assists the doctor."
+
+"I cannot be so ungallant as to die now," Artois replied, with a feeble
+but not sad smile. "Were I to do so, madame would think me ungrateful.
+No, I shall live. I feel now that I am going to live."
+
+And, in fact, from the night of Maurice's visit with Gaspare to the house
+of the sirens he began to get better. The inflammation abated, the
+temperature fell till it was normal, the agony died away gradually from
+the tormented body, and slowly, very slowly, the strength that had ebbed
+began to return. One day, when the doctor said that there was no more
+danger of any relapse, Artois called Hermione and told her that now she
+must think no more of him, but of herself; that she must pack up her
+trunk and go back to her husband.
+
+"You have saved me, and I have killed your honeymoon," he said, rather
+sadly. "That will always be a regret in my life. But, now go, my dear
+friend, and try to assuage your husband's wrath against me. How he must
+hate me!"
+
+"Why, Emile?"
+
+"Are you really a woman? Yes, I know that. No man could have tended me as
+you have. Yet, being a woman, how can you ask that question?"
+
+"Maurice understands. He is blessedly understanding."
+
+"Don't try his blessed comprehension of you and of me too far. You must
+go, indeed."
+
+"I will go."
+
+A shadow that he tried to keep back flitted across Artois's pale face,
+over which the unkempt beard straggled in a way that would have appalled
+his Parisian barber. Hermione saw it.
+
+"I will go," she repeated, quietly, "when I can take you with me."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Hush! You are not to argue. Haven't you an utter contempt for those who
+do things by halves? Well, I have. When you can travel we'll go
+together."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"To Sicily. It will be hot there, but after this it will seem cool as the
+Garden of Eden under those trees where--but you remember! And there is
+always the breeze from the sea. And then from there, very soon, you can
+get a ship from Messina and go back to France, to Marseilles. Don't talk,
+Emile. I am writing to-night to tell Maurice."
+
+And she left the room with quick softness.
+
+Artois did not protest. He told himself that he had not the strength to
+struggle against the tenderness that surrounded him, that made it sweet
+to return to life. But he wondered silently how Maurice would receive
+him, how the dancing faun was bearing, would bear, this interference with
+his new happiness.
+
+"When I am in Sicily I shall see at once, I shall know," he thought. "But
+till then--"
+
+And he gave up the faint attempt to analyze the possible feelings of
+another, and sank again into the curious peace of convalescence.
+
+And Hermione wrote to her husband, telling him of her plan, calling upon
+him with the fearless enthusiasm that was characteristic of her to
+welcome it and to rejoice, with her, in Artois's returning health and
+speedy presence in Sicily.
+
+Maurice read this letter on the terrace alone. Gaspare had gone down on
+the donkey to Marechiaro to buy a bottle of Marsala, which Lucrezia
+demanded for the making of a zampaglione, and Lucrezia was upon the
+mountain-side spreading linen to dry in the sun. It was nearly the end of
+May now, and the trees in the ravine were thick with all their leaves.
+The stream that ran down through the shadows towards the sea was a tiny
+trickle of water, and the long, black snakes were coming boldly forth
+from their winter hiding-places to sun themselves among the bowlders that
+skirted the mountain tracks.
+
+"I can't tell for certain," Hermione wrote, "how soon we shall arrive,
+but Emile is picking up strength every day, and I think, I pray, it may
+not be long. I dare to hope that we shall be with you about the second
+week of June. Oh, Maurice, something in me is almost mad with joy, is
+like Gaspare dancing the tarantella, when I think of coming up the
+mountain-side again with you as I came that first day, that first day of
+my real life. Tell Sebastiano he must play the 'Pastorale' to welcome me.
+And you--but I seem to feel your dear welcome here, to feel your hands
+holding mine, to see your eyes looking at me like Sicily. Isn't it
+strange? I feel out here in Africa as if you were Sicily. But you are,
+indeed, for me. You are Sicily, you are the sun, you are everything that
+means joy to me, that means music, that means hope and peace. Buon
+riposo, my dearest one. Can you feel--can you--how happy I am to-night?"
+
+The second week in June! Maurice stood holding the letter in his hand.
+The fair of San Felice would take place during the second week in June.
+That was what he was thinking, not of Artois's convalescence, not of his
+coming to Sicily. If Hermione arrived before June 11th, could he go to
+the fair with Maddalena? He might go, of course. He might tell Hermione.
+She would say "Go!" She believed in him and had never tried to curb his
+freedom. A less suspicious woman than she was had surely never lived. But
+if she were in Sicily, if he knew that she was there in the house of the
+priest, waiting to welcome him at night when he came back from the fair,
+it would--it would--He laid the letter down. There was a burning heat of
+impatience, of anxiety, within him. Now that he had received this letter
+he understood with what intensity he had been looking forward to this day
+at the fair, to this last festa of his Sicilian life.
+
+"Perhaps they will not come so soon!" he said to him self. "Perhaps they
+will not be here."
+
+And then he began to think of Artois, to realize the fact that he was
+coming with Hermione, that he would be part of the final remnant of these
+Sicilian days.
+
+His feeling towards Artois in London had been sympathetic, even almost
+reverential. He had looked at him as if through Hermione's eyes, had
+regarded him with a sort of boyish reverence. Hermione had said that
+Artois was a great man, and Maurice had felt that he was a great man, had
+mentally sat at his feet. Perhaps in London he would be ready to sit at
+his feet again. But was he ready to sit at his feet here in Sicily? As he
+thought of Artois's penetrating eyes and cool, intellectual face, of his
+air of authority, of his close intimacy with Hermione, he felt almost
+afraid of him. He did not want Artois to come here to Sicily. He hated
+his coming. He almost dreaded it as the coming of a spy. The presence of
+Artois would surely take away all the savor of this wild, free life,
+would import into it an element of the library, of the shut room, of that
+intellectual existence which Maurice was learning to think of as almost
+hateful.
+
+And Hermione called upon him to rejoice with her over the fact that
+Artois would be able to accompany her. How she misunderstood him! Good
+God! how she misunderstood him! It seemed really as if she believed that
+his mind was cast in precisely the same mould as her own, as if she
+thought that because she and he were married they must think and feel
+always alike. How absurd that was, and how impossible!
+
+A sense of being near a prison door came upon him. He threw Hermione's
+letter onto the writing-table, and went out into the sun.
+
+When Gaspare returned that evening Maurice told him the news from Africa.
+The boy's face lit up.
+
+"Oh, then shall we go to London?" he said.
+
+"Why not?" Maurice exclaimed, almost violently. "It will all be
+different! Yes, we had better go to London!"
+
+"Signorino."
+
+"Well, what is it, Gaspare?"
+
+"You do not like that signore to come here."
+
+"I--why not? Yes, I--"
+
+"No, signorino. I can see in your face that you do not like it. Your face
+got quite black just now. But if you do not like it why do you let him
+come? You are the padrone here."
+
+"You don't understand. The signore is a friend of mine."
+
+"But you said he was the friend of the signora."
+
+"So he is. He is the friend of both of us."
+
+Gaspare said nothing for a moment. His mind was working busily. At last
+he said:
+
+"Then Maddalena--when the signora comes will she be the friend of the
+signora, as well as your friend?"
+
+"Maddalena--that has nothing to do with it."
+
+"But Maddalena is your friend!"
+
+"That's quite different."
+
+"I do not understand how it is in England," Gaspare said, gravely.
+"But"--and he nodded his head wisely and spread out his hands--"I
+understand many things, signorino, perhaps more than you think. You do
+not want the signore to come. You are angry at his coming."
+
+"He is a very kind signore," said Maurice, hastily. "And he can speak
+dialetto."
+
+Gaspare smiled and shook his head again. But he did not say anything
+more. For a moment Maurice had an impulse to speak to him frankly, to
+admit him into the intimacy of a friend. He was a Sicilian, although he
+was only a boy. He was Sicilian and he would understand.
+
+"Gaspare," he began.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"As you understand so much--"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"Perhaps you--" He checked himself, realizing that he was on the edge of
+doing an outrageous thing. "You must know that the friends of the signora
+are my friends and that I am always glad to welcome them."
+
+"Va bene, signorino! Va bene!"
+
+The boy began to look glum, understanding at once that he was being
+played with.
+
+"I must go to give Tito his food."
+
+And he stuck his hands in his pockets and went away round the corner of
+the cottage, whistling the tune of the "Canzone di Marechiaro."
+
+Maurice began to feel as if he were in the dark, but as if he were being
+watched there. He wondered how clearly Gaspare read him, how much he
+knew. And Artois? When he came, with his watchful eyes, there would be
+another observer of the Sicilian change. He did not much mind Gaspare,
+but he would hate Artois. He grew hot at the mere thought of Artois being
+there with him, observing, analyzing, playing the literary man's part in
+this out-door life of the mountains and of the sea.
+
+"I'm not a specimen," he said to himself, "and I'm damned if I'll be
+treated as one!"
+
+It did not occur to him that he was anticipating that which might never
+happen. He was as unreasonable as a boy who foresees possible
+interference with his pleasures.
+
+This decision of Hermione to bring with her to Sicily Artois, and its
+communication to Maurice, pushed him on to the recklessness which he had
+previously resolved to hold in check. Had Hermione been returning to him
+alone he would have felt that a gay and thoughtless holiday time was
+coming to an end, but he must have felt, too, that only tenderness and
+strong affection were crossing the sea from Africa to bind him in chains
+that already he had worn with happiness and peace. But the knowledge that
+with Hermione was coming Artois gave to him a definite vision of
+something that was like a cage. Without consciously saying it to himself,
+he had in London been vaguely aware of Artois's coldness of feeling
+towards him. Had any one spoken of it to him he would probably have
+denied that this was so. There are hidden things in a man that he himself
+does not say to himself that he knows of. But Maurice's vision of a cage
+was conjured up by Artois's mental attitude towards him in London, the
+attitude of the observer who might, in certain circumstances, be cruel,
+who was secretly ready to be cruel. And, anticipating the unpleasant
+probable, he threw himself with the greater violence into the enjoyment
+of his few more days of complete liberty.
+
+He wrote to Hermione, expressing as naturally as he could his ready
+acquiescence in her project, and then gave himself up to the
+light-heartedness that came with the flying moments of these last days of
+emancipation in the sun. His mood was akin to the mood of the rich man,
+"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The music, he knew, must
+presently fail. The tarantella must come to an end. Well, then he would
+dance with his whole soul. He would not husband his breath nor save his
+strength. He would be thoughtless because for a moment he had thought too
+much, too much for his nature of the dancing faun who had been given for
+a brief space of time his rightful heritage.
+
+Each day now he went down to the sea.
+
+"How hot it is!" he would say to Gaspare. "If I don't have a bath I shall
+be suffocated."
+
+"Si, signore. At what time shall we go?"
+
+"After the siesta. It will be glorious in the sea to-day."
+
+"Si, signore, it is good to be in the sea."
+
+The boy smiled, at last would sometimes laugh. He loved his padrona, but
+he was a male and a Sicilian. And the signora had gone across the sea to
+her friend. These visits to the sea seemed to him very natural. He would
+have done the same as his padrone in similar circumstances with a light
+heart, with no sense of doing wrong. Only sometimes he raised a warning
+voice.
+
+"Signorino," he would say, "do not forget what I have told you."
+
+"What, Gaspare?"
+
+"Salvatore is birbante. You think he likes you."
+
+"Why shouldn't he like me?"
+
+"You are a forestiere. To him you are as nothing. But he likes your
+money."
+
+"Well, then? I don't care whether he likes me or not. What does it
+matter?"
+
+"Be careful, signorino. The Sicilian has a long hand. Every one knows
+that. Even the Napoletano knows that. I have a friend who was a soldier
+at Naples, and--"
+
+"Come, now, Gaspare! What reason will there ever be for Salvatore to turn
+against me?"
+
+"Va bene, signorino, va bene! But Salvatore is a bad man when he thinks
+any one has tried to do him a wrong. He has blood in his eyes then, and
+when we Sicilians see through blood we do not care what we do--no, not if
+all the world is looking at us."
+
+"I shall do no wrong to Salvatore. What do you mean?"
+
+"Niente, signorino, niente!"
+
+"Stick the cloth on Tito, and put something in the pannier. Al mare! Al
+mare!"
+
+The boy's warning rang in deaf ears. For Maurice really meant what he
+said. He was reckless, perhaps, but he was going to wrong no one, neither
+Salvatore, nor Hermione, nor Maddalena. The coming of Artois drove him
+into the arms of pleasure, but it would never drive him into the arms of
+sin. For it was surely no sin to make a little love in this land of the
+sun, to touch a girl's hand, to snatch a kiss sometimes from the soft
+lips of a girl, from whom he would never ask anything more, whatever
+leaping desire might prompt him.
+
+And Salvatore was always at hand. He seldom put to sea in these days
+unless Maurice went with him in the boat. His greedy eyes shone with a
+light of satisfaction when he saw Tito coming along the dusty white road
+from Isola Bella, and at night, when he crossed himself superstitiously
+before Maria Addolorata, he murmured a prayer that more strangers might
+be wafted to his "Paese," many strangers with money in their pockets and
+folly in their hearts. Then let the sea be empty of fish and the wind of
+the storm break up his boat--it would not matter. He would still live
+well. He might even at the last have money in the bank at Marechiaro,
+houses in the village, a larger wine-shop than Oreste in the Corso.
+
+But he kept his small eyes wide open and seldom let Maddalena be long
+alone with the forestiere, and this supervision began to irritate
+Maurice, to make him at last feel hostile to Salvatore. He remembered
+Gaspare's words about the fisherman--"To him you are as nothing. But he
+likes your money"--and a longing to trick this fox of the sea, who wanted
+to take all and make no return, came to him.
+
+"Why can one never be free in this world?" he thought, almost angrily.
+"Why must there always be some one on the watch to see what one is doing,
+to interfere with one's pleasure?"
+
+He began presently almost to hate Salvatore, who evidently thought that
+Maurice was ready to wrong him, and who, nevertheless, grasped greedily
+at every soldo that came from the stranger's pocket, and touted
+perpetually for more.
+
+His attitude was hideous. Maurice pretended not to notice it, and was
+careful to keep on the most friendly possible terms with him. But, while
+they acted their parts, the secret sense of enmity grew steadily in the
+two men, as things grow in the sun. When Maurice saw the fisherman, with
+a smiling, bird's face, coming to meet him as he climbed up through the
+trees to the sirens' house, he sometimes longed to strike him. And when
+Maurice went away with Gaspare in the night towards the white road where
+Tito, tied to a stake, was waiting to carry the empty pannier that had
+contained a supper up the mountain to the house of the priest, Salvatore
+stood handling his money, and murmuring:
+
+"Maledetto straniero! Madonna! Ma io sono piů birbante di Lei, mille
+volte piů birbante, Dio mio!"
+
+And he laughed as he went towards the sirens' house. It amused him to
+think that a stranger, an "Inglese," fancied that he could play with a
+Sicilian, who had never been "worsted," even by one of his own
+countrymen.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Maurice had begun to dread the arrival of the post. Artois was rapidly
+recovering his strength, and in each of her letters Hermione wrote with a
+more glowing certainty of her speedy return to Sicily, bringing the
+invalid with her. Would they come before June 11th, the day of the fair?
+That was the question which preoccupied Maurice, which began to haunt
+him, and set a light of anxiety in his eyes when he saw Antonino climbing
+up the mountain-side with the letter-bag slung over his shoulder. He felt
+as if he could not forego this last festa. When it was over, when the
+lights had gone out in the houses of San Felice, and the music was
+silent, and the last rocket had burst in the sky, showering down its
+sparks towards the gaping faces of the peasants, he would be ready to
+give up this free, unintellectual life, this life in which his youth ran
+wild. He would resign himself to the inevitable, return to the existence
+in which, till now, he had found happiness, and try to find it there once
+more, try to forget the strange voices that had called him, the strange
+impulses that had prompted him. He would go back to his old self, and
+seek pleasure in the old paths, where he walked with those whom society
+would call his "equals," and did not spend his days with men who wrung
+their scant livelihood from the breast of the earth and from the breast
+of the sea, with women whose eyes, perhaps, were full of flickering
+fires, but who had never turned the leaves of a printed book, or traced a
+word upon paper. He would sit again at the feet of people who were
+cleverer and more full of knowledge than himself, and look up to them
+with reverence.
+
+But he must have his festa first. He counted upon that. He desired that
+so strongly, almost so fiercely, that he felt as if he could not bear to
+be thwarted, as if, should fate interfere between him and the fulfilment
+of this longing, he might do something almost desperate. He looked
+forward to the fair with something of the eagerness and the anticipation
+of a child expectant of strange marvels, of wonderful and mysterious
+happenings, and the name San Felice rang in his ears with a music that
+was magical, suggesting curious joys.
+
+He often talked about the fair to Gaspare, asking him many questions
+which the boy was nothing loath to answer.
+
+To Gaspare the fair of San Felice was the great event of the Sicilian
+year. He had only been to it twice; the first time when he was but ten
+years old, and was taken by an uncle who had gone to seek his fortune in
+South America, and had come back for a year to his native land to spend
+some of the money he had earned as a cook, and afterwards as a restaurant
+proprietor, in Buenos Ayres; the second time when he was sixteen, and had
+succeeded in saving up a little of the money given to him by travellers
+whom he had accompanied as a guide on their excursions. And these two
+days had been red-letter days in his life. His eyes shone with excitement
+when he spoke of the festivities at San Felice, of the bands of
+music--there were three "musics" in the village; of the village beauties
+who sauntered slowly up and down, dressed in brocades and adorned with
+jewels which had been hoarded in the family chests for generations, and
+were only taken out to be worn at the fair and at wedding-feasts; of the
+booths where all the desirable things of the world were exposed for
+sale--rings, watches, chains, looking-glasses, clocks that sang and
+chimed with bells like church towers, yellow shoes, and caps of all
+colors, handkerchiefs, and shawls with fringes that, when worn, drooped
+almost to the ground; ballads written by native poets, relating the life
+and the trial of Musolino, the famous brigand, his noble address to his
+captors, and his despair when he was condemned to eternal confinement;
+and the adventures of Giuseppe Moroni, called "Il Niccheri"
+(illetterato), composed in eight-lined verses, and full of the most
+startling and passionate occurrences. There were donkeys, too--donkeys
+from all parts of Sicily, mules from Girgenti, decorated with
+red-and-yellow harness, with pyramids of plumes and bells upon their
+heads, painted carts with pictures of the miracles of the saints and the
+conquests of the Saracens, turkeys and hens, and even cages containing
+yellow birds that came from islands far away and that sang with the
+sweetness of the angels. The ristoranti were crowded with people, playing
+cards and eating delicious food, and outside upon the pavements were
+dozens of little tables at which you could sit, drinking syrups of
+beautiful hues and watching at your ease the marvels of the show. Here
+came boys from Naples to sing and dance, peddlers with shining knives and
+elegant walking-sticks for sale, fortune-tellers with your fate already
+printed and neatly folded in an envelope, sometimes a pigeon-man with a
+high black hat, who made his doves hop from shoulder to shoulder along a
+row of school-children, or a man with a monkey that played antics to the
+sound of a grinding organ, and that was dressed up in a red worsted
+jacket and a pair of cloth trousers. And there were shooting-galleries
+and puppet-shows and dancing-rooms, and at night, when the darkness came,
+there were giuochi di fuoco which lit up the whole sky, till you could
+see Etna quite plainly.
+
+"E' veramente un paradiso!" concluded Gaspare.
+
+"A paradise!" echoed Maurice. "A paradise! I say, Gaspare, why can't we
+always live in paradise? Why can't life be one long festa?"
+
+"Non lo so, signore. And the signora? Do you think she will be here for
+the fair?"
+
+"I don't know. But if she is here, I am not sure that she will come to
+see it."
+
+"Why not, signorino? Will she stay with the sick signore?"
+
+"Perhaps. But I don't think she will be here. She does not say she will
+be here."
+
+"Do you want her to be here, signorino?" Gaspare asked, abruptly.
+
+"Why do you ask such a question? Of course I am happy, very happy, when
+the signora is here."
+
+As he said the words Maurice remembered how happy he had been in the
+house of the priest alone with Hermione. Indeed, he had thought that he
+was perfectly happy, that he had nothing left to wish for. But that
+seemed long ago. He wondered if he could ever again feel that sense of
+perfect contentment. He could scarcely believe so. A certain feverishness
+had stolen into his Sicilian life. He felt often like a man in suspense,
+uncertain of the future, almost apprehensive. He no longer danced the
+tarantella with the careless abandon of a boy. And yet he sometimes had a
+strange consciousness that he was near to something that might bring to
+him a joy such as he had never yet experienced.
+
+"I wish I knew what day Hermione is arriving," he thought, almost
+fretfully. "I wish she wouldn't keep me hung up in this condition of
+uncertainty. She seems to think that I have nothing to do but just wait
+here upon the pleasure of Artois."
+
+With that last thought the old sense of injury rose in him again. This
+friend of Hermione's was spoiling everything, was being put before every
+one. It was really monstrous that even during their honeymoon this old
+friendship should intrude, should be allowed to govern their actions and
+disturb their serenity. Now that Artois was out of danger Maurice began
+to forget how ill he had been, began sometimes to doubt whether he had
+ever been so ill as Hermione supposed. Perhaps Artois was one of those
+men who liked to have a clever woman at his beck and call. These literary
+fellows were often terribly exigent, eaten up with the sense of their own
+importance. But he, Maurice, was not going to allow himself to be made a
+cat's-paw of. He would make Artois understand that he was not going to
+permit his life to be interfered with by any one.
+
+"I'll let him see that when he comes," he said to himself. "I'll take a
+strong line. A man must be the master of his own life if he's worth
+anything. These Sicilians understand that."
+
+He began secretly to admire what before he had thought almost hateful,
+the strong Arab characteristics that linger on in many Sicilians, to
+think almost weak and unmanly the Western attitude to woman.
+
+"I will be master," he said to himself again. "All these Sicilians are
+wondering that I ever let Hermione go to Africa. Perhaps they think I'm a
+muff to have given in about it. And now, when Hermione comes back with a
+man, they'll suppose--God knows what they won't imagine!"
+
+He had begun so to identify himself with the Sicilians about Marechiaro
+that he cared what they thought, was becoming sensitive to their opinion
+of him as if he had been one of themselves. One day Gaspare told him a
+story of a contadino who had bought a house in the village, but who,
+being unable to complete the payment, had been turned out into the
+street.
+
+"And now, signorino," Gaspare concluded, "they are all laughing at him in
+Marechiaro. He dare not show himself any more in the Piazza. When a man
+cannot go any more into the Piazza--Madonna!"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands in a gesture of
+contemptuous pity.
+
+"E' finito!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Certo!" said Maurice.
+
+He was resolved that he would never be in such a case. Hermione, he felt
+now, did not understand the Sicilians as he understood them. If she did
+she would not bring back Artois from Africa, she would not arrive openly
+with him. But surely she ought to understand that such an action would
+make people wonder, would be likely to make them think that Artois was
+something more than her friend. And then Maurice thought of the day of
+their arrival, of his own descent to the station, to wait upon the
+platform for the train. Artois was not going to stay in the house of the
+priest. That was impossible, as there was no guest-room. He would put up
+at the hotel in Marechiaro. But that would make little difference. He was
+to arrive with Hermione. Every one would know that she had spent all this
+time with him in Africa. Maurice grew hot as he thought of the smiles on
+the Sicilian faces, of the looks of astonishment at the strange doings of
+the forestieri. Hermione's enthusiastic kindness was bringing her husband
+almost to shame. It was a pity that people were sometimes thoughtless in
+their eager desire to be generous and sympathetic.
+
+One day, when Maurice had been brooding over this matter of the
+Sicilian's view of Hermione's proceedings, the spirit moved him to go
+down on foot to Marechiaro to see if there were any letters for him at
+the post. It was now June 7th. In four days would come the fair. As the
+time for it drew near, his anxiety lest anything should interfere to
+prevent his going to it with Maddalena increased, and each day at post
+time he was filled with a fever of impatience to know whether there
+would be a letter from Africa or not. Antonino generally appeared about
+four o'clock, but the letters were in the village long before then, and
+this afternoon Maurice felt that he could not wait for the boy's coming.
+He had a conviction that there was a letter, a decisive letter from
+Hermione, fixing at last the date of her arrival with Artois. He must
+have it in his hands at the first possible moment. If he went himself to
+the post he would know the truth at least an hour and a half sooner than
+if he waited in the house of the priest. He resolved, therefore, to go,
+got his hat and stick, and set out, after telling Gaspare, who was
+watching for birds with his gun, that he was going for a stroll on the
+mountain-side and might be away for a couple of hours.
+
+It was a brilliant afternoon. The landscape looked hard in the fiery
+sunshine, the shapes of the mountains fierce and relentless, the dry
+watercourses almost bitter in their barrenness. Already the devastation
+of the summer was beginning to be apparent. All tenderness had gone from
+the higher slopes of the mountains which, jocund in spring and in autumn
+with growing crops, were now bare and brown, and seamed like the hide of
+a tropical reptile gleaming with metallic hues. The lower slopes were
+still panoplied with the green of vines and of trees, but the ground
+beneath the trees was arid. The sun was coming into his dominion with
+pride and cruelty, like a conqueror who loots the land he takes to be his
+own.
+
+But Maurice did not mind the change, which drove the tourists northward,
+and left Sicily to its own people. He even rejoiced in it. As each day
+the heat increased he was conscious of an increasing exultation, such as
+surely the snakes and the lizards feel as they come out of their
+hiding-places into the golden light. He was filled with a glorious sense
+of expansion, as if his capabilities grew larger, as if they were
+developed by heat like certain plants. None of the miseries that afflict
+many people in the violent summers which govern southern lands were his.
+His skin did not peel, his eyes did not become inflamed, nor did his head
+ache under the action of the burning rays. They came to him like brothers
+and he rejoiced in their company. To-day, as he descended to Marechiaro,
+he revelled in the sun. Its ruthlessness made him feel ruthless. He was
+conscious of that. At this moment he was in absolutely perfect physical
+health. His body was lithe and supple, yet his legs and arms were hard
+with springing muscle. His warm blood sang through his veins like music
+through the pipes of an organ. His eyes shone with the superb animation
+of youth that is radiantly sound. For, despite his anxiety, his sometimes
+almost fretful irritation when he thought about the coming of Artois and
+the passing of his own freedom, there were moments when he felt as if he
+could leap with the sheer joy of life, as if he could lift up his arms
+and burst forth into a wild song of praise to his divinity, the sun. And
+this grand condition of health made him feel ruthless, as the man who
+conquers and enters a city in triumph feels ruthless. As he trod down
+towards Marechiaro to-day, thinking of the letter that perhaps awaited
+him, it seemed to him that it would be monstrous if anything, if any one,
+were to interfere with his day of joy, the day he was looking forward to
+with such eager anticipation. He felt inclined to trample over
+opposition. Yet what could he do if, by some evil chance, Hermione and
+Artois arrived the day before the fair, or on the very day of the fair?
+He hurried his steps. He wanted to be in the village, to know whether
+there was a letter for him from Africa.
+
+When he came into the village it was about half-past two o'clock, and the
+long, narrow main street was deserted. The owners of some of the
+antiquity shops had already put up their shutters for the summer. Other
+shops, still open, showed gaping doorways, through which no travellers
+passed. Inside, the proprietors were dozing among their red brocades,
+their pottery, their Sicilian jewelry and obscure pictures thick with
+dust, guarded by squadrons of large, black flies, which droned on walls
+and ceilings, crept over the tiled floors, and clung to the draperies and
+laces which lay upon the cabinets. In the shady little rooms of the
+barbers small boys in linen jackets kept a drowsy vigil for the
+proprietors, who were sleeping in some dark corner of bedchamber or
+wine-shop. But no customer came to send them flying. The sun made the
+beards push on the brown Sicilian faces, but no one wanted to be shaved
+before the evening fell. Two or three lads lounged by on their way to the
+sea with towels and bathing-drawers over their arms. A few women were
+spinning flax on the door-lintels, or filling buckets of water from the
+fountain. A few children were trying to play mysterious games in the
+narrow alleys that led downward to the sea and upward to the mountains on
+the left and right of the street. A donkey brayed under an archway as if
+to summon its master from his siesta. A cat stole along the gutter, and
+vanished into a hole beneath a shut door. But the village was almost like
+a dead village, slain by the sun in his carelessness of pride.
+
+On his way to the post Maurice passed through the Piazza that was the
+glory of Marechiaro and the place of assemblage for its people. Here the
+music sounded on festa days before the stone steps that led up to the
+church of San Giuseppe. Here was the principal caffč, the Caffč Nuovo,
+where granite and ices were to be had, delicious yellow cakes, and
+chocolate made up into shapes of crowing cocks, of pigs, of little men
+with hats, and of saints with flowing robes. Here, too, was the club,
+with chairs and sofas now covered with white, and long tables adorned
+with illustrated journals and the papers of Catania, of Messina, and
+Palermo. But at this hour the caffč was closed and the club was empty.
+For the sun beat down with fury upon the open space with its tiled
+pavement, and the seats let into the wall that sheltered the Piazza from
+the precipice that frowned above the sea were untenanted by loungers. As
+Maurice went by he thought of Gaspare's words, "When a man cannot go any
+more into the Piazza--Madonna, it is finished!" This was the place where
+the public opinion of Marechiaro was formed, where fame was made and
+characters were taken away. He paused for an instant by the church, then
+went on under the clock tower and came to the post.
+
+"Any letters for me, Don Paolo?" he asked of the postmaster.
+
+The old man saluted him languidly through the peep-hole.
+
+"Si, signore, ce ne sono."
+
+He turned to seek for them while Maurice waited. He heard the flies
+buzzing. Their noise was loud in his ears. His heart beat strongly and he
+was gnawed by suspense. Never before had he felt so anxious, so impatient
+to know anything as he was now to know if among the letters there was one
+from Hermione.
+
+"Ecco, signore!"
+
+"Grazie!"
+
+Maurice took the packet.
+
+"A rivederci!"
+
+"A rivederlo, signore."
+
+He went away down the street. But now he had his letters he did not look
+at them immediately. Something held him back from looking at them until
+he had come again into the Piazza. It was still deserted. He went over to
+the seat by the wall, and sat down sideways, so that he could look over
+the wall to the sea immediately below him. Then, very slowly, he drew out
+his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, lit it, and began to smoke like
+a man who was at ease and idle. He glanced over the wall. At the foot of
+the precipice by the sea was the station of Cattaro, at which Hermione
+and Artois would arrive when they came. He could see the platform, some
+trucks of merchandise standing on the rails, the white road winding by
+towards San Felice and Etna. After a long look down he turned at last to
+the packet from the post which he had laid upon the hot stone at his
+side. The _Times_, the "Pink 'un," the _Illustrated London News_, and
+three letters. The first was obviously a bill forwarded from London. The
+second was also from England. He recognized the handwriting of his
+mother. The third? He turned it over. Yes, it was from Hermione. His
+instinct had not deceived him. He was certain, too, that it did not
+deceive him now. He was certain that this was the letter that fixed the
+date of her coming with Artois. He opened the two other letters and
+glanced over them, and then at last he tore the covering from Hermione's.
+A swift, searching look was enough. The letter dropped from his hand to
+the seat. He had seen these words:
+
+"Isn't it splendid? Emile may leave at once. But there is no good boat
+till the tenth. We shall take that, and be at Cattaro on the eleventh at
+five o'clock in the afternoon...."
+
+"Isn't it splendid?"
+
+For a moment he sat quite still in the glare of the sun, mentally
+repeating to himself these words of his wife. So the inevitable had
+happened. For he felt it was inevitable. Fate was against him. He was not
+to have his pleasure.
+
+"Signorino! Come sta lei? Lei sta bene?"
+
+He started and looked up. He had heard no footstep. Salvatore stood by
+him, smiling at him, Salvatore with bare feet, and a fish-basket slung
+over his arm.
+
+"Buon giorno, Salvatore!" he answered, with an effort.
+
+Salvatore looked at Maurice's cigarette, put down the basket, and sat
+down on the seat by Maurice's side.
+
+"I haven't smoked to-day, signore," he began. "Dio mio! But it must be
+good to have plenty of soldi!"
+
+"Ecco!"
+
+Maurice held out his cigarette-case.
+
+"Take two--three!"
+
+"Grazie, signore, mille grazie!"
+
+He took them greedily.
+
+"And the fair, signorino--only four days now to the fair! I have been to
+order the donkeys for me and Maddalena."
+
+"Davvero?" Maurice said, mechanically.
+
+"Si, signore. From Angelo of the mill. He wanted fifteen lire, but I
+laughed at him. I was with him a good hour and I got them for nine. Per
+Dio! Fifteen lire and to a Siciliano! For he didn't know you were coming.
+I took care not to tell him that."
+
+"Oh, you took care not to tell him that I was coming!"
+
+Maurice was looking over the wall at the platform of the station far down
+below. He seemed to see himself upon it, waiting for the train to glide
+in on the day of the fair, waiting among the smiling Sicilian facchini.
+
+"Si, signore. Was not I right?"
+
+"Quite right."
+
+"Per Dio, signore, these are good cigarettes. Where do they come from?"
+
+"From Cairo, in Egypt."
+
+"Egitto! They must cost a lot."
+
+He edged nearer to Maurice.
+
+"You must be very happy, signorino."
+
+"I!" Maurice laughed. "Madonna! Why?"
+
+"Because you are so rich!"
+
+There was a fawning sound in the fisherman's voice, a fawning look in his
+small, screwed-up eyes.
+
+"To you it would be nothing to buy all the donkeys at the fair of San
+Felice."
+
+Maurice moved ever so little away from him.
+
+"Ah, signorino, if I had been born you how happy I should be!"
+
+And he heaved a great sigh and puffed at the cigarette voluptuously.
+
+Maurice said nothing. He was still looking at the railway platform. And
+now he seemed to see the train gliding in on the day of the fair of San
+Felice.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+"Well, what is it, Salvatore?"
+
+"I have ordered the donkeys for ten o'clock. Then we can go quietly. They
+will be at Isola Bella at ten o'clock. I shall bring Maddalena round in
+the boat."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Salvatore chuckled.
+
+"She has got a surprise for you, signore."
+
+"A surprise?"
+
+"Per Dio!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+His voice was listless, but now he looked at Salvatore.
+
+"I ought not to tell you, signore. But--if I do--you won't ever tell
+her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"A new gown, signorino, a beautiful new gown, made by Maria Compagni here
+in the Corso. Will you be at Isola Bella with Gaspare by ten o'clock on
+the day, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, Salvatore!" Maurice said, in a loud, firm, almost angry voice. "I
+will be there. Don't doubt it. Addio Salvatore!"
+
+He got up.
+
+"A rivederci, signore. Ma--"
+
+He got up, too, and bent to pick up his fish-basket.
+
+"No, don't come with me. I'm going up now, straight up by the Castello."
+
+"In all this heat? But it's steep there, signore, and the path is all
+covered with stones. You'll never--"
+
+"That doesn't matter. I like the sun. Addio!"
+
+"And this evening, signorino? You are coming to bathe this evening?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't think so. Don't wait for me. Go to sea if you want
+to!"
+
+"Birbanti!" muttered the fisherman, as he watched Maurice stride away
+across the Piazza, and strike up the mountain-side by the tiny path that
+led to the Castello. "You want to get me out of the way, do you?
+Birbanti! Ah, you fine strangers from England! You think to come here and
+find men that are babies, do you? men that--"
+
+He went off noiselessly on his bare feet, muttering to himself with the
+half-smoked cigarette in his lean, brown hand.
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice climbed rapidly up the steep track over the stones in
+the eye of the sun. He had not lied to Salvatore. While the fisherman had
+been speaking to him he had come to a decision. A disgraceful decision he
+knew it to be, but he would keep to it. Nothing should prevent him from
+keeping to it. He would be at Isola Bella on the day of the fair. He
+would go to San Felice. He would stay there till the last rocket burst in
+the sky over Etna, till the last song had been sung, the last toast
+shouted, the last tarantella danced, the last--kiss given--the last, the
+very last. He would ignore this message from Africa. He would pretend he
+had never received it. He would lie about it. Yes, he would lie--but he
+would have his pleasure. He was determined upon that, and nothing should
+shake him, no qualms of conscience, no voices within him, no memories of
+past days, no promptings of duty.
+
+He hurried up the stony path. He did not feel the sun upon him. The sweat
+poured down over his face, his body. He did not know it. His heart was
+set hard, and he felt villanous, but he felt quite sure what he was going
+to do, quite sure that he was going to the fair despite that letter.
+
+When he reached the priest's house he felt exhausted. Without knowing it
+he had come up the mountain at a racing pace. But he was not tired merely
+because of that. He sank down in a chair in the sitting-room. Lucrezia
+came and peeped at him.
+
+"Where is Gaspare?" he asked, putting his hand instinctively over the
+pocket in which were the letters.
+
+"He is still out after the birds, signore. He has shot five already."
+
+"Poor little wretches! And he's still out?"
+
+"Si, signore. He has gone on to Don Peppino's terreno now. There are many
+birds there. How hot you are, signorino! Shall I--"
+
+"No, no. Nothing, Lucrezia! Leave me alone!"
+
+She disappeared.
+
+Then Maurice drew the letters from his pocket and slowly spread out
+Hermione's in his lap. He had not read it through yet. He had only
+glanced at it and seen what he had feared to see. Now he read it word by
+word, very slowly and carefully. When he had come to the end he kept it
+on his knee and sat for some time quite still.
+
+In the letter Hermione asked him to go to the Hôtel Regina Margherita at
+Marechiaro, and engage two good rooms facing the sea for Artois, a
+bedroom and a sitting-room. They were to be ready for the eleventh. She
+wrote with her usual splendid frankness. Her soul was made of sincerity
+as a sovereign is made of gold.
+
+"I know"--these were her words--"I know you will try and make Emile's
+coming to Sicily a little festa. Don't think I imagine you are personally
+delighted at his coming, though I am sure you are delighted at his
+recovery. He is my old friend, not yours, and I am not such a fool as to
+suppose that you can care for him at all as I do, who have known him
+intimately and proved his loyalty and his nobility of nature. But I
+think, I am certain, Maurice, that you will make his coming a festa for
+my sake. He has suffered very much. He is as weak almost as a child
+still. There's something tremendously pathetic in the weakness of body of
+a man so brilliant in mind, so powerful of soul. It goes right to my
+heart as I think it would go to yours. Let us make his return to life
+beautiful and blessed. Sha'n't we? Put flowers in the rooms for me, won't
+you? Make them look homey. Put some books about. But I needn't tell you.
+We are one, you and I, and I needn't tell you any more. It would be like
+telling things to myself--as unnecessary as teaching an organ-grinder how
+to turn the handle of his organ! Oh, Maurice, I can laugh to-day! I could
+almost--_I_--get up and dance the tarantella all alone here in my little,
+bare room with no books and scarcely any flowers. And at the station show
+Emile he is welcome. He is a little diffident at coming. He fancies
+perhaps he will be in the way. But one look of yours, one grasp of your
+hand will drive it all out of him! God bless you, my dearest. How he has
+blessed me in giving you to me!"
+
+As Maurice sat there, under his skin, burned deep brown by the sun, there
+rose a hot flush of red! Yes, he reddened at the thought of what he was
+going to do, but still he meant to do it. He could not forego his
+pleasure. He could not. There was something wild and imperious within him
+that defied his better self at this moment. But the better self was not
+dead. It was even startlingly alive, enough alive to stand almost aghast
+at that which was going, it knew, to dominate it--to dominate it for a
+time, but only for a time. On that he was resolved, as he was resolved to
+have this one pleasure to which he had looked forward, to which he was
+looking forward now. Men often mentally put a period to their sinning.
+Maurice put a period to his sinning as he sat staring at the letter on
+his knees. And the period which he put was the day of the fair at San
+Felice. After that day this book of his wild youth was to be closed
+forever.
+
+After the day of the fair he would live rightly, sincerely, meeting as it
+deserved to be met the utter sincerity of his wife. He would be, after
+that date, entirely straight with her. He loved her. As he looked at her
+letter he felt that he did love, must love, such love as hers. He was not
+a bad man, but he was a wilful man. The wild heart of youth in him was
+wilful. Well, after San Felice, he would control that wilfulness of his
+heart, he would discipline it. He would do more, he would forget that it
+existed. After San Felice!
+
+With a sigh, like that of a burdened man, he got up, took the letter in
+his hand, and went out up the mountain-side. There he tore the letter and
+its envelope into fragments, and hid the fragments in a heap of stones
+hot with the sun.
+
+When Gaspare came in that evening with a string of little birds in his
+hand and asked Maurice if there were any letter from Africa to say when
+the signora would arrive, Maurice answered "No."
+
+"Then the signora will not be here for the fair, signorino?" said the
+boy.
+
+"I don't suppose--no, Gaspare, she will not be here for the fair."
+
+"She would have written by now if she were coming.
+
+"Yes, if she were coming she would certainly have written by now."
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Are you ready?"
+
+It was Gaspare's voice shouting vivaciously from the sunny terrace, where
+Tito and another donkey, gayly caparisoned and decorated with flowers and
+little streamers of colored ribbon, were waiting before the steps.
+
+"Si, si! I'm coming in a moment!" replied Maurice's voice from the
+bedroom.
+
+Lucrezia stood by the wall looking very dismal. She longed to go to the
+fair, and that made her sad. But there was also another reason for her
+depression. Sebastiano was still away, and for many days he had not
+written to her. This was bad enough. But there was something worse. News
+had come to Marechiaro from a sailor of Messina, a friend of
+Sebastiano's, that Sebastiano was lingering in the Lipari Isles because
+he had found a girl there, a pretty girl called Teodora Amalfi, to whom
+he was paying attentions. And although Lucrezia laughed at the story, and
+pretended to disbelieve it, her heart was rent by jealousy and despair,
+and a longing to travel away, to cross the sea, to tear her lover from
+temptation, to--to speak for a few moments quietly--oh, very
+quietly--with this Teodora. Even now, while she stared at the donkeys,
+and at Gaspare in his festa suit, with two large, pink roses above his
+ears, she put up her hands instinctively to her own ears, as if to pluck
+the ear-rings out of them, as the Sicilian women of the lower classes do,
+deliberately, sternly, before they begin to fight their rivals, women who
+have taken their lovers or their husbands from them.
+
+Ah, if she were only in the Lipari Isles she would speak with Teodora
+Amalfi, speak with her till the blood flowed! She set her teeth, and her
+face looked almost old in the sunshine.
+
+"Coraggio, Lucrezia!" laughed Gaspare. "He will come back some day
+when--when he has sold enough to the people of the isles! But where is
+the padrone, Dio mio? Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Maurice appeared at the sitting-room door and came slowly down the steps.
+
+Gaspare stared. "Eccomi!"
+
+"Why, signorino, what is the matter? What has happened?"
+
+"Happened? Nothing!"
+
+"Then why do you look so black?"
+
+"I! It's the shadow of the awning on my face."
+
+He smiled. He kept on smiling.
+
+"I say, Gasparino, how splendid the donkeys are! And you, too!"
+
+He took hold of the boy by the shoulders and turned him round.
+
+"Per Bacco! We shall make a fine show at the fair! I've got money, lot's
+of money, to spend!"
+
+He showed his portfolio, full of dirty notes. Gaspare's eyes began to
+sparkle.
+
+"Wait, signorino!"
+
+He lifted his hands to Maurice's striped flannel jacket and thrust two
+large bunches of flowers and ferns into the two button-holes, to right
+and left.
+
+"Bravo! Now, then."
+
+"No, no, signorino! Wait!"
+
+"More flowers! But where--what, over my ears, too!"
+
+He began to laugh.
+
+"But--"
+
+"Si, signore, si! To-day you must be a real Siciliano!"
+
+"Va bene!"
+
+He bent down his head to be decorated.
+
+"Pouf! They tickle! There, then! Now let's be off!"
+
+He leaped onto Tito's back. Gaspare sprang up on the other donkey.
+
+"Addio, Lucrezia!"
+
+Maurice turned to her.
+
+"Don't leave the house to-day."
+
+"No, signore," said poor Lucrezia, in a deplorable voice.
+
+"Mind, now! Don't go down to Marechiaro this afternoon."
+
+There was an odd sound, almost of pleading, in his voice.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"I trust you to be here--remember."
+
+"Va bene, signorino!"
+
+"Ah--a--a--ah!" shouted Gaspare.
+
+They were off.
+
+"Signorino," said Gaspare, presently, when they were in the shadow of the
+ravine, "why did you say all that to Lucrezia?"
+
+"All what?"
+
+"All that about not leaving the house to-day?"
+
+"Oh--why--it's better to have some one there."
+
+"Si, signore. But why to-day specially?"
+
+"I don't know. There's no particular reason."
+
+"I thought there was."
+
+"No, of course not. How could there be?"
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+"If Lucrezia goes down to the village they'll be filling her ears with
+that stupid gossip about Sebastiano and that girl--Teodora."
+
+"It was for Lucrezia then, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, for Lucrezia. She's miserable enough already. I don't want her to
+be a spectacle when--when the signora returns."
+
+"I wonder when she is coming? I wonder why she has not written all these
+days?"
+
+"Oh, she'll soon come. We shall--we shall very soon have her here with
+us."
+
+He tried to speak naturally, but found the effort difficult, knowing what
+he knew, that in the evening of that day Hermione would arrive at the
+house of the priest and find no preparations made for her return, no one
+to welcome her but Lucrezia--if, indeed, Lucrezia obeyed his orders and
+refrained from descending to the village on the chance of hearing some
+fresh news of her fickle lover. And Artois! There were no rooms engaged
+for him at the Hôtel Regina Margherita. There were no flowers, no books.
+Maurice tingled--his whole body tingled for a moment--and he felt like a
+man guilty of some mean crime and arraigned before all the world. Then he
+struck Tito with his switch, and began to gallop down the steep path at a
+breakneck pace, sticking his feet far out upon either side. He would
+forget. He would put away these thoughts that were tormenting him. He
+would enjoy this day of pleasure for which he had sacrificed so much, for
+which he had trampled down his self-respect in the dust.
+
+When they reached the road by Isola Bella, Salvatore's boat was just
+coming round the point, vigorously propelled by the fisherman's strong
+arms over the radiant sea. It was a magnificent day, very hot but not
+sultry, free from sirocco. The sky was deep blue, a passionate, exciting
+blue that seemed vocal, as if it were saying thrilling things to the
+world that lay beneath it. The waveless sea was purple, a sea, indeed, of
+legend, a wine-dark, lustrous, silken sea. Into it, just here along this
+magic coast, was surely gathered all the wonder of color of all the
+southern seas. They must be blanched to make this marvel of glory, this
+immense jewel of God. And the lemon groves were thick along the sea. And
+the orange-trees stood in their decorative squadrons drinking in the
+rays of the sun with an ecstatic submission. And Etna, snowless Etna,
+rose to heaven out of this morning world, with its base in the purple
+glory and its feather of smoke in the calling blue, child of the sea-god
+and of the god that looks down from the height, majestically calm in the
+riot of splendor that set the feet of June dancing in a great tarantella.
+
+As Maurice saw the wonder of sea and sky, the boat coming in over the
+sea, with Maddalena in the stern holding a bouquet of flowers, his heart
+leaped up and he forgot for a moment the shadow in himself, the shadow of
+his own unworthiness. He sprang off the donkey.
+
+"I'll go down to meet them!" he cried. "Catch hold of Tito, Gaspare!"
+
+The railway line ran along the sea, between road and beach. He had to
+cross it. In doing so one of his feet struck the metal rail, which gave
+out a dry sound. He looked down, suddenly recalled to a reality other
+than the splendor of the morning, the rapture of this careless festa day.
+And again he was conscious of the shadow. Along this line, in a few
+hours, would come the train bearing Hermione and Artois. Hermione would
+be at the window, eagerly looking out, full of happy anticipation,
+leaning to catch the first sight of his face, to receive and return his
+smile of welcome. What would her face be like when--? But Salvatore was
+hailing him from the sea. Maddalena was waving her hand. The thing was
+done. The die was cast. He had chosen his lot. Fiercely he put away from
+him the thought of Hermione, lifted his voice in an answering hail, his
+hand in a salutation which he tried to make carelessly joyous. The boat
+glided in between the flat rocks. And then--then he was able to forget.
+For Maddalena's long eyes were looking into his, with the joyousness of a
+child's, and yet with something of the expectation of a woman's, too. And
+her brown face was alive with a new and delicious self-consciousness,
+asking him to praise her for the surprise she had prepared, in his honor
+surely, specially for him, and not for her comrades and the public of the
+fair.
+
+"Maddalena!" he exclaimed.
+
+He put out his hands to help her out. She stood on the gunwale of the
+boat and jumped lightly down, with a little laugh, onto the beach.
+
+"Maddalena! Per Dio! Ma che bellezza!"
+
+She laughed again, and stood there on the stones before him smiling and
+watching him, with her head a little on one side, and the hand that held
+the tight bouquet of roses and ferns, round as a ring and red as dawn, up
+to her lips, as if a sudden impulse prompted her now to conceal something
+of her pleasure.
+
+"Le piace?"
+
+It came to him softly over the roses.
+
+Maurice said nothing, but took her hand and looked at her. Salvatore was
+fastening up the boat and putting the oars into their places, and getting
+his jacket and hat.
+
+What a transformation it was, making an almost new Maddalena! This
+festival dress was really quite wonderful. He felt inclined to touch it
+here and there, to turn Maddalena round for new aspects, as a child turns
+round a marvellous doll.
+
+Maddalena wore a tudischina, a bodice of blue cotton velvet, ornamented
+with yellow silken fringes, and opening over the breast to show a section
+of snowy white edged with little buttons of sparkling steel. Her
+petticoat--the sinava--was of pea-green silk and thread, and was
+partially covered by an apron, a real coquette of an apron, white and
+green, with little pockets and puckers, and a green rosette where the
+strings met round the supple waist. Her sleeves were of white muslin,
+bound with yellow silk ribbons, and her stockings were blue, the color of
+the bodice. On her feet were shining shoes of black leather, neatly tied
+with small, black ribbons, and over her shoulders was a lovely shawl of
+blue and white with a pattern of flowers. She wore nothing on her head,
+but in her ears were heavy ear-rings, and round her neck was a thin
+silver chain with bright-blue stones threaded on it here and there.
+
+"Maddalena!" Maurice said, at last. "You are a queen to-day!"
+
+He stopped, then he added:
+
+"No, you are a siren to-day, the siren I once fancied you might be."
+
+"A siren, signorino? What is that?"
+
+"An enchantress of the sea with a voice that makes men--that makes men
+feel they cannot go, they cannot leave it."
+
+Maddalena lifted the roses a little higher to hide her face, but Maurice
+saw that her eyes were still smiling, and it seemed to him that she
+looked even more radiantly happy than when she had taken his hands to
+spring down to the beach.
+
+Now Salvatore came up in his glory of a dark-blue suit, with a gay shirt
+of pink-and-white striped cotton, fastened at the throat with long, pink
+strings that had tasselled ends, a scarlet bow-tie with a brass anchor
+and the Italian flag thrust through it, yellow shoes, and a black hat,
+placed well over the left ear. Upon the forefinger of his left hand he
+displayed a thick snake-ring of tarnished metal, and he had a large,
+overblown rose in his button-hole. His mustaches had been carefully
+waxed, his hair cropped, and his hawklike, subtle, and yet violent face
+well washed for the great occasion. With bold familiarity he seized
+Maurice's hand.
+
+"Buon giorno, signore. Come sta lei?"
+
+"Benissimo."
+
+"And Maddalena, signore? What do you think of Maddalena?"
+
+He looked at his girl with a certain pride, and then back at Maurice
+searchingly.
+
+"Maddalena is beautiful to-day," Maurice answered, quickly. He did not
+want to discuss her with her father, whom he longed to be rid of, whom he
+meant to get rid of if possible at the fair. Surely it would be easy to
+give him the slip there. He would be drinking with his companions, other
+fishermen and contadini, or playing cards, or--yes, that was an idea!
+
+"Salvatore!" Maurice exclaimed, catching hold of the fisherman's arm.
+
+"Signore?"
+
+"There'll be donkeys at the fair, eh?"
+
+"Donkeys--per Dio! Why, last year there were over sixty, and--"
+
+"And isn't there a donkey auction sometimes, towards the end of the day,
+when they go cheap?"
+
+"Si, signore! Si, signore!"
+
+The fisherman's greedy little eyes were fixed on Maurice with keen
+interrogation.
+
+"Don't let us forget that," Maurice said, returning his gaze. "You're a
+good judge of a donkey?"
+
+Salvatore laughed.
+
+"Per Bacco! There won't be a man at San Felice that can beat me at that!"
+
+"Then perhaps you can do something for me. Perhaps you can buy me a
+donkey. Didn't I speak of it before?"
+
+"Si, signore. For the signora to ride when she comes back from Africa?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"For a lady to ride," Maurice answered, looking at Maddalena.
+
+Salvatore made a clicking noise with his tongue, a noise that suggested
+eating. Then he spat vigorously and took from his jacket-pocket a long,
+black cigar. This was evidently going to be a great day for him.
+
+"Avanti, signorino! Avanti!"
+
+Gaspare was shouting and waving his hat frantically from the road.
+
+"Come along, Maddalena!"
+
+They left the beach and climbed the bank, Maddalena walking carefully in
+the shining shoes, and holding her green skirt well away from the bushes
+with both hands. Maurice hurried across the railway line without looking
+at it. He wanted to forget it. He was determined to forget it, and what
+it was bringing to Cattaro that afternoon. They reached the group of four
+donkeys which were standing patiently in the dusty white road.
+
+"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Gaspare, as Maddalena came full into his sight.
+"Madre mia! But you are like a burgisa dressed for the wedding-day, Donna
+Maddalena!"
+
+He wagged his head at her till the big roses above his ears shook like
+flowers in a wind.
+
+"Ora basta, ch' č tardu: jamu ad accumpagnari li Zitti!" he continued,
+pronouncing the time-honored sentence which, at a rustic wedding, gives
+the signal to the musicians to stop their playing, and to the assembled
+company the hint that the moment has come to escort the bride to the new
+home which her bridegroom has prepared for her.
+
+Maddalena laughed and blushed all over her face, and Salvatore shouted
+out a verse of a marriage song in high favor at Sicilian weddings:
+
+               "E cu saluti a li Zituzzi novi!
+               Chi bellu 'nguaggiamentu furtunatu!
+               Firma la menti, custanti lu cori,
+               E si cci arriva a lu jornu biatu--"
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice helped Maddalena onto her donkey, and paid and
+dismissed the boy who had brought it and Salvatore's beast from
+Marechiaro. Then he took out his watch.
+
+"A quarter-past ten," he said. "Off we go! Now, Gaspare--uno! due! tre!"
+
+They leaped simultaneously onto their donkeys, Salvatore clambered up on
+his, and the little cavalcade started off on the long, white road that
+ran close along the sea, Maddalena and Maurice in the van, Salvatore and
+Gaspare behind. Just at first they all kept close together, but Sicilians
+are very careful of their festa clothes, and soon Salvatore and Gaspare
+dropped farther behind to avoid the clouds of dust stirred up by the
+tripping feet of the donkeys in front. Their chattering voices died away,
+and when Maurice looked back he saw them at a distance which rendered his
+privacy with Maddalena more complete than anything he had dared to hope
+for so early in the day. Yet now that they were thus alone he felt as if
+he had nothing to say to her. He did not feel exactly constrained, but it
+seemed to him that, to-day, he could not talk the familiar commonplaces
+to her, or pay her obvious compliments. They might, they would please
+her, but something in himself would resent them. This was to be such a
+great day. He had wanted it with such ardor, he had been so afraid of
+missing it, he had gained it at the cost of so much self-respect, that it
+ought to be extraordinary from dawn to dark, and he and Maddalena to be
+unusual, intense--something, at least, more eager, more happy, more
+intimate than usual in it.
+
+And then, too, as he looked at her riding along by the sea, with her
+young head held rather high and a smile of innocent pride in her eyes, he
+remembered that this day was their good-bye. Maddalena did not know that.
+Probably she did not think about the future. But he knew it. They might
+meet again. They would doubtless meet again. But it would all be
+different. He would be a serious married man, who could no longer frolic
+as if he were still a boy like Gaspare. This was the last day of his
+intimate friendship with Maddalena.
+
+That seemed to him very strange. He had become accustomed to her society,
+to her naďve curiosity, her girlish, simple gayety, so accustomed to it
+all that he could not imagine life without it, could scarcely realize
+what life had been before he knew Maddalena. It seemed to him that he
+must have always known Maddalena. And she--what did she feel about that?
+
+"Maddalena!" he said.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+She turned her head and glanced at him, smiling, as if she were sure of
+hearing something pleasant. To-day, in her pretty festa dress, she looked
+intended for happiness. Everything about her conveyed the suggestion that
+she was expectant of joy. The expression in her eyes was a summons to the
+world to be very kind and good to her, to give her only pleasant things,
+things that could not harm her.
+
+"Maddalena, do you feel as if you had known me long?"
+
+She nodded her head.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"How long?"
+
+She spread out one hand with the fingers held apart.
+
+"Oh, signore--but always! I feel as if I had known you always."
+
+"And yet it's only a few days."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+She acquiesced calmly. The problem did not seem to puzzle her, the
+problem of this feeling so ill-founded. It was so. Very well, then--so it
+was.
+
+"And," he went on, "do you feel as if you would always know me?"
+
+"Si, signore. Of course."
+
+"But I shall go away, I am going away."
+
+For a moment her face clouded. But the influence of joy was very strong
+upon her to-day, and the cloud passed.
+
+"But you will come back, signorino. You will always come back."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+A pretty slyness crept into her face, showed in the curve of the young
+lips, in the expression of the young eyes.
+
+"Because you like to be here, because you like the Siciliani. Isn't it
+true?"
+
+"Yes," he said, almost passionately. "It's true! Ah, Maddalena--"
+
+But at this moment a group of people from Marechiaro suddenly appeared
+upon the road beside them, having descended from the village by a
+mountain-path. There were exclamations, salutations. Maddalena's gown was
+carefully examined by the women of the party. The men exchanged
+compliments with Maurice. Then Salvatore and Gaspare, seeing friends,
+came galloping up, shouting, in a cloud of dust. A cavalcade was formed,
+and henceforth Maurice was unable to exchange any more confidences with
+Maddalena. He felt vexed at first, but the boisterous merriment of all
+these people, their glowing anticipation of pleasure, soon infected him.
+His heart was lightened of its burden and the spirit of the careless boy
+awoke in him. He would take no thought for the morrow, he would be able
+to take no thought so long as he was in this jocund company. As they
+trotted forward in a white mist along the shining sea Maurice was one of
+the gayest among them. No laugh rang out more frequently than his, no
+voice chatted more vivaciously. The conscious effort which at first he
+had to make seemed to give him an impetus, to send him onward with a rush
+so that he outdistanced his companions. Had any one observed him closely
+during that ride to the fair he might well have thought that here was a
+nature given over to happiness, a nature that was utterly sunny in the
+sun.
+
+They passed through the town of Cattaro, where was the station for
+Marechiaro. For a moment Maurice felt a pang of self-contempt, and of
+something more, of something that was tender, pitiful even, as he thought
+of Hermione's expectation disappointed. But it died away, or he thrust
+it away. The long street was full of people, either preparing to start
+for the fair themselves or standing at their doors to watch their friends
+start. Donkeys were being saddled and decorated with flowers. Tall,
+painted carts were being harnessed to mules. Visions of men being
+lathered and shaved, of women having their hair dressed or their hair
+searched, Sicilian fashion, of youths trying to curl upward scarcely born
+mustaches, of children being hastily attired in clothes which made them
+wriggle and squint, came to the eyes from houses in which privacy was not
+so much scorned as unthought of, utterly unknown. Turkeys strolled in and
+out among the toilet-makers. Pigs accompanied their mistresses from
+doorway to doorway as dogs accompany the women of other countries. And
+the cavalcade of the people of Marechiaro was hailed from all sides with
+pleasantries and promises to meet at the fair, with broad jokes or
+respectful salutations. Many a "Benedicite!" or "C'ci basu li mano!"
+greeted Maurice. Many a berretto was lifted from heads that he had never
+seen to his knowledge before. He was made to feel by all that he was
+among friends, and as he returned the smiles and salutations he
+remembered the saying Hermione had repeated: "Every Sicilian, even if he
+wears a long cap and sleeps in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman," and
+he thought it very true.
+
+It seemed as if they would never get away from the street. At every
+moment they halted. One man begged them to wait a moment till his donkey
+was saddled, so that he might join them. Another, a wine-shop keeper,
+insisted on Maurice's testing his moscato, and thereupon Maurice felt
+obliged to order glasses all round, to the great delight of Gaspare, who
+always felt himself to be glorified by the generosity of his padrone, and
+who promptly took the proceedings in charge, measured out the wine in
+appropriate quantities, handed it about, and constituted himself master
+of the ceremony. Already, at eleven o'clock, brindisi were invented, and
+Maurice was called upon to "drop into poetry." Then Maddalena caught
+sight of some girl friends, and must needs show them all her finery. For
+this purpose she solemnly dismounted from her donkey to be closely
+examined on the pavement, turned about, shook forth her pea-green skirt,
+took off her chain for more minute inspection, and measured the silken
+fringes of her shawl in order to compare them with other shawls which
+were hastily brought out from a house near-by.
+
+But Gaspare, always a little ruthless with women, soon tired of such
+vanities.
+
+"Avanti! Avanti!" he shouted. "Dio mio! Le donne sono pazze! Andiamo!
+Andiamo!"
+
+He hustled Maddalena, who yielded, blushing and laughing, to his
+importunities, and at last they were really off again, and drowned in a
+sea of odor as they passed some buildings where lemons were being packed
+to be shipped away from Sicily. This smell seemed to Maurice to be the
+very breath of the island. He drank it in eagerly. Lemons, lemons, and
+the sun! Oranges, lemons, yellow flowers under the lemons, and the sun!
+Always yellow, pale yellow, gold yellow, red-gold yellow, and white, and
+silver-white, the white of the roads, the silver-white of dusty olive
+leaves, and green, the dark, lustrous, polished green of orange leaves,
+and purple and blue, the purple of sea, the blue of sky. What a riot of
+talk it was, and what a riot of color! It made Maurice feel almost drunk.
+It was heady, this island of the south--heady in the summer-time. It had
+a powerful influence, an influence that was surely an excuse for much.
+Ah, the stay-at-homes, who condemned the far-off passions and violences
+of men! What did they know of the various truths of the world? How should
+one in Clapham judge one at the fair of San Felice? Avanti! Avanti!
+Avanti along the blinding white road by the sea, to the village on which
+great Etna looked down, not harshly for all its majesty. Nature
+understood. And God, who made Nature, who was behind Nature--did not He
+understand? There is forgiveness surely in great hearts, though the small
+hearts have no space to hold it.
+
+Something like this Maurice thought for a moment, ere a large
+thoughtlessness swept over him, bred of the sun and the odors, the
+movement, the cries and laughter of his companions, the gay gown and the
+happy glances of Maddalena, even of the white dust that whirled up from
+the feet of the cantering donkeys.
+
+And so, ever laughing, ever joking, gayly, almost tumultuously, they
+rushed upon the fair.
+
+San Felice is a large village in the plain at the foot of Etna. It lies
+near the sea between Catania and Messina, but beyond the black and
+forbidding lava land. Its patron saint, Protettore di San Felice, is
+Sant' Onofrio, and this was his festival. In the large, old church in the
+square, which was the centre of the life of the fiera, his image,
+smothered in paint, sumptuously decorated with red and gold and bunches
+of artificial flowers, was exposed under a canopy with pillars; and thin
+squares of paper reproducing its formal charms--the oval face with large
+eyes and small, straight nose, the ample forehead, crowned with hair that
+was brought down to a point in the centre, the undulating, divided beard
+descending upon the breast, one hand holding a book, the other upraised
+in a blessing--were sold for a soldo to all who would buy them.
+
+The first thing the party from Isola Bella and from Marechiaro did, when
+they had stabled their donkeys at Don Leontini's, in the Via Bocca di
+Leone, was to pay the visit of etiquette to Sant' Onofrio. Their laughter
+was stilled at the church doorway, through which women and men draped in
+shawls, lads and little children, were coming and going. Their faces
+assumed expressions of superstitious reverence and devotion. And, going
+up one by one to the large image of the saint, they contemplated it with
+awe, touched its hand or the hem of its robe, made the sign of the cross,
+and retreated, feeling that they were blessed for the day.
+
+Maddalena approached the saint with Maurice and Gaspare. She and Gaspare
+touched the hand that held the book, made the sign of the cross, then
+stared at Maurice to see why he did nothing. He quickly followed their
+example. Maddalena, who was pulling some of the roses from her tight
+bouquet, whispered to him:
+
+"Sant' Onofrio will bring us good-fortune."
+
+"Davvero?" he whispered back.
+
+"Si! Si!" said Gaspare, nodding his head.
+
+While Maddalena laid her flowers upon the lap of the saint, Gaspare
+bought from a boy three sheets of paper containing Sant' Onofrio's
+reproduction, and three more showing the effigies of San Filadelfo, Sant'
+Alfio, and San Cirino.
+
+"Ecco, Donna Maddalena! Ecco, signorino!"
+
+He distributed his purchases, keeping two for himself. These last he very
+carefully and solemnly folded up and bestowed in the inner pocket of his
+jacket, which contained a leather portfolio, given to him by Maurice to
+carry his money in.
+
+"Ecco!" he said, once more, as he buttoned the flap of the pocket as a
+precaution against thieves.
+
+And with that final exclamation he dismissed all serious thoughts.
+
+"Mangiamo, signorino!" he said. "Ora basta!"
+
+And they went forth into the sunshine. Salvatore was talking to some
+fishermen from Catania upon the steps. They cast curious glances at
+Maurice as he came out with Maddalena, and, when Salvatore went off with
+his daughter and the forestiere, they laughed among themselves and
+exchanged some remarks that were evidently merry. But Maurice did not
+heed them. He was not a self-conscious man. And Maddalena was far too
+happy to suppose that any one could be saying nasty things about her.
+
+"Where are we going to eat?" asked Maurice.
+
+"This way, this way, signorino!" replied Gaspare, elbowing a passage
+through the crowd. "You must follow me. I know where to go. I have many
+friends here."
+
+The truth of this statement was speedily made manifest. Almost every
+third person they met saluted Gaspare, some kissing him upon both cheeks,
+others grasping his hand, others taking him familiarly by the arm. Among
+the last was a tall boy with jet-black, curly hair and a long, pale face,
+whom Gaspare promptly presented to his padrone, by the name of Amedeo
+Buccini.
+
+"Amedeo is a parrucchiere, signorino," he said, "and my compare, and the
+best dancer in San Felice. May he eat with us?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+Gaspare informed Amedeo, who took off his hat, held it in his hand, and
+smiled all over his face with pleasure.
+
+"Yes, Gaspare is my compare, signore," he affirmed. "Compare, compare,
+compareddu"--he glanced at Gaspare, who joined in with him:
+
+               "Compare, compare, compareddu,
+               Io ti voglio molto bene,
+               Mangiamo sempre insieme--
+               Mangiamo carne e riso
+               E andiamo in Paradiso!"
+
+"Carne e riso--si!" cried Maurice, laughing. "But Paradise! Must you go
+to Paradise directly afterwards, before the dancing and before the
+procession and before the fireworks?"
+
+"No, signore," said Gaspare. "When we are very old, when we cannot dance
+any more--non č vero, Amedeo?--then we will go to Paradiso."
+
+"Yes," agreed the tall boy, quite seriously, "then we will go to
+Paradiso."
+
+"And I, too," said Maurice; "and Maddalena, but not till then."
+
+What a long time away that would be!
+
+"Here is the ristorante!"
+
+They had reached a long room with doors open onto the square, opposite to
+the rows of booths which were set up under the shadow of the church.
+Outside of it were many small tables and numbers of chairs on which
+people were sitting, contemplating the movement of the crowd of buyers
+and sellers, smoking, drinking syrups, gazzosa, and eating ices and flat
+biscuits.
+
+Gaspare guided them through the throng to a long table set on a sanded
+floor.
+
+"Ecco, signorino!"
+
+He installed Maurice at the top of the table.
+
+"And you sit here, Donna Maddalena."
+
+He placed her at Maurice's right hand, and was going to sit down himself
+on the left, when Salvatore roughly pushed in before him, seized the
+chair, sat in it, and leaned his arms on the table with a loud laugh that
+sounded defiant. An ugly look came into Gaspare's face.
+
+"Macchč--" he began, angrily.
+
+But Maurice silenced him with a quick look.
+
+"Gaspare, you come here, by Maddalena!"
+
+"Ma--"
+
+"Come along, Gasparino, and tell us what we are to have. You must order
+everything. Where's the cameriere? Cameriere! Cameriere!"
+
+He struck on his glass with a fork. A waiter came running.
+
+"Don Gaspare will order for us all," said Maurice to him, pointing to
+Gaspare.
+
+His diplomacy was successful. Gaspare's face cleared, and in a moment he
+was immersed in an eager colloquy with the waiter, another friend of his
+from Marechiaro. Amedeo Buccini took a place by Gaspare, and all those
+from Marechiaro, who evidently considered that they belonged to the
+Inglese's party for the day, arranged themselves as they pleased and
+waited anxiously for the coming of the macaroni.
+
+A certain formality now reigned over the assembly. The movement of the
+road in the outside world by the sea had stirred the blood, had loosened
+tongues and quickened spirits. But a meal in a restaurant, with a rich
+English signore presiding at the head of the table, was an unaccustomed
+ceremony. Dark faces that had been lit up with laughter now looked almost
+ludicrously discreet. Brown hands which had been in constant activity,
+talking as plainly, and more expressively, than voices, now lay limply
+upon the white cloth or were placed upon knees motionless as the knees of
+statues. And all eyes were turned towards the giver of the feast, mutely
+demanding of him a signal of conduct to guide his inquiring guests. But
+Maurice, too, felt for the moment tongue-tied. He was very sensitive to
+influences, and his present position, between Maddalena and her father,
+created within him a certain confusion of feelings, an odd sensation of
+being between two conflicting elements. He was conscious of affection and
+of enmity, both close to him, both strong, the one ready to show itself,
+the other determined to remain in hiding. He glanced at Salvatore, and
+met the fisherman's keen gaze. Behind the instant smile in the glittering
+eyes he divined, rather than saw, the shadow of his hatred. And for a
+moment he wondered. Why should Salvatore hate him? It was reasonable to
+hate a man for a wrong done, even for a wrong deliberately contemplated
+with intention--the intention of committing it. But he had done no real
+wrong to Salvatore. Nor had he any evil intention with regard to him or
+his. So far he had only brought pleasure into their lives, his life and
+Maddalena's--pleasure and money. If there had been any secret pain
+engendered by their mutual intercourse it was his. And this day was the
+last of their intimacy, though Salvatore and Maddalena did not know it.
+Suddenly a desire, an almost weak desire, came to him to banish
+Salvatore's distrust of him, a distrust which he was more conscious of at
+this moment than ever before.
+
+He did not know of the muttered comments of the fishermen from Catania as
+he and Maddalena passed down the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio.
+But Salvatore's sharp ears had caught them and the laughter that followed
+them, and his hot blood was on fire. The words, the laughter had touched
+his sensitive Sicilian pride--the pride of the man who means never to be
+banished from the Piazza--as a knife touches a raw wound. And as Maurice
+had set a limit to his sinning--his insincerity to Hermione, his betrayal
+of her complete trust in him, nothing more--so Salvatore now, while he
+sat at meat with the Inglese, mentally put a limit to his own
+complaisance, a complaisance which had been born of his intense avarice.
+To-day he would get all he could out of the Inglese--money, food, wine, a
+donkey--who knew what? And then--good-bye to soft speeches. Those
+fishermen, his friends, his comrades, his world, in fact, should have
+their mouths shut once for all. He knew how to look after his girl, and
+they should know that he knew, they and all Marechiaro, and all San
+Felice, and all Cattaro. His limit, like Maurice's, was that day of the
+fair, and it was nearly reached. For the hours were hurrying towards the
+night and farewells.
+
+Moved by his abrupt desire to stand well with everybody during this last
+festa, Maurice began to speak to Salvatore of the donkey auction. When
+would it begin?
+
+"Chi lo sa?"
+
+No one knew. In Sicily all feasts are movable. Even mass may begin an
+hour too late or an hour too early. One thought the donkey auction would
+start at fourteen, another at sixteen o'clock. Gaspare was imperiously
+certain, over the macaroni, which had now made its appearance, that the
+hour was seventeen. There were to be other auctions, auctions of
+wonderful things. A clock that played music--the "Marcia Reale" and the
+"Tre Colori"--was to be put up; suits of clothes, too; boots, hats, a
+chair that rocked like a boat on the sea, a revolver ornamented with
+ivory. Already--no one knew when, for no one had missed him--he had been
+to view these treasures. As he spoke of them tongues were loosed and eyes
+shone with excitement. Money was in the air. Prices were passionately
+discussed, values debated. All down the table went the words "soldi,"
+"lire," "lire sterline," "biglietti da cinque," "biglietti da dieci."
+Salvatore's hatred died away, suffocated for the moment under the weight
+of his avarice. A donkey--yes, he meant to get a donkey with the
+stranger's money. But why stop there? Why not have the clock and the
+rocking-chair and the revolver? His sharpness of the Sicilian, a
+sharpness almost as keen and sure as that of the Arab, divined the
+intensity, the recklessness alive in the Englishman to-day, bred of that
+limit, "my last day of the careless life," to which his own limit was
+twin-brother, but of which he knew nothing. And as Maurice was intense
+to-day, because there were so few hours left to him for intensity, so was
+Salvatore intense in a different way, but for a similar reason. They were
+walking in step without being aware of it. Or were they not rather racing
+neck to neck, like passionate opponents?
+
+There was little time. Then they must use what there was to the full.
+They must not let one single moment find them lazy, indifferent.
+
+[Illustration: "'I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,' SHE SAID"]
+
+Under the cover of the flood of talk Maurice turned to Maddalena. She was
+taking no part in it, but was eating her macaroni gently, as if it
+were a new and wonderful food. So Maurice thought as he looked at her.
+To-day there was something strange, almost pathetic, to him in Maddalena,
+a softness, an innocent refinement that made him imagine her in another
+life than hers, and with other companions, in a life as free but less
+hard, with companions as natural but less ruthless to women.
+
+"Maddalena," he said to her. "They all want to buy things at the
+auction."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, don't you want to buy something?"
+
+He was testing her, testing her memory. She looked at him above her fork,
+from which the macaroni streamed down.
+
+"I am content without anything, signorino," she said.
+
+"Without the blue dress and the ear-rings, longer than that?" He measured
+imaginary ear-rings in the air. "Have you forgotten, Maddalena?"
+
+She blushed and bent over her plate. She had not forgotten. All the day
+since she rose at dawn she had been thinking of Maurice's old promise.
+But she did not know that he remembered it, and his remembrance of it
+came to her now as a lovely surprise. He bent his head down nearer to
+her.
+
+"When they are all at the auction, we will go to buy the blue dress and
+the ear-rings," he almost whispered. "We will go by ourselves. Shall we?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Her voice was very small and her cheeks still held their flush. She
+glanced, with eyes that were unusually conscious, to right and left of
+her, to see if the neighbors had noticed their colloquy. And that look of
+consciousness made Maurice suddenly understand that this limit which he
+had put to his sinning--so he had called it with a sort of angry mental
+sincerity, summoned, perhaps, to match the tremendous sincerity of his
+wife which he was meeting with a lie to-day--his sinning against Hermione
+was also a limit to something else. Had he not sinned against Maddalena,
+sinned when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that he delighted to
+be with her? Was he not sinning now when he promised to buy for her the
+most beautiful things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself
+that his fault against Maddalena was more grave, more unforgivable than
+his fault against Hermione. But then a sudden anger that was like a
+storm, against his own condemnation of himself, swept through him. He had
+come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and here he was giving himself up
+to gloom, to absurd self-torture. Where was his natural careless
+temperament? To-day his soul was full of shadows, like the soul of a man
+going to meet a doom.
+
+"Where's the wine?" he called to Gaspare. "Wine, cameriere, wine!"
+
+"You must not drink wine with the pasta, signorino!" cried Gaspare. "Only
+afterwards, with the vitello."
+
+"Have you ordered vitello? Capital! But I've finished my pasta and I'm
+thirsty. Well, what do you want to buy at the auction, Gaspare, and you,
+Amedeo, and you Salvatore?"
+
+He plunged into the talk and made Salvatore show his keen desires,
+encouraging and playing with his avarice, now holding it off for a
+moment, then coaxing it as one coaxes an animal, stroking it, tempting it
+to a forward movement. The wine went round now, for the vitello was on
+the table, and the talk grew more noisy, the laughter louder. Outside,
+too, the movement and the tumult of the fair were increasing. Cries of
+men selling their wares rose up, the hard melodies of a piano-organ, and
+a strange and ecclesiastical chant sung by three voices that, repeated
+again and again, at last attracted Maurice's attention.
+
+"What's that?" he asked of Gaspare. "Are those priests chanting?"
+
+"Priests! No, signore. Those are the Romani."
+
+"Romans here! What are they doing?"
+
+"They have a cart decorated with flags, signorino, and they are selling
+lemon-water and ices. All the people say that they are Romans and that is
+how they sing in Rome."
+
+The long and lugubrious chant of the ice-venders rose up again, strident
+and melancholy as a song chanted over a corpse.
+
+"It's funny to sing like that to sell ices," Maurice said. "It sounds
+like men at a funeral."
+
+"Oh, they are very good ices, signorino. The Romans make splendid ices."
+
+Turkey followed the vitello.
+
+Maurice's guests were now completely at ease and perfectly happy. The
+consciousness that all this was going to be paid for, that they would not
+have to put their hands in their pockets for a soldo, warmed their hearts
+as the wine warmed their bodies. Amedeo's long, white face was becoming
+radiant, and even Salvatore softened towards the Inglese. A sort of
+respect, almost furtive, came to him for the wealth that could carelessly
+entertain this crowd of people, that could buy clocks, chairs, donkeys at
+pleasure, and scarcely know that soldi were gone, scarcely miss them. As
+he attacked his share of the turkey vigorously, picking up the bones with
+his fingers and tearing the flesh away with his white teeth, he tried to
+realize what such wealth must mean to the possessor of it, an effort
+continually made by the sharp-witted, very poor man. And this wealth--for
+the moment some of it was at his command! To ask to-day would be to have.
+Instinctively he knew that, and felt like one with money in the bank. If
+only it might be so to-morrow and for many days! He began to regret the
+limit, almost to forget the sound of the laughter of the Catania
+fishermen upon the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio. His pride was
+going to sleep, and his avarice was opening its eyes wider.
+
+When the meal was over they went out onto the pavement to take coffee in
+the open air. The throng was much greater than it had been when they
+entered, for people were continually arriving from the more distant
+villages, and two trains had come in from Messina and Catania. It was
+difficult to find a table. Indeed, it might have been impossible had not
+Gaspare ruthlessly dislodged a party of acquaintances who were
+comfortably established around one in a prominent position.
+
+"I must have a table for my padrone," he said. "Go along with you!"
+
+And they meekly went, smiling, and without ill-will--indeed, almost as if
+they had received a compliment.
+
+"But, Gaspare," began Maurice, "I can't--"
+
+"Here is a chair for you, signorino. Take it quickly."
+
+"At any rate, let us offer them something."
+
+"Much better spare your soldi now, signorino, and buy something at the
+auction. That clock plays the 'Tre Colori' just like a band."
+
+"Buy it. Here is some money."
+
+He thrust some notes into the boy's ready hand.
+
+"Grazie, signorino. Ecco la musica!"
+
+In the distance there rose the blare of a processional march from "Aďda,"
+and round the corner of the Via di Polifemo came a throng of men and boys
+in dark uniforms, with epaulets and cocked hats with flying plumes,
+blowing with all their might into wind instruments of enormous size.
+
+"That is the musica of the cittŕ, signore," explained Amedeo. "Afterwards
+there will be the Musica Mascagni and the Musica Leoncavallo."
+
+"Mamma mia! And will they all play together?"
+
+"No, signore. They have quarrelled. At Pasqua we had no music, and the
+archpriest was hooted by all in the Piazza."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Non lo so. I think he had forbidden the Musica Mascagni to play at Madre
+Lucia's funeral, and the Musica Mascagni went to fight with the Musica
+della cittŕ. To-day they will all play, because it is the festa of the
+Santo Patrono, but even for him they will not play together."
+
+The bandsmen had now taken their places upon a wooden dais exactly
+opposite to the restaurant, and were indulging in a military rendering of
+"Celeste Aďda," which struck most of the Sicilians at the small tables to
+a reverent silence. Maddalena's eyes had become almost round with
+pleasure, Gaspare was singing the air frankly with Amedeo, and even
+Salvatore seemed soothed and humanized, as he sipped his coffee, puffed
+at a thin cigar, and eyed the women who were slowly sauntering up and
+down to show their finery. At the windows of most of the neighboring
+houses appeared parties of dignified gazers, important personages of the
+town, who owned small balconies commanding the piazza, and who now
+stepped forth upon these coigns of vantage, and leaned upon the rails
+that they might see and be seen by the less favored ones below. Amedeo
+and Gaspare began to name these potentates. The stout man with a gray
+mustache, white trousers, and a plaid shawl over his shoulders was Signor
+Torloni, the syndic of San Felice. The tall, angry-looking gentleman,
+with bulging, black eyes and wrinkled cheeks, was Signor Carata, the
+avvocato; and the lady in black and a yellow shawl was his wife, who was
+the daughter of the syndic. Close by was Signorina Maria Sacchetti, the
+beauty of San Felice, already more than plump, but with a good
+complexion, and hair so thick that it stood out from her satisfied face
+as if it were trained over a trellis. She wore white, and long, thread
+gloves which went above her elbows. Maddalena regarded her with awe when
+Amedeo mentioned a rumor that she was going to be "promised" to Dr.
+Marinelli, who was to be seen at her side, wearing a Gibus hat and
+curling a pair of gigantic black mustaches.
+
+Maurice listened to the music and the chatter which, silenced by the
+arrival of the music, had now burst forth again, with rather indifferent
+ears. He wanted to get away somewhere and to be alone with Maddalena. The
+day was passing on. Soon night would be falling. The fair would be at an
+end. Then would come the ride back, and then----But he did not care to
+look forward into that future. He had not done so yet. He would not do so
+now. It would be better, when the time came, to rush upon it blindly.
+Preparation, forethought, would only render him unnatural. And he must
+seem natural, utterly natural, in his insincere surprise, in his
+insincere regret.
+
+"Pay for the coffee, Gaspare," he said, giving the boy some money. "Now I
+want to walk about and see everything. Where are the donkeys?"
+
+He glanced at Salvatore.
+
+"Oh, signore," said Gaspare, "they are outside the town in the
+watercourse that runs under the bridge--you know, that broke down this
+spring where the line is? They have only just finished mending it."
+
+"I remember your telling me."
+
+"And you were so glad the signora was travelling the other way."
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+He spoke hastily. Salvatore was on his feet.
+
+"What hour have we?"
+
+Maurice looked at his watch.
+
+"Half-past two already! I say, Salvatore, you mustn't forget the
+donkeys."
+
+Salvatore came close up to him.
+
+"Signore," he began, in a low voice, "what do you wish me to do?"
+
+"Bid for a good donkey."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"For the best donkey they put up for sale."
+
+Salvatore began to look passionately eager.
+
+"Si, signore. And if I get it?"
+
+"Come to me and I will give you the money to pay."
+
+"Si, signore. How high shall I go?"
+
+Gaspare was listening intently, with a hard face and sullen eyes. His
+whole body seemed to be disapproving what Maurice was doing. But he said
+nothing. Perhaps he felt that to-day it would be useless to try to govern
+the actions of his padrone.
+
+"How high? Well"--Maurice felt that, before Gaspare, he must put a limit
+to his price, though he did not care what it was--"say a hundred. Here,
+I'll give it you now."
+
+He put his hand into his pocket and drew out his portfolio.
+
+"There's the hundred."
+
+Salvatore took it eagerly, spread it over his hand, stared at it, then
+folded it with fingers that seemed for the moment almost delicate, and
+put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He meant to go presently and
+show it to the fishermen of Catania, who had laughed upon the steps of
+the church, and explain matters to them a little. They thought him a
+fool. Well, he would soon make them understand who was the fool.
+
+"Grazie, signore!"
+
+He said it through his teeth. Maurice turned to Gaspare. He felt the
+boy's stern disapproval of what he had done, and wanted, if possible, to
+make amends.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, "here is a hundred lire for you. I want you to go to
+the auction and to bid for anything you think worth having. Buy
+something for your mother and father, for the house, some nice things!"
+
+"Grazie, signore."
+
+He took the note, but without alacrity, and his face was still lowering.
+
+"And you, signore?" he asked.
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. Are you not coming with me to the auction? It will be better for
+you to be there to choose the things."
+
+For an instant Maurice felt irritated. Was he never to be allowed a
+moment alone with Maddalena?
+
+"Oh, but I'm no good at----" he began.
+
+Then he stopped. To-day he must be birbante--on his guard. Once the
+auction was in full swing--so he thought--Salvatore and Gaspare would be
+as they were when they gambled beside the sea. They would forget
+everything. It would be easy to escape. But till that moment came he must
+be cautious.
+
+"Of course I'll come," he exclaimed, heartily. "But you must do the
+bidding, Gaspare."
+
+The boy looked less sullen.
+
+"Va bene, signorino. I shall know best what the things are worth. And
+Salvatore"--he glanced viciously at the fisherman--"can go to the
+donkeys. I have seen them. They are poor donkeys this year."
+
+Salvatore returned his vicious glance and said something in dialect which
+Maurice did not understand. Gaspare's face flushed, and he was about to
+burst into an angry reply when Maurice touched his arm.
+
+"Come along, Gaspare!"
+
+As they got up, he whispered:
+
+"Remember what I said about to-day!"
+
+"Macchč----"
+
+Maurice closed his fingers tightly on Gaspare's arm.
+
+"Gaspare, you must remember! Afterwards what you like, but not to-day.
+Andiamo!"
+
+They all got up. The Musica della cittŕ was now playing a violent jig,
+undoubtedly composed by Bellini, who was considered almost as a child of
+San Felice, having been born close by at Catania.
+
+"Where are the women in the wonderful blue dresses?" Maurice asked, as
+they stepped into the road; "and the ear-rings? I haven't seen them yet."
+
+"They will come towards evening, signorino," replied Gaspare, "when it
+gets cool. They do not care to be in the sun dressed like that. It might
+spoil their things."
+
+Evidently the promenade of these proud beauties was an important
+function.
+
+"We must not miss them," Maurice said to Maddalena.
+
+She looked conscious.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"They will all be here this evening, signore," said Amedeo, "for the
+giuochi di fuoco."
+
+"The giuochi di fuoco--they will be at the end?"
+
+"Si, signore. After the giuochi di fuoco it is all finished."
+
+Maurice stifled a sigh. "It is all finished," Amedeo had said. But for
+him? For him there would be the ride home up the mountain, the arrival
+upon the terrace before the house of the priest. At what hour would he be
+there? It would be very late, perhaps nearly at dawn, in the cold, still,
+sad hour when vitality is at its lowest. And Hermione? Would she be
+sleeping? How would they meet? How would he----?
+
+"Andiamo! Andiamo!"
+
+He cried out almost angrily.
+
+"Which is the way?"
+
+"All the auctions are held outside the town, signore," said Amedeo.
+"Follow me."
+
+Proudly he took the lead, glad to be useful and important after the
+benefits that had been bestowed upon him, and hoping secretly that
+perhaps the rich Inglese would give him something to spend, too, since
+money was so plentiful for donkeys and clocks.
+
+"They are in the fiume, near the sea and the railway line."
+
+The railway line! When he heard that Maurice had a moment's absurd
+sensation of reluctance, a desire to hold back, such as comes to a man
+who is unexpectedly asked to confront some danger. It seemed to him that
+if he went to the watercourse he might be seen by Hermione and Artois as
+they passed by on their way to Marechiaro. But of course they were coming
+from Messina! What a fool he was to-day! His recklessness seemed to have
+deserted him just when he wanted it most. To-day he was not himself. He
+was a coward. What it was that made him a coward he did not tell himself.
+
+"Then we can all go together," he said. "Salvatore and all."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Salvatore's voice was close at his ear, and he knew by the sound of it
+that the fisherman was smiling.
+
+"We can all keep together, signore; then we shall be more gay."
+
+They threaded their way through the throng. The violent jig of Bellini
+died away gradually, till it was faint in the distance. At the end of the
+narrow street Maurice saw the large bulk of Etna. On this clear afternoon
+it looked quite close, almost as if, when they got out of the street,
+they would be at its very foot, and would have to begin to climb. Maurice
+remembered his wild longing to carry Maddalena off upon the sea, or to
+some eyrie in the mountains, to be alone with her in some savage place.
+Why not give all these people the slip now--somehow--when the fun of the
+fair was at its height, mount the donkeys and ride straight for the huge
+mountain? There were caverns there and desolate lava wastes; there were
+almost impenetrable beech forests. Sebastiano had told him tales of
+them, those mighty forests that climbed up to green lawns looking down
+upon the Lipari Isles. He thought of their silence and their shadows,
+their beds made of the drifted leaves of the autumn. There, would be no
+disturbance, no clashing of wills and of interests, but calm and silence
+and the time to love. He glanced at Maddalena. He could hardly help
+imagining that she knew what he was thinking of. Salvatore had dropped
+behind for a moment. Maurice did not know it, but the fisherman had
+caught sight of his comrades of Catania drinking in a roadside wine-shop,
+and had stopped to show them the note for a hundred francs, and to make
+them understand the position of affairs between him and the forestiere.
+Gaspare was talking eagerly to Amedeo about the things that were likely
+to be put up for sale at the auction.
+
+"Maddalena," Maurice said to the girl, in a low voice, "can you guess
+what I am thinking about?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"You see the mountain!"
+
+He pointed to the end of the little street.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"I am thinking that I should like to go there now with you."
+
+"Ma, signorino--the fiera!"
+
+Her voice sounded plaintive with surprise and she glanced at her
+pea-green skirt.
+
+"And this, signorino!"--she touched it carefully with her slim fingers.
+"How could I go in this?"
+
+"When the fair is over, then, and you are in your every-day gown,
+Maddalena, I should like to carry you off to Etna."
+
+"They say there are briganti there."
+
+"Brigands--would you be afraid of them with me?"
+
+"I don't know, signore. But what should we do there on Etna far away from
+the sea and from Marechiaro?"
+
+"We should"--he whispered in her ear, seizing this chance almost angrily,
+almost defiantly, with the thought of Salvatore in his mind--"we should
+love each other, Maddalena. It is quiet in the beech forests on Etna. No
+one would come to disturb us, and----"
+
+A chuckle close to his ear made him start. Salvatore's hand was on his
+arm, and Salvatore's face, looking wily and triumphant, was close to his.
+
+"Gaspare was wrong, there are splendid donkeys here. I have been talking
+to some friends who have seen them."
+
+There was a tramp of heavy boots on the stones behind them. The fishermen
+from Catania were coming to see the fun. Salvatore was in glory. To get
+all and give nothing was, in his opinion, to accomplish the legitimate
+aim of a man's life. And his friends, those who had dared to sneer and to
+whisper, and to imagine that he was selling his daughter for money, now
+knew the truth and were here to witness his ingenuity. Intoxicated by his
+triumph, he began to show off his power over the Inglese for the benefit
+of the tramplers behind. He talked to Maurice with a loud familiarity,
+kept laying his hand on Maurice's arm as they walked, and even called
+him, with a half-jocose intonation, "compare." Maurice sickened at his
+impertinence, but was obliged to endure it with patience, and this act of
+patience brought to the birth within him a sudden, fierce longing for
+revenge, a longing to pay Salvatore out for his grossness, his greed, his
+sly and leering affectation of playing the slave when he was really
+indicating to his compatriots that he considered himself the master.
+Again Maurice heard the call of the Sicilian blood within him, but this
+time it did not call him to the tarantella or to love. It called him to
+strike a blow. But this blow could only be struck through Maddalena,
+could only be struck if he were traitor to Hermione. For a moment he saw
+everything red. Again Salvatore called him "compare." Suddenly Maurice
+could not bear it.
+
+"Don't say that!" he said. "Don't call me that!"
+
+He had almost hissed the words out. Salvatore started, and for an
+instant, as they walked side by side, the two men looked at each other
+with eyes that told the truth. Then Salvatore, without asking for any
+explanation of Maurice's sudden outburst, said:
+
+"Va bene, signore, va bene! I thought for to-day we were all compares.
+Scusi, scusi."
+
+There was a bitterness of irony in his voice. As he finished he swept off
+his soft hat and then replaced it more over his left ear than ever.
+Maurice knew at once that he had done the unforgivable thing, that he had
+stabbed a Sicilian's amour propre in the presence of witnesses of his own
+blood. The fishermen from Catania had heard. He knew it from Salvatore's
+manner, and an odd sensation came to him that Salvatore had passed
+sentence upon him. In silence, and mechanically, he walked on to the end
+of the street. He felt like one who, having done something swiftly,
+thoughtlessly, is suddenly confronted with the irreparable, abruptly sees
+the future spread out before him bathed in a flash of crude light, the
+future transformed in a second by that act of his as a landscape is
+transformed by an earthquake or a calm sea by a hurricane.
+
+And when the watercourse came in sight, with its crowd, its voices, and
+its multitude of beasts, he looked at it dully for a moment, hardly
+realizing it.
+
+In Sicily the animal fairs are often held in the great watercourses that
+stretch down from the foot of the mountains to the sea, and that resemble
+huge highroads in the making, roads upon which the stones have been
+dumped ready for the steam-roller. In winter there is sometimes a torrent
+of water rushing through them, but in summer they are dry, and look like
+wounds gashed in the thickly growing lemon and orange groves. The
+trampling feet of beasts can do no harm to the stones, and these
+watercourses in the summer season are of no use to anybody. They are,
+therefore, often utilized at fair time. Cattle, donkeys, mules are driven
+down to them in squadrons. Painted Sicilian carts are ranged upon their
+banks, with sets of harness, and the auctioneers, whose business it is to
+sell miscellaneous articles, household furniture, stuffs, clocks,
+ornaments, frequently descend into them, and mount a heap of stones to
+gain command of their gaping audience of contadini and the shrewder
+buyers from the towns.
+
+The watercourse of San Felice was traversed at its mouth by the railway
+line from Catania to Messina, which crossed it on a long bridge supported
+by stone pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had said,
+had recently collapsed and was now nearly built up again. It was already
+in use, but the trains were obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in
+order not to shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed at each
+end to signal to the driver whether he was to stop or whether he might
+venture to go on. Beyond the watercourse, upon the side opposite to the
+town of San Felice, was a series of dense lemon groves, gained by a
+sloping bank of bare, crumbling earth, on the top of which, close to the
+line and exactly where it came to the bridge, was a group of four old
+olive-trees with gnarled, twisted trunks. These trees cast a patch of
+pleasant shade, from which all the bustle of the fair was visible, but at
+a distance, and as Maurice and his party came out of the village on the
+opposite bank, he whispered to Maddalena:
+
+"Maddalena!"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"Let's get away presently, you and I; let's go and sit under those trees.
+I want to talk to you quietly."
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+Her voice was lower even than his own.
+
+"Ecco, signore! Ecco!"
+
+Salvatore was pointing to a crowd of donkeys.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+"What is it, Gaspare?"
+
+"That is the man who is going to sell the clock!"
+
+The boy's face was intent. His eyes were shining, and his glum manner had
+vanished, under the influence of a keen excitement. Maurice realized that
+very soon he would be free. Once his friends were in the crowd of buyers
+and sellers everything but the chance of a bargain would be forgotten.
+His own blood quickened but for a different reason.
+
+"What beautiful carts!" he said. "We have no such carts in England!"
+
+"If you would like to buy a cart, signore----" began Salvatore.
+
+But Gaspare interrupted with violence.
+
+"Macchč! What is the use of a cart to the signorino? He is going away to
+England. How can he take a cart with him in the train?"
+
+"He can leave the cart with me," said Salvatore, with open impudence. "I
+can take care of it for the signore as well as the donkey."
+
+"Macchč!" cried Gaspare, furiously.
+
+Maurice took him by the arm.
+
+"Help me down the bank! Come on!"
+
+He began to run, pulling Gaspare with him. When they got to the bottom,
+he said:
+
+"It's all right, Gaspare. I'm not going to be such a fool as to buy a
+cart. Now, then, which way are we going?"
+
+"Signore, do you want to buy a very good donkey, a very strong donkey,
+strong enough to carry three Germans to the top of Etna? Come and see my
+donkey. He is very cheap. I make a special price because the signore is
+simpatico. All the English are simpatici. Come this way, signore! Gaspare
+knows me. Gaspare knows that I am not birbante."
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Look at this clock! It plays the 'Tre Colori.' It
+is worth twenty-five lire, but I will make a special price for you
+because you love Sicily and are like a Siciliano. Gaspare will tell
+you----"
+
+But Gaspare elbowed away his acquaintances roughly.
+
+"Let my padrone alone. He is not here to buy. He is only here to see the
+fair. Come on, signorino! Do not answer them. Do not take any notice. You
+must not buy anything or you will be cheated. Let me make the prices."
+
+"Yes, you make the prices. Per Bacco, how hot it is!"
+
+Maurice pulled his hat down over his eyes.
+
+"Maddalena, you'll get a sunstroke!" he said.
+
+"Oh no, signore. I am accustomed to the sun."
+
+"But to-day it's terrific!"
+
+Indeed, the masses of stones in the watercourse seemed to draw and to
+concentrate the sun-rays. The air was alive with minute and dancing
+specks of light, and in the distance, seen under the railway bridge, the
+sea looked hot, a fiery blue that was surely sweating in the glare of the
+afternoon. The crowd of donkeys, of cattle, of pigs--there were many pigs
+on sale--looked both dull and angry in the heat, and the swarms of
+Sicilians who moved slowly about among them, examining them critically,
+appraising their qualities and noting their defects, perspired in their
+festa clothes, which were mostly heavy and ill-adapted to summer-time. A
+small boy passed by, bearing in his arms a struggling turkey. He caught
+his foot in some stones, fell, bruised his forehead, and burst out
+crying, while the indignant and terrified bird broke away, leaving some
+feathers, and made off violently towards Etna. There was a roar of
+laughter from the people near. Some ran to catch the turkey, others
+picked up the boy. Salvatore had stopped to see this adventure, and was
+now at a little distance surrounded by the Catanesi, who were evidently
+determined to assist at his bidding for a donkey. The sight of the note
+for a hundred lire had greatly increased their respect for Salvatore, and
+with the Sicilian instinct to go, and to stay, where money is, they now
+kept close to their comrade, eying him almost with awe as one in
+possession of a fortune. Maurice saw them presently examining a group of
+donkeys. Salvatore, with an autocratic air, and the wild gestures
+peculiar to him, was evidently laying down the law as to what each animal
+was worth. The fishermen stood by, listening attentively. The fact of
+Salvatore's purchasing power gave him the right to pronounce an opinion.
+He was in glory. Maurice thanked Heaven for that. The man in glory is
+often the forgetful man. Salvatore, he thought, would not bother about
+his daughter and his banker for a little while. But how to get rid of
+Gaspare and Amedeo! It seemed to him that they would never leave his
+side.
+
+There were many wooden stands covered with goods for sale in the
+watercourse, with bales of stuff for suits and dresses, with hats and
+caps, shirts, cravats, boots and shoes, walking-sticks, shawls, household
+utensils, crockery, everything the contadino needs and loves. Gaspare,
+having money to lay out, considered it his serious duty to examine
+everything that was to be bought with slow minuteness. It did not matter
+whether the goods were suited to a masculine taste or not. He went into
+the mysteries of feminine attire with almost as much assiduity as a
+mother displays when buying a daughter's trousseau, and insisted upon
+Maurice sharing his interest and caution. All sense of humor, all boyish
+sprightliness vanished from him in this important epoch of his life. The
+suspicion, the intensity of the bargaining contadino came to the surface.
+His usually bright face was quite altered. He looked elderly, subtle, and
+almost Jewish as he slowly passed from stall to stall, testing, weighing,
+measuring, appraising.
+
+It seemed to Maurice that this progress would never end. Presently they
+reached a stand covered with women's shawls and with aprons.
+
+"Shall I buy an apron for my mother, signorino?" asked Gaspare.
+
+"Yes, certainly."
+
+Maurice did not know what else to say. The result of his consent was
+terrible. For a full half-hour they stood in the glaring sun, while
+Gaspare and Amedeo solemnly tried on aprons over their suits in the midst
+of a concourse of attentive contadini. In vain did Maurice say: "That's a
+pretty one. I should take that one." Some defect was always discoverable.
+The distant mother's taste was evidently peculiar and not to be easily
+suited, and Maurice, not being familiar with it, was unable to combat
+such assertions of Gaspare as that she objected to pink spots, or that
+she could never be expected to put on an apron before the neighbors if
+the stripes upon it were of different colors and there was no stitching
+round the hem. For the first time since he was in Sicily the heat began
+to affect him unpleasantly. His head felt as if it were compressed in an
+iron band, and the vision of Gaspare, eagerly bargaining, looking Jewish,
+and revolving slowly in aprons of different colors, shapes, and sizes,
+began to dance before his eyes. He felt desperate, and suddenly resolved
+to be frank.
+
+"Macchč!" Gaspare was exclaiming, with indignant gestures of protest to
+the elderly couple who were in charge of the aprons; "it is not worth two
+soldi! It is not fit to be thrown to the pigs, and you ask me----"
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+"Two lire--Madonna! Sangue di San Pancrazio, they ask me two lire!
+Macchč!" (He flung down the apron passionately upon the stall.) "Go and
+find Lipari people to buy your dirt; don't come to one from Marechiaro."
+
+He took up another apron.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+"One lira fifty? Madre mia, do you think I was born in a grotto on Etna
+and have never----"
+
+"Gaspare, listen to me!"
+
+"Scusi, signorino! I----"
+
+"I'm going over there to sit down in the shade for a minute. After that
+wine I drank at dinner I'm a bit sleepy."
+
+"Si, signore. Shall I come with you?"
+
+For once there was reluctance in his voice, and he looked down at the
+blue-and-white apron he had on with wistful eyes. It was a new joy to him
+to be bargaining in the midst of an attentive throng of his compatriots.
+
+"No, no. You stay here and spend the money. Bid for the clock when the
+auction comes on."
+
+"Oh, signore, but you must be here, too, then."
+
+"All right. Come and fetch me if you like. I shall be over there under
+the trees."
+
+He waved his hand vaguely towards the lemon groves.
+
+"Now, choose a good apron. Don't let them cheat you."
+
+"Macchč!"
+
+The boy laughed loudly, and turned eagerly to the stall again.
+
+"Come, Maddalena!"
+
+Maurice drew her quickly, anxiously, out of the crowd, and they began to
+walk across the watercourse towards the farther bank and the group of
+olive-trees. Salvatore had forgotten them. So had Gaspare. Both father
+and servant were taken by the fascination of the fair. At last! But how
+late it must be! How many hours had already fled away! Maurice scarcely
+dared to look at his watch. He feared to see the time. While they walked
+he said nothing to Maddalena, but when they reached the bank he took her
+arm and helped her up it, and when they were at the top he drew a long
+breath.
+
+"Are you tired, signorino?"
+
+"Tired--yes, of all those people. Come and sit down, Maddalena, under the
+olive-trees."
+
+He took her by the hand. Her hand was warm and dry, pleasant to touch, to
+hold. As he felt it in his the desire to strike at Salvatore revived
+within him. Salvatore was laughing at him, was triumphing over him,
+triumphing in the get-all and give-nothing policy which he thought he was
+pursuing with such complete success. Would it be very difficult to turn
+that success into failure? Maurice wondered for a moment, then ceased to
+wonder. Something in the touch of Maddalena's hand told him that, if he
+chose, he could have his revenge upon Salvatore, and he was assailed by a
+double temptation. Both anger and love tempted him. If he stooped to do
+evil he could gratify two of the strongest desires in humanity, the
+desire to conquer in love and the desire to triumph in hate. Salvatore
+thought him such a fool, held him in such contempt! Something within him
+was burning to-day as a cheek burns with shame, something within him that
+was like the kernel of him, like the soul of his manhood, which the
+fisherman was sneering at. He did not say to himself strongly that he did
+not care what such men thought of him. He could not, for his nature was
+both reckless and sensitive. He did care, as if he had been a Sicilian
+half doubtful whether he dared to show his face in the piazza. And he had
+another feeling, too, which had come to him when Salvatore had answered
+his exclamation of irresistible anger at being called "compare," the
+feeling that, whether he sinned against the fisherman or not, the
+fisherman meant to do him harm. The sensation might be absurd, would have
+seemed to him probably absurd in England. Here, in Sicily, it sprang up
+and he had just to accept it, as a man accepts an instinct which guides
+him, prompts him.
+
+Salvatore had turned down his thumb that day.
+
+Maurice was not afraid of him. Physically, he was quite fearless. But
+this sensation of having been secretly condemned made him feel hard,
+cruel, ready, perhaps, to do a thing not natural to him, to sacrifice
+another who had never done him wrong. At that moment it seemed to him
+that it would be more manly to triumph over Salvatore by a double
+betrayal than to "run straight," conquer himself and let men not of his
+code think of him as they would.
+
+Not of his code! But what was his code? Was it that of England or that of
+Sicily? Which strain of blood was governing him to-day? Which strain
+would govern him finally? Artois would have had an interesting specimen
+under his observant eyes had he been at the fair of San Felice.
+
+Maddalena willingly obeyed Maurice's suggestion.
+
+"Get well into the shade," he said. "There's just enough to hold us, if
+we sit close together. You don't mind that, do you?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"Put your back against the trunk--there."
+
+He kept his hat off. Over the railway line from the hot-looking sea there
+came a little breeze that just moved his short hair and the feathers of
+gold about Maddalena's brow. In the watercourse, but at some distance,
+they saw the black crowd of men and women and beasts swarming over the
+hot stones.
+
+"How can they?" Maurice muttered, as he looked down.
+
+"Cosa?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"I was thinking out loud. I meant how can they bargain and bother hour
+after hour in all that sun!"
+
+"But, signorino, you would not have them pay too much!" she said, very
+seriously. "It is dreadful to waste soldi."
+
+"I suppose--yes, of course it is. Oh, but there are so many things worth
+more than soldi. Dio mio! Let's forget all that!"
+
+He waved his hand towards the crowd, but he saw that Maddalena was
+preoccupied. She glanced towards the watercourse rather wistfully.
+
+"What is it, Maddalena? Ah, I know! The blue dress and the ear-rings! Per
+Bacco!"
+
+"No, signore--no, signore!"
+
+She disclaimed quickly, reddening.
+
+"Yes, it is. I had forgotten. But we can't go now. Maddalena, we will buy
+them this evening. Directly it gets cool we'll go, directly we've rested
+a little. But don't think of them now. I've promised, and I always keep a
+promise. Now, don't think of that any more!"
+
+He spoke with a sort of desperation. The fair seemed to be his enemy, and
+he had thought that it would be his friend. It was like a personage with
+a stronger influence than his, an influence that could take away that
+which he wished to retain, to fix upon himself.
+
+"No, signore," Maddalena said, meekly, but still wistfully.
+
+"Do you care for a blue dress and a pair of ear-rings more than you do
+for me?" cried Maurice, with sudden roughness. "Are you like your father?
+Do you only care for me for what you can get out of me? I believe you
+do!"
+
+Maddalena looked startled, almost terrified, by his outburst. Her lips
+trembled, but she gazed at him steadily.
+
+"Non č vero."
+
+The words sounded almost stern.
+
+"I do--" he said. "I do want to be cared for a little--just for myself."
+
+[Illustration: "HE KEPT HIS HAND ON HERS AND HELD IT ON THE WARM GROUND"]
+
+At that moment he had a sensation of loneliness like that of an
+utterly unloved man. And yet at that moment a great love was travelling
+to him--a love that was complete and flawless. But he did not think of
+it. He only thought that perhaps all this time he had been deceived, that
+Maddalena, like her father, was merely pleased to see him because he had
+money and could spend it. He sickened.
+
+"Non č vero!" Maddalena repeated.
+
+Her lips still trembled. Maurice looked at her doubtfully, yet with a
+sudden tenderness. Always when she looked troubled, even for an instant,
+there came to him the swift desire to protect her, to shield her.
+
+"But why should you care for me?" he said. "It is better not. For I am
+going away, and probably you will never see me again."
+
+Tears came into Maddalena's eyes. He did not know whether they were
+summoned by his previous roughness or his present pathos. He wanted to
+know.
+
+"Probably I shall never come back to Sicily again," he said, with
+pressure.
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"It will be better not," he added. "Much better."
+
+Now he was speaking for himself.
+
+"There's something here, something that I love and that's bad for me. I'm
+quite changed here. I'm like another man."
+
+He saw a sort of childish surprise creeping into her face.
+
+"Why, signorino?" she murmured.
+
+He kept his hand on hers and held it on the warm ground.
+
+"Perhaps it is the sun," he said. "I lose my head here, and I--lose my
+heart!"
+
+She still looked rather surprised, and again her ignorance fascinated
+him. He thought that it was far more attractive than any knowledge could
+have been.
+
+"I'm horribly happy here, but I oughtn't to be happy."
+
+"Why, signorino? It is better to be happy."
+
+"Per Dio!" he exclaimed.
+
+Now a deep desire to have his revenge upon Salvatore came to him, but not
+at all because it would hurt Salvatore. The cruelty had gone out of him.
+Maddalena's eyes of a child had driven it away. He wanted his revenge
+only because it would be an intense happiness to him to have it. He
+wanted it because it would satisfy an imperious desire of tender passion,
+not because it would infuriate a man who hated him. He forgot the father
+in the daughter.
+
+"Suppose I were quite poor, Maddalena!" he said.
+
+"But you are very rich, signorino."
+
+"But suppose I were poor, like Gaspare, for instance. Suppose I were as I
+am, just the same, only a contadino, or a fisherman, as your father is.
+And suppose--suppose"--he hesitated--"suppose that I were not married!"
+
+She said nothing. She was listening with deep but still surprised
+attention.
+
+"Then I could--I could go to your father and ask him----"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"What could you ask him, signorino?"
+
+"Can't you guess?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"I might ask him to let me marry you. I should--if it were like that--I
+should ask him to let me marry you."
+
+"Davvero?"
+
+An expression of intense pleasure, and of something more--of pride--had
+come into her face. She could not divest herself imaginatively of her
+conception of him as a rich forestiere, and she saw herself placed high
+above "the other girls," turned into a lady.
+
+"Magari!" she murmured, drawing in her breath, then breathing out.
+
+"You would be happy if I did that?"
+
+"Magari!" she said again.
+
+He did not know what the word meant, but he thought it sounded like the
+most complete expression of satisfaction he had ever heard.
+
+"I wish," he said, pressing her hand--"I wish I were a Sicilian of
+Marechiaro."
+
+At this moment, while he was speaking, he heard in the distance the
+shrill whistle of an engine. It ceased. Then it rose again, piercing,
+prolonged, fierce surely with inquiry. He put his hands to his ears.
+
+"How beastly that is!" he exclaimed.
+
+He hated it, not only for itself, but for the knowledge it sharply
+recalled to his mind, the knowledge of exactly what he was doing, and of
+the facts of his life, the facts that the very near future held.
+
+"Why do they do that?" he added, with intense irritation.
+
+"Because of the bridge, signorino. They want to know if they can come
+upon the bridge. Look! There is the man waving a flag. Now they can come.
+It is the train from Palermo."
+
+"Palermo!" he said, sharply.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"But the train from Palermo comes the other way, by Messina!"
+
+"Si, signore. But there are two, one by Messina and one by Catania.
+Ecco!"
+
+From the lemon groves came the rattle of the approaching train.
+
+"But--but----"
+
+He caught at his watch, pulled it out.
+
+Five o'clock!
+
+He had taken his hand from Maddalena's, and now he made a movement as if
+to get up. But he did not get up. Instead, he pressed back against the
+olive-tree, upon whose trunk he was leaning, as if he wished to force
+himself into the gnarled wood of it. He had an instinct to hide. The
+train came on very slowly. During the two or three minutes that elapsed
+before it was in his view Maurice lived very rapidly. He felt sure that
+Hermione and Artois were in the train. Hermione had said that they would
+arrive at Cattaro at five-thirty. She had not said which way they were
+coming. Maurice had assumed that they would come from Messina because
+Hermione had gone away by that route. It was a natural error. But now? If
+they were at the carriage window! If they saw him! And surely they must
+see him. The olive-trees were close to the line and on a level with it.
+He could not get away. If he got up he would be more easily seen.
+Hermione would call out to him. If he pretended not to hear she might,
+she probably would, get out of the train at the San Felice station and
+come into the fair. She was impulsive. It was just the sort of thing she
+might do. She would do it. He was sure she would do it. He looked at the
+watercourse hard. The crowd of people was not very far off. He thought he
+detected the form of Gaspare. Yes, it was Gaspare. He and Amedeo were on
+the outskirts of the crowd near the railway bridge. As he gazed, the
+train whistled once more, and he saw Gaspare turn round and look towards
+the sea. He held his breath.
+
+"Ecco, signorino. Viene!"
+
+Maddalena touched his arm, kept her hand upon it. She was deeply
+interested in this event, the traversing by the train of the unfinished
+bridge. Maurice was thankful for that. At least she did not notice his
+violent perturbation.
+
+"Look, signorino! Look!"
+
+In despite of himself, Maurice obeyed her. He wanted not to look, but he
+could not help looking. The engine, still whistling, crept out from the
+embrace of the lemon-trees, with the dingy line of carriages behind it.
+At most of the windows there were heads of people looking out. Third
+class--he saw soldiers, contadini. Second class--no one. Now the
+first-class carriages were coming. They were close to him.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+He had seen Hermione. She was standing up, with her two hands resting on
+the door-frame and her head and shoulders outside of the carriage.
+Maurice sat absolutely still and stared at her, stared at her almost as
+if she were a stranger passing by. She was looking at the watercourse, at
+the crowd, eagerly. Her face, much browner than when she had left Sicily,
+was alight with excitement, with happiness. She was radiant. Yet he
+thought she looked old, older at least than he had remembered. Suddenly,
+as the train came very slowly upon the bridge, she drew in to speak to
+some one behind her, and he saw vaguely Artois, pale, with a long beard.
+He was seated, and he, too, was gazing out at the fair. He looked ill,
+but he, too, looked happy, much happier than he had in London. He put up
+a thin hand and stroked his beard, and Maurice saw wrinkles coming round
+his eyes as he smiled at something Hermione said to him. The train came
+to the middle of the bridge and stopped.
+
+"Ecco!" murmured Maddalena. "The man at the other end has signalled!"
+
+Maurice looked again at the watercourse. Gaspare was beyond the crowd
+now, and was staring at the train with interest, like Maddalena. Would it
+never go on? Maurice set his teeth and cursed it silently. And his soul
+said; "Go on! Go on!" again and again. "Go on! Go on!" Now Hermione was
+once more leaning out. Surely she must see Gaspare. A man waved a flag.
+The train jerked back, jangled, crept forward once more, this time a
+little faster. In a moment they would begone. Thank God! But what was
+Hermione doing? She started. She leaned further forward, staring into
+the watercourse. Maurice saw her face changing. A look of intense
+surprise, of intense inquiry, came into it. She took one hand swiftly
+from the door, put it behind her--ah, she had a pair of opera-glasses at
+her eyes now! The train went on faster. It was nearly off the bridge. But
+she was waving her hand. She was calling. She had seen Gaspare. And he?
+Maurice saw him start forward as if to run to the bridge. But the train
+was gone. The boy stopped, hesitated, then dashed away across the stones.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Maurice said nothing.
+
+"Signorino!" repeated Maddalena. "Look at Gaspare! Is he mad? Look! How
+he is running!"
+
+Gaspare reached the bank, darted up it, and disappeared into the village.
+
+"Signorino, what is the matter?"
+
+Maddalena pulled his sleeve. She was looking almost alarmed.
+
+"Matter? Nothing."
+
+Maurice got up. He could not remain still. It was all over now. The fair
+was at an end for him. Gaspare would reach the station before the train
+went on, would explain matters. Hermione would get out. Already Maurice
+seemed to see her coming down to the watercourse, walking with her
+characteristic slow vigor. It did not occur to him at first that Hermione
+might refuse to leave Artois. Something in him knew that she was coming.
+Fate had interfered now imperiously. Once he had cheated fate. That was
+when he came to the fair despite Hermione's letter. Now fate was going to
+have her revenge upon him. He looked at Maddalena. Was fate working for
+her, to protect her? Would his loss be her gain? He did not know, for he
+did not know what would have been the course of his own conduct if fate
+had not interfered. He had been trifling, letting the current take him.
+It might have taken him far, but--now Hermione was coming. It was all
+over and the sun was still up, still shining upon the sea.
+
+"Let us go into the fair. It is cooler now."
+
+He tried to speak lightly.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Maddalena shook out her skirt and began to smile. She was thinking of the
+blue dress and the ear-rings. They went down into the watercourse.
+
+"Signorino, what can have been the matter with Gaspare?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"He was looking at the train."
+
+"Was he? Perhaps he saw a friend in it. Yes, that must have been it. He
+saw a friend in the train."
+
+He stared across the watercourse towards the village, seeking two
+figures, and he was conscious now of two feelings that fought within him,
+of two desires: a desire that Hermione should not come, and a desire that
+she should come. He wanted, he even longed, to have his evening with
+Maddalena. Yet he wanted Hermione to get out of the train when Gaspare
+told her that he--Maurice--was at San Felice. If she did not get out she
+would be putting Artois before him. The pale face at the window, the eyes
+that smiled when Hermione turned familiarly round to speak, had stirred
+within him the jealousy of which he had already been conscious more than
+once. But now actual vision had made it fiercer. The woman who had leaned
+out looking at the fair belonged to him. He felt intensely that she was
+his property. Maddalena spoke to him again, two or three times. He did
+not hear her. He was seeing the wrinkles that came round the eyes of
+Artois when he smiled.
+
+"Where are we going, signorino? Are we going back to the town?"
+
+Instinctively, Maurice was following in the direction taken by Gaspare.
+He wanted to meet fate half-way, to still, by action, the tumult of
+feeling within him.
+
+"Aren't the best things to be bought there?" he replied. "By the church
+where all those booths are? I think so."
+
+Maddalena began to walk a little faster. The moment had come. Already she
+felt the blue dress rustling about her limbs, the ear-rings swinging in
+her ears.
+
+Maurice did not try to hold her back. Nor did it occur to him that it
+would be wise to meet Hermione without Maddalena. He had done no actual
+wrong, and the pale face of Artois had made him defiant. Hermione came to
+him with her friend. He would come to her with his. He did not think of
+Maddalena as a weapon exactly, but he did feel as if, without her, he
+would be at a disadvantage when he and Hermione met.
+
+They were in the first street now. People were beginning to flow back
+from the watercourse towards the centre of the fair. They walked in a
+crowd and could not see far before them. But Maurice thought he would
+know when Hermione was near him, that he would feel her approach. The
+crowd went on slowly, retarding them, but at last they were near to the
+church of Sant' Onofrio and could hear the sound of music. The
+"Intermezzo" from "Cavalleria Rusticana" was being played by the Musica
+Mascagni. Suddenly, Maurice started. He had felt a pull at his arm.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Gaspare was by his side, streaming with perspiration and looking
+violently excited.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+He stopped, cast a swift look round. Gaspare was alone.
+
+"Signorino"--the boy was breathing hard--"the signora"--he gulped--"the
+signora has come back."
+
+The time had come for acting. Maurice feigned surprise.
+
+"The signora! What are you saying? The signora is in Africa."
+
+"No, signore! She is here!"
+
+"Here in San Felice!"
+
+"No, signore! But she was in the train. I saw her at the window. She
+waved her hand to me and called out--when the train was on the bridge. I
+ran to the station; I ran fast, but when I got there the train had just
+gone. The signora has come back, and we are not there to meet her!"
+
+His eyes were tragic. Evidently he felt that their absence was a matter
+of immense importance, was a catastrophe.
+
+"The signora here!" Maurice repeated, trying to make his voice amazed.
+"But why did she not tell us? Why did not she say that she was coming?"
+
+He looked at Gaspare, but only for an instant. He felt afraid to meet his
+great, searching eyes.
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+Maddalena stood by in silence. The bright look of anticipation had gone
+out of her face, and was replaced by a confused and slightly anxious
+expression.
+
+"I can't understand it," Maurice said, heavily. "I can't--was the signora
+alone, or did you see some one with her?"
+
+"The sick signore? I did not see him. I saw only the signora standing at
+the window, waving her hand--cosě!"
+
+He waved his hand.
+
+"Madonna!" Maurice said, mechanically.
+
+"What are we to do, signorino?"
+
+"Do! What can we do? The train has gone!"
+
+"Si, signore. But shall I fetch the donkeys?"
+
+Maurice stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking frankly piteous.
+
+"Have you got the clock yet?" he asked Gaspare.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+Gaspare began to look rather miserable, too.
+
+"It has not been put up. Perhaps they are putting it up now."
+
+"Gaspare," Maurice said, hastily, "we can't be back to meet the signora
+now. Even if we went at once we should be hours late--and the donkeys are
+tired, perhaps. They will go slowly unless they have a proper rest. It is
+a dreadful pity, but I think if the signora knew she would wish us to
+stay now till the fair is over. She would not wish to spoil your
+pleasure. Do you think she would?"
+
+"No, signore. The signora always wishes people to be happy."
+
+"Even if we went at once it would be night before we got back."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"I think we had better stay--at any rate till the auction is finished and
+we have had something to eat. Then we will go."
+
+"Va bene."
+
+The boy sounded doubtful.
+
+"La povera signora!" he said. "How disappointed she will be! She did want
+to speak to me. Her face was all red; she was so excited when she saw me,
+and her mouth was wide open like that!"
+
+He made a grimace, with earnest, heart-felt sincerity.
+
+"It cannot be helped. To-night we will explain everything and make the
+signora quite happy. Look here! Buy something for her. Buy her a present
+at the auction!"
+
+"Signorino!" Gaspare cried. "I will give her the clock that plays the
+'Tre Colori'! Then she will be happy again. Shall I?"
+
+"Si, si. And meet me in the market-place. Then we will eat something and
+we will start for home."
+
+The boy darted away towards the watercourse. His heart was light again.
+He had something to do for the signora, something that would make her
+very happy. Ah, when she heard the clock playing the "Tre Colori"! Mamma
+mia!
+
+He tore towards the watercourse in an agony lest he should be too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Night was falling over the fair. The blue dress and the ear-rings had
+been chosen and paid for. The promenade of the beauties in the famous
+inherited brocades had taken place with éclat before the church of Sant'
+Onofrio. Salvatore had acquired a donkey of strange beauty and wondrous
+strength, and Gaspare had reappeared in the piazza accompanied by Amedeo,
+both laden with purchases and shining with excitement and happiness.
+Gaspare's pockets were bulging, and he walked carefully, carrying in his
+hands a tortured-looking parcel.
+
+"Dov'č il mio padrone?" he asked, as he and Amedeo pushed through the
+dense throng. "Dov'č il mio padrone?"
+
+He spied Maurice and Maddalena sitting before the ristorante listening to
+the performance of a small Neapolitan boy with a cropped head, who was
+singing street songs in a powerful bass voice, and occasionally doing a
+few steps of a melancholy dance upon the pavement. The crowd billowed
+round them. A little way off the "Musica della cittŕ," surrounded by a
+circle of colored lamps, was playing a selection from the "Puritani." The
+strange ecclesiastical chant of the Roman ice venders rose up against the
+music as if in protest. And these three definite and fighting
+melodies--of the Neapolitan, the band, and the ice venders--detached
+themselves from a foundation of ceaseless sound, contributed by the
+hundreds of Sicilians who swarmed about the ancient church, infested the
+narrow side streets of the village, looked down from the small balconies
+and the windows of the houses, and gathered in mobs in the wine-shops and
+the trattorie.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Look!"
+
+Gaspare had reached Maurice, and now stood by the little table at which
+his padrone and Maddalena were sitting, and placed the tortured parcel
+tenderly upon it.
+
+"Is that the clock?"
+
+Gaspare did not reply in words, but his brown fingers deftly removed the
+string and paper and undressed his treasure.
+
+"Ecco!" he exclaimed.
+
+The clock was revealed, a great circle of blue and white standing upon
+short, brass legs, and ticking loudly,
+
+               "Speranza mia, non piangere,
+                 E il marinar fedele,
+               Vedrai tornar dall' Africa
+                 Tra un anno queste vele----"
+
+bawled the little boy from Naples. Gaspare seized the clock, turned a
+handle, lifted his hand in a reverent gesture bespeaking attention; there
+was a faint whirr, and then, sure enough, the tune of the "Tre Colori"
+was tinkled blithely forth.
+
+"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare, triumphantly.
+
+"Mamma mia!" murmured Maddalena, almost exhausted with the magic of the
+fair.
+
+"It's wonderful!" said Maurice.
+
+He, too, was a little tired, but not in body.
+
+Gaspare wound the clock again, and again the tune was trilled forth,
+competing sturdily with the giant noises of the fair, a little voice that
+made itself audible by its clearness and precision.
+
+"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare. "Will not the signora be happy when she sees
+what I have brought her from the fair?"
+
+He sighed from sheer delight in his possession and the thought of his
+padrona's joy and wonder in it.
+
+"Mangiamo?" he added, descending from heavenly delights to earthly
+necessities.
+
+"Yes, it is getting late," said Maurice. "The fireworks will soon be
+beginning, I suppose."
+
+"Not till ten, signorino. I have asked. There will be dancing first.
+But--are we going to stay?"
+
+Maurice hesitated, but only for a second.
+
+"Yes," he said. "Even if we went now the signora would be in bed and
+asleep long before we got home. We will stay to the end, the very end."
+
+"Then we can say 'Good-morning' to the signora when we get home," said
+Gaspare.
+
+He was quite happy now that he had this marvellous present to take back
+with him. He felt that it would make all things right, would sweep away
+all lingering disappointment at their absence and the want of welcome.
+
+Salvatore did not appear at the meal. He had gone off to stable his new
+purchase with the other donkeys, and now, having got a further sum of
+money out of the Inglese, was drinking and playing cards with the
+fishermen of Catania. But he knew where his girl and Maurice were, and
+that Gaspare and Amedeo were with them. And he knew, too, that the
+Inglese's signora had come back. He told the news to the fishermen.
+
+"To-night, when he gets home, his 'cristiana' will be waiting for him.
+Per Dio! it is over for him now. We shall see little more of him."
+
+"And get little more from him!" said one of the fishermen, who was
+jealous of Salvatore's good-fortune.
+
+Salvatore laughed loudly. He had drunk a good deal of wine and he had had
+a great deal of money given to him.
+
+"I shall find another English fool, perhaps!" he said. "Chi lo sa?"
+
+"And his cristiana?" asked another fisherman. "What is she like?"
+
+"Like!" cried Salvatore, pouring out another glass of wine and spitting
+on the discolored floor, over which hens were running; "what is any
+cristiana like?"
+
+And he repeated the contadino's proverb:
+
+"'La mugghieri č comu la gatta: si l'accarizzi, idda ti gratta!'"
+
+"Perhaps the Inglese will get scratched to-night," said the first
+fisherman.
+
+"I don't mind," rejoined Salvatore. "Get us a fresh pack of cards,
+Fortunato. I'll pay for 'em."
+
+And he flung down a lira on the wine-stained table.
+
+Gaspare, now quite relieved in his mind, gave himself up with all his
+heart to the enjoyment of the last hours of the fair, and was unwearied
+in calling on his padrone to do the same. When the evening meal was over
+he led the party forth into the crowd that was gathered about the music;
+he took them to the shooting-tent, and made them try their luck at the
+little figures which calmly presented grotesquely painted profiles to the
+eager aim of the contadini; he made them eat ices which they bought at
+the beflagged cart of the ecclesiastical Romans, whose eternally chanting
+voices made upon Maurice a sinister impression, suggesting to his
+mind--he knew not why--the thought of death. Finally, prompted by Amedeo,
+he drew Maurice into a room where there was dancing.
+
+It was crowded with men and women, was rather dark and very hot. In a
+corner there was a grinding organ, whose handle was turned by a
+perspiring man in a long, woollen cap. Beside him, hunched up on a
+window-sill, was a shepherd boy who accompanied the organ upon a flute of
+reed. Round the walls stood a throng of gazers, and in the middle of the
+floor the dancers performed vigorously, dancing now a polka, now a waltz,
+now a mazurka, now an elaborate country dance in which sixteen or twenty
+people took part, now a tarantella, called by many of the contadini "La
+Fasola." No sooner had they entered the room than Gaspare gently but
+firmly placed his arm round his padrone's waist, took his left hand and
+began to turn him about in a slow waltz, while Amedeo followed the
+example given with Maddalena. Round and round they went among the other
+couples. The organ in the corner ground out a wheezy tune. The reed-flute
+of the shepherd boy twittered, as perhaps, long ago, on the great
+mountain that looked down in the night above the village, a similar flute
+twittered from the woods to Empedocles climbing upward for the last time
+towards the plume of smoke that floated from the volcano. And then Amedeo
+and Gaspare danced together and Maurice's arm was about the waist of
+Maddalena.
+
+It was the first time that he had danced with her, and the mutual act
+seemed to him to increase their intimacy, to carry them a step forward in
+this short and curious friendship which was now, surely, very close to
+its end. They did not speak as they danced. Maddalena's face was very
+solemn, like the face of one taking part in an important ceremonial. And
+Maurice, too, felt serious, even sad. The darkness and heat of the room,
+the melancholy with which all the tunes of a grinding organ seem
+impregnated, the complicated sounds from the fair outside, from which now
+and again the voices of the Roman ice-venders detached themselves, even
+the tapping of the heavy boots of the dancers upon the floor of
+brick--all things in this hour moved him to a certain dreariness of the
+spirit which was touched with sentimentality. This fair day was coming to
+an end. He felt as if everything were coming to an end.
+
+Every dog has his day. The old saying came to his mind. "Every dog has
+his day--and mine is over."
+
+He saw in the dimness of the room the face of Hermione at the railway
+carriage window. It was the face of one on the edge of some great
+beginning. But she did not know. Hermione did not know.
+
+The dance was over. Another was formed, a country dance. Again Maurice
+was Maddalena's partner. Then came "La Fasola," in which Amedeo proudly
+showed forth his well-known genius and Gaspare rivalled him. But Maurice
+thought it was not like the tarantella upon the terrace before the house
+of the priest. The brilliancy, the gayety of that rapture in the sun were
+not present here among farewells. A longing to be in the open air under
+the stars came to him, and when at last the grinding organ stopped he
+said to Gaspare:
+
+"I'm going outside. You'll find me there when you've finished dancing."
+
+"Va bene, signorino. In a quarter of an hour the fireworks will be
+beginning."
+
+"And then we must start off at once."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The organ struck up again and Amedeo took hold of Gaspare by the waist.
+
+"Maddalena, come out with me."
+
+She followed him. She was tired. Festivals were few in her life, and the
+many excitements of this long day had told upon her, but her fatigue was
+the fatigue of happiness. They sat down on a wooden bench set against the
+outer wall of the house. No one else was sitting there, but many people
+were passing to and fro, and they could see the lamps round the "Musica
+Leoncavallo," and hear it fighting and conquering the twitter of the
+shepherd boy's flute and the weary wheezing of the organ within the
+house. A great, looming darkness rising towards the stars dominated the
+humming village. Etna was watching over the last glories of the fair.
+
+"Have you been happy to-day, Maddalena?" Maurice asked.
+
+"Si, signore, very happy. And you?"
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"It will all be very different to-morrow," he said.
+
+He was trying to realize to-morrow, but he could not.
+
+"We need not think of to-morrow," Maddalena said.
+
+She arranged her skirt with her hands, and crossed one foot over the
+other.
+
+"Do you always live for the day?" Maurice asked her.
+
+She did not understand him.
+
+"I do not want to think of to-morrow," she said. "There will be no fair
+then."
+
+"And you would like always to be at the fair?"
+
+"Si, signore, always."
+
+There was a great conviction in her simple statement.
+
+"And you, signorino?"
+
+She was curious about him to-night.
+
+"I don't know what I should like," he said.
+
+He looked up at the great darkness of Etna, and again a longing came to
+him to climb up, far up, into those beech forests that looked towards the
+Isles of Lipari. He wanted greater freedom. Even the fair was prison.
+
+"But I think," he said, after a pause--"I think I should like to carry
+you off, Maddalena, up there, far up on Etna."
+
+He remembered his feeling when he had put his arms round her in the
+dance. It had been like putting his arms round ignorance that wanted to
+be knowledge. Who would be Maddalena's teacher? Not he. And yet he had
+almost intended to have his revenge upon Salvatore.
+
+"Shall we go now?" he said. "Shall we go off to Etna, Maddalena?"
+
+"Signorino!"
+
+She gave a little laugh.
+
+"We must go home after the fireworks."
+
+"Why should we? Why should we not take the donkeys now? Gaspare is
+dancing. Your father is playing cards. No one would notice. Shall we?
+Shall we go now and get the donkeys, Maddalena?"
+
+But she replied:
+
+"A girl can only go like that with a man when she is married."
+
+"That's not true," he said. "She can go like that with a man she loves."
+
+"But then she is wicked, and the Madonna will not hear her when she
+prays, signorino."
+
+"Wouldn't you do anything for a man you really loved? Wouldn't you forget
+everything? Wouldn't you forget even the Madonna?"
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+It seemed to him that he was answered.
+
+"Wouldn't you forget the Madonna for me?" he whispered, leaning towards
+her.
+
+There was a loud report close to them, a whizzing noise, a deep murmur
+from the crowd, and in the clear sky above Etna the first rocket burst,
+showering down a cataract of golden stars, which streamed towards the
+earth, leaving trails of fire behind them.
+
+The sound of the grinding organ and of the shepherd boy's flute ceased in
+the dancing-room, and the crowd within rushed out into the market-place.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Come with me! We cannot see properly here! I know
+where to go. There will be wheels of fire, and masses of flowers, and a
+picture of the Regina Margherita. Presto! Presto!"
+
+Gaspare had hold of Maurice by the arm.
+
+"E' finito!" Maurice murmured.
+
+It seemed to him that the last day of his wild youth was at an end.
+
+"E' finito!" he repeated.
+
+But there was still an hour.
+
+And who can tell what an hour will bring forth?
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Maurice and Gaspare said
+good-bye to Maddalena and her father on the road by Isola Bella.
+Salvatore had left the three donkeys at Cattaro, and had come the rest of
+the way on foot, while Maddalena rode Gaspare's beast.
+
+"The donkey you bought is for Maddalena," Maurice had said to him.
+
+And the fisherman had burst into effusive thanks. But already he had his
+eye on a possible customer in Cattaro. As soon as the Inglese had gone
+back to his own country the donkey would be resold at a good price. What
+did a fisherman want with donkeys, and how was an animal to be stabled on
+the Sirens' Isle? As soon as the Inglese was gone, Salvatore meant to put
+a fine sum of money into his pocket.
+
+"Addio, signorino!" he said, sweeping off his hat with the wild,
+half-impudent gesture that was peculiar to him. "I kiss your hand and I
+kiss the hand of your signora."
+
+He bent down his head as if he were going to translate the formal phrase
+into an action, but Maurice drew back.
+
+"Addio, Salvatore," he said.
+
+His voice was low.
+
+"Addio, Maddalena!" he added.
+
+She murmured something in reply. Salvatore looked keenly from one to the
+other.
+
+"Are you tired, Maddalena?" he asked, with a sort of rough suspicion.
+
+"Si," she answered.
+
+She followed him slowly across the railway line towards the sea, while
+Maurice and Gaspare turned their donkeys' heads towards the mountain.
+
+They rode upward in silence. Gaspare was sleepy. His head nodded loosely
+as he rode, but his hands never let go their careful hold of the clock.
+Round about him his many purchases were carefully disposed, fastened
+elaborately to the big saddle. The roses, faded now, were still above his
+ears. Maurice rode behind. He was not sleepy. He felt as if he would
+never sleep again.
+
+As they drew nearer to the house of the priest, Gaspare pulled himself
+together with an effort, half-turned on his donkey, and looked round at
+his padrone.
+
+"Signorino!"
+
+"Si."
+
+"Do you think the signora will be asleep?"
+
+"I don't know. I suppose so."
+
+The boy looked wise.
+
+"I do not think so," he said, firmly.
+
+"What--at three o'clock in the morning!"
+
+"I think the signora will be on the terrace watching for us."
+
+Maurice's lips twitched.
+
+"Chi lo sa?" he replied.
+
+He tried to speak carelessly, but where was his habitual carelessness of
+spirit, his carelessness of a boy now? He felt that he had lost it
+forever, lost it in that last hour of the fair.
+
+"Signorino!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Where were you and Maddalena when I was helping with the fireworks?"
+
+"Close by."
+
+"Did you see them all? Did you see the Regina Margherita?"
+
+"Si."
+
+"I looked round for you, but I could not see you."
+
+"There was such a crowd and it was dark."
+
+"Yes. Then you were there, where I left you?"
+
+"We may have moved a little, but we were not far off."
+
+"I cannot think why I could not find you when the fireworks were over."
+
+"It was the crowd. I thought it best to go to the stable without
+searching for you. I knew you and Salvatore would be there."
+
+The boy was silent for a moment. Then he said:
+
+"Salvatore was very angry when he saw me come into the stable without
+you."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He said I ought not to have left my padrone."
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"I told him I would not be spoken to by him. If you had not come in just
+then I think there would have been a baruffa. Salvatore is a bad man, and
+always ready with his knife. And he had been drinking."
+
+"He was quiet enough coming home."
+
+"I do not like his being so quiet."
+
+"What does it matter?"
+
+Again there was a pause. Then Gaspare said:
+
+"Now that the signora has come back we shall not go any more to the Casa
+delle Sirene, shall we?"
+
+"No, I don't suppose we shall go any more."
+
+"It is better like that, signorino. It is much better that we do not go."
+
+Maurice said nothing.
+
+"We have been there too often," added Gaspare. "I am glad the signora has
+come back. I am sorry she ever went away."
+
+"It was not our fault that she went," Maurice said, in a hard voice like
+that of a man trying to justify something, to defend himself against some
+accusation. "We did not want the signora to go."
+
+"No, signore."
+
+Gaspare's voice sounded almost apologetic. He was a little startled by
+his padrone's tone.
+
+"It was a pity she went," he continued. "The poor signora----"
+
+"Why is it such a pity?" Maurice interrupted, almost roughly, almost
+suspiciously. "Why do you say 'the poor signora'?"
+
+Gaspare stared at him with open surprise.
+
+"I only meant----"
+
+"The signora wished to go to Africa. She decided for herself. There is no
+reason to call her the poor signora."
+
+"No, signore."
+
+The boy's voice recalled Maurice to prudence.
+
+"It was very good of her to go," he said, more quietly. "Perhaps she has
+saved the life of the sick signore by going."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Gaspare said no more, but as they rode up, drawing ever nearer to the
+bare mountain-side and the house of the priest, Maurice's heart
+reiterated the thought of the boy. Why had Hermione ever gone? What a
+madness it had all been, her going, his staying! He knew it now for a
+madness, a madness of the summer, of the hot, the burning south. In this
+terrible quiet of the mountains, without the sun, without the laughter
+and the voices and the movement of men, he understood that he had been
+mad, that there had been something in him, not all himself, which had run
+wild, despising restraint. And he had known that it was running wild, and
+he had thought to let it go just so far and no farther. He had set a
+limit of time to his wildness and its deeds. And he had set another
+limit. Surely he had. He had not ever meant to go too far. And then, just
+when he had said to himself "E' finito!" the irrevocable was at hand, the
+moment of delirium in which all things that should have been remembered
+were forgotten. What had led him? What spirit of evil? Or had he been
+led at all? Had not he rather deliberately forced his way to the tragic
+goal whither, through all these sunlit days, these starry nights, his
+feet had been tending?
+
+He looked upon himself as a man looks upon a stranger whom he has seen
+commit a crime which he could never have committed. Mentally he took
+himself into custody, he tried, he condemned himself. In this hour of
+acute reaction the cool justice of the Englishman judged the passionate
+impulse of the Sicilian, even marvelled at it, and the heart of the
+dancing Faun cried: "What am I--what am I really?" and did not find the
+answer.
+
+"Signorino?"
+
+"Yes, Gaspare."
+
+"When we get to that rock we shall see the house."
+
+"I know."
+
+How eagerly he had looked upward to the little white house on the
+mountain on that first day in Sicily, with what joy of anticipation, with
+what an exquisite sense of liberty and of peace! The drowsy wail of the
+"Pastorale" had come floating down to him over the olive-trees almost
+like a melody that stole from paradise. But now he dreaded the turn of
+the path. He dreaded to see the terrace wall, the snowy building it
+protected. And he felt as if he were drawing near to a terror, and as if
+he could not face it, did not know how to face it.
+
+"Signorino, there is no light! Look!"
+
+"The signora and Lucrezia must be asleep at this hour."
+
+"If they are, what are we to do? Shall we wake them?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+He spoke quickly, in hope of a respite.
+
+"We will wait--we will not disturb them."
+
+Gaspare looked down at the parcel he was holding with such anxious care.
+
+"I would like to play the 'Tre Colori,'" he said. "I would like the
+first thing the signora hears when she wakes to be the 'Tre Colori.'"
+
+"Hush! We must be very quiet."
+
+The noise made on the path by the tripping feet of the donkeys was almost
+intolerable to him. It must surely wake the deepest sleeper. They were
+now on the last ascent where the mountain-side was bare. Some stones
+rattled downward, causing a sharp, continuous sound. It was answered by
+another sound, which made both Gaspare and Maurice draw rein and pull up.
+
+As on that first day in Sicily Maurice had been welcomed by the
+"Pastorale," so he was welcomed by it now. What an irony that was to him!
+For an instant his lips curved in a bitter smile. But the smile died away
+as he realized things, and a strange sadness took hold of his heart. For
+it was not the ceramella that he heard in this still hour, but a piano
+played softly, monotonously, with a dreamy tenderness that made it surely
+one with the tenderness of the deep night. And he knew that Hermione had
+been watching, that she had heard him coming, that this was her welcome,
+a welcome from the depths of her pure, true heart. How much the music
+told him! How clearly it spoke to him! And how its caress flagellated his
+bare soul! Hermione had returned expectant of welcome and had found
+nothing, and instead of coming out upon the terrace, instead of showing
+surprise, vexation, jealous curiosity, of assuming the injured air that
+even a good woman can scarcely resist displaying in a moment of acute
+disappointment, she sent forth this delicate salutation to him from afar,
+the sweetest that she knew, the one she herself loved best.
+
+Tears came into his eyes as he listened. Then he shut his eyes and said
+to himself, shuddering:
+
+"Oh, you beast! You beast!"
+
+"It is the signora!" said Gaspare, turning round on his donkey. "She does
+not know we are here, and she is playing to keep herself awake."
+
+He looked down at his clock, and his eyes began to shine.
+
+"I am glad the signora is awake!" he said. "Signorino, let us get off the
+donkeys and leave them at the arch, and let us go in without any noise."
+
+"But perhaps the signora knows that we are here," Maurice said.
+
+Directly he had heard the music he had known that Hermione was aware of
+their approach.
+
+"No, no, signore. I am sure she does not, or she would have come out to
+meet us. Let us leave the donkeys!"
+
+He sprang off softly. Mechanically, Maurice followed his example.
+
+"Now, signore!"
+
+The boy took him by the hand and led him on tiptoe to the terrace, making
+him crouch down close to the open French window. The "Pastorale" was
+louder here. It never ceased, but returned again and again with the
+delicious monotony that made it memorable and wove a spell round those
+who loved it. As he listened to it, Maurice fancied he could hear the
+breathing of the player, and he felt that she was listening, too,
+listening tensely for footsteps on the terrace.
+
+Gaspare looked up at him with bright eyes. The boy's whole face was alive
+with a gay and mischievous happiness, as he turned the handle at the back
+of his clock slowly, slowly, till at last it would turn no more. Then
+there tinkled forth to join the "Pastorale" the clear, trilling melody of
+the "Tre Colori."
+
+The music in the room ceased abruptly. There was a rustling sound as the
+player moved. Then Hermione's voice, with something trembling through it
+that was half a sob, half a little burst of happy laughter, called out:
+
+"Gaspare, how dare you interrupt my concert?"
+
+"Signora! Signora!" cried Gaspare, and, springing up, he darted into the
+sitting-room.
+
+But Maurice, though he lifted himself up quickly, stood where he was with
+his hand set hard against the wall of the house. He heard Gaspare kiss
+Hermione's hand. Then he heard her say:
+
+"But, but, Gaspare----"
+
+He took his hand from the wall with an effort. His feet seemed glued to
+the ground, but at last he was in the room.
+
+"Hermione!" he said.
+
+"Maurice!"
+
+He felt her strong hands, strong and yet soft like all the woman, on his.
+
+"Cento di questi giorni!" she said. "Ah, but it is better than all the
+birthdays in the world!"
+
+He wanted to kiss her--not to please her, but for himself he wanted to
+kiss her--but he dared not. He felt that if his lips were to touch
+hers--she must know. To excuse his avoidance of the natural greeting he
+looked at Gaspare.
+
+"I know!" she whispered. "You haven't forgotten!"
+
+She was alluding to that morning on the terrace when he came up from the
+fishing. They loosed their hands. Gaspare set the clock playing again.
+
+"What a beauty!" Hermione said, glad to hide her emotion for a moment
+till she and Maurice could be alone. "What a marvel! Where did you find
+it, Gaspare--at the fair?"
+
+"Si, signora!"
+
+Solemnly he handed it, still playing brightly, to his padrona, just a
+little reluctantly, perhaps, but very gallantly.
+
+"It is for you, signora."
+
+"A present--oh, Gaspare!"
+
+Again her voice was veiled. She put out her hand and touched the boy's
+hand.
+
+"Grazie! How sweetly it plays! You thought of me!"
+
+There was a silence till the tune was finished. Then Maurice said:
+
+"Hermione, I don't know what to say. That we should be at the fair the
+day you arrived! Why--why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you write?"
+
+"You didn't know, then!"
+
+The words came very quickly, very eagerly.
+
+"Know! Didn't Lucrezia tell you that we had no idea?"
+
+"Poor Lucrezia! She's in a dreadful condition. I found her in the
+village."
+
+"No!" Maurice cried, thankful to turn the conversation from himself,
+though only for an instant. "I specially told her to stay here. I
+specially----"
+
+"Well, but, poor thing, as you weren't expecting me! But I wrote,
+Maurice, I wrote a letter telling you everything, the hour we were
+coming--"
+
+"It's Don Paolo!" exclaimed Gaspare, angrily. "He hides away the letters.
+He lets them lie sometimes in his office for months. To-morrow I will go
+and tell him what I think; I will turn out every drawer."
+
+"It is too bad!" Maurice said.
+
+"Then you never had it?"
+
+"Hermione"--he stared at the open door--"you think we should have gone to
+the fair if----"
+
+"No, no, I never thought so. I only wondered. It all seemed so strange."
+
+"It is too horrible!" Maurice said, with heavy emphasis. "And Artois--no
+rooms ready for him! What can he have thought?"
+
+"As I did, that there had been a mistake. What does it matter now? Just
+at the moment I was dreadfully--oh, dreadfully disappointed. I saw
+Gaspare at the fair. And you saw me, Gaspare?"
+
+"Si, signora. I ran all the way to the station, but the train had gone."
+
+"But I didn't see you, Maurice. Where were you?"
+
+Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but Maurice did not give him time.
+
+"I was there, too, in the fair."
+
+"But of course you weren't looking at the train?"
+
+"Of course not. And when Gaspare told me, it was too late to do anything.
+We couldn't get back in time, and the donkeys were tired, and so----"
+
+"Oh, I'm glad you didn't hurry back. What good would it have done then?"
+
+There was a touch of constraint in her voice.
+
+"You must have thought I should be in bed."
+
+"Yes, we did."
+
+"And so I ought to be now. I believe I am tremendously tired, but--but
+I'm so tremendously something else that I hardly know."
+
+The constraint had gone.
+
+"The signora is happy because she is back in my country," Gaspare
+remarked, with pride and an air of shrewdness.
+
+He nodded his head. The faded roses shook above his ears. Hermione smiled
+at him.
+
+"He knows all about it," she said. "Well, if we are ever to go to
+bed----"
+
+Gaspare looked from her to his padrone.
+
+"Buona notte, signora," he said, gravely. "Buona notte, signorino. Buon
+riposo!"
+
+"Buon riposo!" echoed Hermione. "It is blessed to hear that again. I do
+love the clock, Gaspare."
+
+The boy beamed at her and went reluctantly away to find the donkeys. At
+that moment Maurice would have given almost anything to keep him. He
+dreaded unspeakably to be alone with Hermione. But it had to be. He must
+face it. He must seem natural, happy.
+
+"Shall I put the clock down?" he asked.
+
+He went to her, took the clock, carried it to the writing-table, and put
+it down.
+
+"Gaspare was so happy to bring it to you."
+
+He turned. He felt desperate. He came to Hermione and put out his hands.
+
+"I feel so bad that we weren't here," he said.
+
+"That is it!"
+
+There was a sound of deep relief in her voice. Then she had been puzzled
+by his demeanor! He must be natural; but how? It seemed to him as if
+never in all his life could he have felt innocent, careless, brave. Now
+he was made of cowardice. He was like a dog that crawls with its belly to
+the floor. He got hold of Hermione's hands.
+
+"I feel--I feel horribly, horribly bad!"
+
+Speaking the absolute truth, his voice was absolutely sincere, and he
+deceived her utterly.
+
+"Maurice," she said, "I believe it's upset you so much that--that you are
+shy of me."
+
+She laughed happily.
+
+"Shy--of me!"
+
+He tried to laugh, too, and kissed her abruptly, awkwardly. All his
+natural grace was gone from him. But when he kissed her she did not know
+it; her lips clung to his with a tender passion, a fealty that terrified
+him.
+
+"She must know!" he thought. "She must feel the truth. My lips must tell
+it to her."
+
+And when at last they drew away from each other his eyes asked her
+furiously a question, asked it of her eyes.
+
+"What is it, Maurice?"
+
+He said nothing. She dropped her eyes and reddened slowly, till she
+looked much younger than usual, strangely like a girl.
+
+"You haven't--you haven't----"
+
+There was a sound of reserve in her voice, and yet a sound of triumph,
+too. She looked up at him again.
+
+"Do you guess that I have something to tell you?" she said, slowly.
+
+"Something to tell me?" he repeated, dully.
+
+He was so intent on himself, on his own evil-doing, that it seemed to him
+as if everything must have some connection with it.
+
+"Ah," she said, quickly; "no, I see you weren't."
+
+"What is it?" he asked, but without real interest.
+
+"I can't tell you now," she said.
+
+Gaspare went by the window leading the donkeys.
+
+"Buona notte, signora!"
+
+It was a very happy voice.
+
+"Buona notte, Gaspare. Sleep well."
+
+Maurice caught at the last words.
+
+"We must sleep," he said. "To-morrow we'll--we'll----"
+
+"Tell each other everything. Yes, to-morrow!"
+
+She put her arm through his.
+
+"Maurice, if you knew how I feel!"
+
+"Yes?" he said, trying to make his voice eager, buoyant. "Yes?"
+
+"If you knew how I've been longing to be back! And so often I've thought
+that I never should be here with you again, just in the way we were!"
+
+He cleared his throat.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It is so difficult to repeat a great, an intense happiness, I think. But
+we will, we are repeating it, aren't we?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When I got to the station to-day, and--and you weren't there, I had a
+dreadful foreboding. It was foolish. The explanation of your not being
+there was so simple. Of course I might have guessed it."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But in the first moment I felt as if you weren't there because I had
+lost you forever, because you had been taken away from me forever. It was
+such an intense feeling that it frightened me--it frightened me horribly.
+Put your arm round me, Maurice. Let me feel what an idiot I have been!"
+
+He obeyed her and put his arm round her, and he felt as if his arm must
+tell her what she had not learned from his lips. And she thought that now
+he must know the truth she had not told him.
+
+"Don't think of dreadful things," he said.
+
+"I won't any more. I don't think I could with you. To me you always mean
+the sun, light, and life, and all that is brave and beautiful!"
+
+He took his arm away from her.
+
+"Come, we must sleep, Hermione!" he said. "It's nearly dawn. I can almost
+see the smoke on Etna."
+
+He shut the French window and drew the bolt.
+
+She had gone into the bedroom and was standing by the dressing-table. She
+did not know why, but a great shyness had come upon her. It was like a
+cloud enveloping her. Never before had she felt like this with Maurice,
+not even when they were first married. She had loved him too utterly to
+be shy with him. Maurice was still in the sitting-room, fastening the
+shutters of the window. She heard the creak of wood, the clatter of the
+iron bar falling into the fastener. Now he would come.
+
+But he did not come. He was moving about in the room. She heard papers
+rustling, then the lid of the piano shut down. He was putting everything
+in order.
+
+This orderliness was so unusual in Maurice that it made a disagreeable
+impression upon her. She began to feel as if he did not want to come into
+the bedroom, as if he were trying to put off the moment of coming. She
+remembered that he had seemed shy of her. What had come to them both
+to-night? Her instinct moved her to break through this painful, this
+absurd constraint.
+
+"Maurice!" she called.
+
+"Yes."
+
+His voice sounded odd to her, almost like the voice of some other man,
+some stranger.
+
+"Aren't you coming?"
+
+"Yes. Hermione."
+
+But still he did not come. After a moment, he said:
+
+"It's awfully hot to-night!"
+
+"After Africa it seems quite cool to me."
+
+"Does it? I've been--since you've been away I've been sleeping nearly
+always out-of-doors on the terrace."
+
+Now he came to the doorway and stood there. He looked at the white room,
+at Hermione. She had on a white tea-gown. It seemed to him that
+everything here was white, everything but his soul. He felt as if he
+could not come into this room, could not sleep here to-night, as if it
+would be a desecration. When he stood in the doorway the painful shyness
+returned to her.
+
+"Have you?" she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you--would you rather sleep there to-night?"
+
+She did not mean to say it. It was the last thing she wished to say. Yet
+she said it. It seemed to her that she was forced to say it.
+
+"Well, it's much cooler there."
+
+She was silent.
+
+"I could just put one or two rugs and cushions on the seat by the wall,"
+he said. "I shall sleep like a top. I'm awfully tired!"
+
+"But--but the sun will soon be up, won't it?"
+
+"Oh--then I can come in."
+
+"All right."
+
+"I'll take the rugs from the sitting-room. I say--how's Artois?"
+
+"Much better, but he's still weak."
+
+"Poor chap!"
+
+"He'll ride up to-morrow on a donkey."
+
+"Good! I'm--I'm most awfully sorry about his rooms."
+
+"What does it matter? I've made them quite nice already. He's perfectly
+comfortable."
+
+"I'm glad. It's all--it's all been such a pity--about to-day, I mean."
+
+"Don't let's think of it! Don't let's think of it any more."
+
+A passionate sound had stolen into her voice. She moved a step towards
+him. A sudden idea had come to her, an idea that stirred within her a
+great happiness, that made a flame of joy spring up in her heart.
+
+"Maurice, you--you----"
+
+"What is it?" he asked.
+
+"You aren't vexed at my staying away so long? You aren't vexed at my
+bringing Emile back with me?"
+
+"No, of course not," he said. "But--but I wish you hadn't gone away."
+
+And then he disappeared into the sitting-room, collected the rugs and
+cushions, opened the French window, and went out upon the terrace.
+Presently he called out:
+
+"I shall sleep as I am, Hermione, without undressing. I'm awfully done.
+Good-night."
+
+"Good-night!" she called.
+
+There was a quiver in her voice. And yet that flame of happiness had not
+quite died down. She said to herself:
+
+"He doesn't want me to know. He's too proud. But he has been a little
+jealous, perhaps." She remembered how Sicilian he was.
+
+"But I'll make him forget it all," she thought, eagerly.
+"To-morrow--to-morrow it will be all right. He's missed me, he's missed
+me!"
+
+That thought was very sweet to her. It seemed to explain all things; this
+constraint of her husband, which had reacted upon her, this action of his
+in preferring to sleep outside--everything. He had always been like a
+boy. He was like a boy now. He could not conceal his feelings. He did not
+doubt her. She knew that. But he had been a little jealous about her
+friendship for Emile.
+
+She undressed. When she was ready for bed she hesitated a moment. Then
+she put a white shawl round her shoulders and stole quickly out of the
+room. She came upon the terrace. The stars were waning. The gray of the
+dawn was in the sky towards the east. Maurice, stretched upon the rugs,
+with his face turned towards the terrace wall, was lying still. She went
+to him, bent down, and kissed him.
+
+"I love you," she whispered--"oh, so much!"
+
+She did not wait, but went away at once. When she was gone he put up his
+hand to his face. On his cheek there was a tear.
+
+"God forgive me!" he said to himself. "God forgive me!"
+
+His body was shaken by a sob.
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+When the sun came up over the rim of the sea Maurice ceased from his
+pretence of sleep, raised himself on his elbow, then sat upright and
+looked over the ravine to the rocks of the Sirens' Isle. The name seemed
+to him now a fatal name, and everything connected with his sojourn in
+Sicily fatal. Surely there had been a malign spirit at work. In this
+early morning hour his brain, though unrefreshed by sleep, was almost
+unnaturally clear, feverishly busy. Something had met him when he first
+set foot in Sicily--so he thought now--had met him with a fixed and evil
+purpose. And that purpose had never been abandoned.
+
+Old superstitions, inherited perhaps from a long chain of credulous
+Sicilian ancestors, were stirring in him. He did not laugh at his idea,
+as a pure-blooded Englishman would have laughed. He pondered it. He
+cherished it.
+
+On his very first evening in Sicily the spirit had led him to the wall,
+had directed his gaze to the far-off light in the house of the sirens. He
+remembered how strangely the little light had fascinated his eyes, and
+his mind through his eyes, how he had asked what it was, how, when
+Hermione had called him to come in to sleep, he had turned upon the steps
+to gaze down on it once more. Then he had not known why he gazed. Now he
+knew. The spirit that had met him by the sea in Sicily had whispered to
+him to look, and he had obeyed because he could not do otherwise.
+
+He dwelt upon that thought, that he had obeyed because he had been
+obliged to obey. It was a palliative to his mental misery and his hatred
+of himself. The fatalism that is linked with superstition got hold upon
+him and comforted him a little. He had not been a free agent. He had had
+to do as he had done. Everything had been arranged so that he might sin.
+The night of the fishing had prepared the way for the night of the fair.
+If Hermione had stayed--but of course she had not stayed. The spirit that
+had kept him in Sicily had sent her across the sea to Africa. In the full
+flush of his hot-blooded youth, intoxicated by his first knowledge of the
+sun and of love, he had been left quite alone. Newly married, he had been
+abandoned by his wife for a good, even perhaps a noble, reason. Still, he
+had been abandoned--to himself and the keeping of that spirit. Was it any
+wonder that he had fallen? He strove to think that it was not. In the
+night he had cowered before Hermione and had been cruel with himself.
+Now, in the sunshine, he showed fight. He strove to find excuses for
+himself. If he did not find excuses he felt that he could not face the
+day, face Hermione in sunlight.
+
+And now that the spirit had led him thus far, surely its work was done,
+surely it would leave him alone. He tried to believe that.
+
+Then he thought of Maddalena.
+
+She was there, down there where the rising sun glittered on the sea. She
+surely was awake, as he was awake. She was thinking, wondering--perhaps
+weeping.
+
+He got up. He could not look at the sea any more. The name "House of the
+Sirens" suddenly seemed to him a terrible misnomer, now that he thought
+of Maddalena perhaps weeping by the sea.
+
+He had his revenge upon Salvatore, but at what a cost!
+
+Salvatore! The fisherman's face rose up before him. If he ever knew!
+Maurice remembered his sensation that already, before he had done the
+fisherman any wrong, the fisherman had condemned him. Now there was a
+reason for condemnation. He had no physical fear of Salvatore. He was not
+a man to be physically afraid of another man. But if Salvatore ever knew
+he might tell. He might tell Hermione. That thought brought with it to
+Maurice a cold as of winter. The malign spirit might still have a purpose
+in connection with him, might still be near him full of intention. He
+felt afraid of the Sicily he had loved. He longed to leave it. He thought
+of it as an isle of fear, where terrors walked in the midst of the glory
+of the sunshine, where fatality lurked beside the purple sea.
+
+"Maurice!"
+
+He started. Hermione was on the steps of the sitting-room.
+
+"You're not sleeping!" he said.
+
+He felt as if she had been there reading all his thoughts.
+
+"And you!" she answered.
+
+"The sun woke me."
+
+He lied instinctively. All his life with her would be a lie now, could
+never be anything else--unless----
+
+He looked at her hard and long in the eyes for the first time since they
+had met after her return. Suppose he were to tell her, now, at once, in
+the stillness, the wonderful innocence and clearness of the dawn! For a
+moment he felt that it would be an exquisite relief, a casting down of an
+intolerable burden. She had such a splendid nature. She loved sincerity
+as she loved God. To her it was the one great essential quality, whose
+presence or absence made or marred the beauty of a human soul. He knew
+that.
+
+"Why do you look at me like that?" she said, coming down to him with the
+look of slow strength that was always characteristic of her.
+
+He dropped his eyes.
+
+"I don't know. How do you mean?"
+
+"As if you had something to tell me."
+
+"Perhaps--perhaps I have," he answered.
+
+He was on the verge, the very verge of confession. She put her arm
+through his. When she touched him the impulse waned, but it did not die
+utterly away.
+
+"Tell it me," she said. "I love to hear everything you tell me. I don't
+think you could ever tell me anything that I should not understand."
+
+"Are you--are you sure?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"But"--he suddenly remembered some words of hers that, till then, he had
+forgotten--"but you had something to tell me."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I want to hear it."
+
+He could not speak yet. Perhaps presently he would be able to.
+
+"Let us go up to the top of the mountain," she answered. "I feel as if we
+could see the whole island from there. And up there we shall get all the
+wind of the morning."
+
+They turned towards the steep, bare slope and climbed it, while the sun
+rose higher, as if attending them. At the summit there was a heap of
+stones.
+
+"Let us sit here," Hermione said. "We can see everything from here, all
+the glories of the dawn."
+
+"Yes."
+
+He was so intensely preoccupied by the debate within him that he did not
+remember that it was here, among these stones where they were sitting,
+that he had hidden the fragments of Hermione's letter from Africa telling
+him of her return on the day of the fair.
+
+They sat down with their faces towards the sea. The air up here was
+exquisitely cool. In the pellucid clearness of dawn the coast-line looked
+enchanted, fairy-like and full of delicate mystery. And its fading, in
+the far distance, was like a calling voice. Behind them the ranges of
+mountains held a few filmy white clouds, like laces, about their rugged
+peaks. The sea was a pale blue stillness, shot with soft grays and mauves
+and pinks, and dotted here and there with black specks that were the
+boats of fishermen.
+
+Hermione sat with her hands clasped round her knees. Her face, browned by
+the African sun, was intense with feeling.
+
+"Yes," she said, at last, "I can tell you here."
+
+She looked at the sea, the coast-line, then turned her head and gazed at
+the mountains.
+
+"We looked at them together," she continued--"that last evening before I
+went away. Do you remember, Maurice?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"From the arch. It is better up here. Always, when I am very happy or
+very sad, my instinct would be to seek a mountain-top. The sight of great
+spaces seen from a height teaches one, I think."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Not to be an egoist in one's joy; not to be a craven in one's sorrow.
+You see, a great view suggests the world, the vastness of things, the
+multiplicity of life. I think that must be it. And of course it reminds
+one, too, that one will soon be going away."
+
+"Going away?"
+
+"Yes. 'The mountains will endure'--but we--!"
+
+"Oh, you mean death."
+
+"Yes. What is it makes one think most of death when--when life, new life,
+is very near?"
+
+She had been gazing at the mountains and the sea, but now she turned and
+looked into his face.
+
+"Don't you understand what I have to tell you?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head. He was still wondering whether he would dare to tell
+her of his sin. And he did not know. At one moment he thought that he
+could do it, at another that he would rather throw himself over the
+precipice of the mountain than do it.
+
+"I don't understand it at all."
+
+There was a lack of interest in his voice, but she did not notice it. She
+was full of the wonder of the morning, the wonder of being again with
+him, and the wonder of what she had to tell him.
+
+"Maurice"--she put her hand on his--"the night I was crossing the sea to
+Africa I knew. All these days I have kept this secret from you because I
+could not write it. It seemed to me too sacred. I felt I must be with you
+when I told it. That night upon the sea I was very sad. I could not
+sleep. I was on deck looking always back, towards Sicily and you. And
+just when the dawn was coming I--I knew that a child was coming, too, a
+child of mine and yours."
+
+She was silent. Her hand pressed his, and now she was again looking
+towards the sea. And it seemed to him that her face was new, that it was
+already the face of a mother.
+
+He said nothing and he did not move. He looked down at the heap of stones
+by which they were sitting, and his eyes rested on a piece of paper
+covered with writing. It was a fragment of Hermione's letter to him. As
+he saw it something sharp and cold like a weapon made of ice, seemed to
+be plunged into him. He got up, pulling hard at her hand. She obeyed his
+hand.
+
+"What is it?" she said, as they stood together. "You look----"
+
+He had become pale. He knew it.
+
+"Hermione!" he said.
+
+He was actually panting as if he had been running. He moved a few steps
+towards the edge of the summit. She followed him.
+
+"You are angry that I didn't tell you! But--I wanted to say it. I wanted
+to--to----"
+
+She lifted his hands to her lips.
+
+"Thank you for giving me a child," she said.
+
+Then tears came into his eyes and ran down over his cheeks. That he
+should be thanked by her--that scourged the genuine good in him till
+surely blood started under the strokes.
+
+"Don't thank me!" he said. "Don't do that! I won't have it!"
+
+His voice sounded angry.
+
+"I won't ever let you thank me for anything," he went on. "You must
+understand that."
+
+He was on the edge of some violent, some almost hysterical outburst. He
+thought of Gaspare casting himself down in the boat that morning when he
+had feared that his padrone was drowned. So he longed to cast himself
+down and cry. But he had the strength to check his impulse. Only, the
+checking of it seemed to turn him for a moment into something made not of
+flesh and blood but of iron. And this thing of iron was voiceless.
+
+She knew that he was feeling intensely and respected his silence. But at
+last it began almost to frighten her. The boyish look she loved had gone
+out of his face. A stern man stood beside her, a man she had never seen
+before.
+
+"Maurice," she said, at length. "What is it? I think you are suffering."
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"But--but aren't you glad? Surely you are glad?"
+
+To her the word seemed mean, poverty-stricken. She changed it.
+
+"Surely you are thankful?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, at last. "I am thinking that I don't know
+that I am worthy to be a father."
+
+He himself had fixed a limit. Now, God was putting a period to his wild
+youth. And the heart--was that changed within him?
+
+Too much was happening. The cup was being filled too full. A great
+longing came to him to get away, far away, and be alone. If it had been
+any other day he would have gone off into the mountains, by himself, have
+stayed out till night came, have walked, climbed, till he was exhausted.
+But to-day he could not do that. And soon Artois would be coming. He felt
+as if something must snap in brain or heart.
+
+And he had not slept. How he wished that he could sleep for a little
+while and forget everything. In sleep one knows nothing. He longed to be
+able to sleep.
+
+"I understand that," she said. "But you are worthy, my dear one."
+
+When she said that he knew that he could never tell her.
+
+"I must try," he muttered. "I'll try--from to-day."
+
+She did not talk to him any more. Her instinct told her not to. Almost
+directly they were walking down to the priest's house. She did not know
+which of them had moved first.
+
+When they got there they found Lucrezia up. Her eyes were red, but she
+smiled at Hermione. Then she looked at the padrone with alarm. She
+expected him to blame her for having disobeyed his orders of the day
+before. But he had forgotten all about that.
+
+"Get breakfast, Lucrezia," Hermione said. "We'll have it on the terrace.
+And presently we must have a talk. The sick signore is coming up to-day
+for collazione. We must have a very nice collazione, but something
+wholesome."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia went away to the kitchen thankfully. She had heard bad news of
+Sebastiano yesterday in the village. He was openly in love with the girl
+in the Lipari Isles. Her heart was almost breaking, but the return of the
+padrona comforted her a little. Now she had some one to whom she could
+tell her trouble, some one who would sympathize.
+
+"I'll go and take a bath, Hermione," Maurice said.
+
+And he, too, disappeared.
+
+Hermione went to talk to Gaspare and tell him what to get in Marechiaro.
+
+When breakfast was ready Maurice came back looking less pale, but still
+unboyish. All the bright sparkle to which Hermione was accustomed had
+gone out of him. She wondered why. She had expected the change in him to
+be a passing thing, but it persisted.
+
+At breakfast it was obviously difficult for him to talk. She sought a
+reason for his strangeness. Presently she thought again of Artois. Could
+he be the reason? Or was Maurice now merely preoccupied by that great,
+new knowledge that there would soon be a third life mingled with theirs?
+She wondered exactly what he felt about that. He was really such a boy at
+heart despite his set face of to-day. Perhaps he dreaded the idea of
+responsibility. His agitation upon the mountain-top had been intense.
+Perhaps he was rendered unhappy by the thought of fatherhood. Or was it
+Emile?
+
+When breakfast was over, and he was smoking, she said to him:
+
+"Maurice, I want to ask you something."
+
+A startled look came into his eyes.
+
+"What?" he said, quickly.
+
+He threw his cigarette away and turned towards her, with a sort of
+tenseness that suggested to her a man bracing himself for some ordeal.
+
+"Only about Emile."
+
+"Oh!" he said.
+
+He took another cigarette, and his attitude at once looked easier. She
+wondered why.
+
+"You don't mind about Emile being here, do you?"
+
+Maurice was nearly answering quickly that he was delighted to welcome
+him. But a suddenly born shrewdness prevented him. To-day, like a guilty
+man, he was painfully conscious, painfully alert. He knew that Hermione
+was wondering about him, and realized that her question afforded him an
+opportunity to be deceptive and yet to seem quite natural and truthful.
+He could not be as he had been, to-day. The effort was far too difficult
+for him. Hermione's question showed him a plausible excuse for his
+peculiarity of demeanor and conduct. He seized it.
+
+"I think it was very natural for you to bring him," he answered.
+
+He lit the cigarette. His hand was trembling slightly.
+
+"But--but you had rather I hadn't brought him?"
+
+As Maurice began to act a part an old feeling returned to him, and almost
+turned his lie into truth.
+
+"You could hardly expect me to wish to have Artois with us here, could
+you, Hermione?" he said, slowly.
+
+She scarcely knew whether she were most pained or pleased. She was pained
+that anything she had done had clouded his happiness, but she was
+intensely glad to think he loved to be quite alone with her.
+
+"No, I felt that. But I felt, too, as if it would be cruel to stop short,
+unworthy in us."
+
+"In us?"
+
+"Yes. You let me go to Africa. You might have asked me, you might even
+have told me, not to go. I did not think of it at the time. Everything
+went so quickly. But I have thought of it since. And, knowing that,
+realizing it, I feel that you had your part, a great part, in Emile's
+rescue. For I do believe, Maurice, that if I had not gone he would have
+died."
+
+"Then I am glad you went."
+
+He spoke perfunctorily, almost formally. Hermione felt chilled.
+
+"It seemed to me that, having begun to do a good work, it would be finer,
+stronger, to carry it quite through, to put aside our own desires and
+think of another who had passed through a great ordeal. Was I wrong,
+Maurice? Emile is still very weak, very dependent. Ought I to have said,
+'Now I see you're not going to die, I'll leave you at once.' Wouldn't it
+have been rather selfish, even rather brutal?"
+
+His reply startled her.
+
+"Have you--have you ever thought of where we are?" he said.
+
+"Where we are!"
+
+"Of the people we are living among?"
+
+"I don't think I understand."
+
+He cleared his throat.
+
+"They're Sicilians. They don't see things as the English do," he said.
+
+There was a silence. Hermione felt a heat rush over her, over all her
+body and face. She did not speak, because, if she had, she might have
+said something vehement, even headstrong, such as she had never said,
+surely never would say, to Maurice.
+
+"Of course I understand. It's not that," he added.
+
+"No, it couldn't be that," she said. "You needn't tell me."
+
+The hot feeling stayed with her. She tried to control it.
+
+"You surely can't mind what ignorant people out here think of an utterly
+innocent action!" she said, at last, very quietly.
+
+But even as she spoke she remembered the Sicilian blood in him.
+
+"You have minded it!" she said. "You do mind now."
+
+And suddenly she felt very tender over him, as she might have felt over a
+child. In his face she could not see the boy to-day, but his words set
+the boy, the inmost nature of the boy that he still surely was, before
+her.
+
+The sense of humor in her seemed to be laughing and wiping away a tear at
+the same time.
+
+She moved her chair close to his.
+
+"Maurice," she said. "Do you know that sometimes you make me feel
+horribly old and motherly?"
+
+"Do I?" he said.
+
+"You do to-day, and yet--do you know that I have been thinking since I
+came back that you are looking older, much older than when I went away?"
+
+"Is that Artois?" he said, looking over the wall to the mountain-side
+beyond the ravine.
+
+Hermione got up, leaned upon the wall, and followed his eyes.
+
+"I think it must be. I told Gaspare to go to the hotel when he fetched
+the provisions in Marechiaro and tell Emile it would be best to come up
+in the cool. Yes, it is he, and Gaspare is with him! Maurice, you don't
+mind so very much?"
+
+She put her arm through his.
+
+"These people can't talk when they see how ill he looks. And if they
+do--oh, Maurice, what does it matter? Surely there's only one thing in
+the world that matters, and that is whether one can look one's own
+conscience in the face and say, 'I've nothing to be ashamed of!'"
+
+Maurice longed to get away from the touch of her arm. He remembered the
+fragment of paper he had seen among the stones on the mountain-side. He
+must go up there alone directly he had a moment of freedom. But
+now--Artois! He stared at the distant donkeys. His brain felt dry and
+shrivelled, his body both feverish and tired. How could he support this
+long day's necessities? It seemed to him that he had not the strength and
+resolution to endure them. And Artois was so brilliant! Maurice thought
+of him at that moment as a sort of monster of intellectuality, terrifying
+and repellent.
+
+"Don't you think so?" Hermione said.
+
+"I dare say," he answered. "But I dare say, I suppose--very few of us can
+do that. We can't expect to be perfect, and other people oughtn't to
+expect it of us."
+
+His voice had changed. Before, it had been almost an accusing voice and
+insincere. Now it was surely a voice that pleaded, and it was absolutely
+sincere. Hermione remembered how in London long ago the humility of
+Maurice had touched her. He had stood out from the mass of conceited men
+because of his beauty and his simple readiness to sit at the feet of
+others. And surely the simplicity, the humility, still persisted
+beautifully in him.
+
+"I don't think I should ever expect anything of you that you wouldn't
+give me," she said to him. "Anything of loyalty, of straightness, or of
+manhood. Often you seem to me a boy, and yet, I know, if a danger came to
+me, or a trouble, I could lean on you and you would never fail me. That's
+what a woman loves to feel when she has given herself to a man, that he
+knows how to take care of her, and that he cares to take care of her."
+
+Her body was touching his. He felt himself stiffen. The mental pain he
+suffered under the lash of her words affected his body, and his knowledge
+of the necessity to hide all that was in his mind caused his body to long
+for isolation, to shrink from any contact with another.
+
+"I hope," he said, trying to make his voice natural and simple----"I hope
+you'll never be in trouble or in danger, Hermione."
+
+"I don't think I could mind very much if you were there, if I could just
+touch your hand."
+
+"Here they come!" he said. "I hope Artois isn't very tired with the ride.
+We ought to have had Sebastiano here to play the 'Pastorale' for him."
+
+"Ah! Sebastiano!" said Hermione. "He's playing it for some one else in
+the Lipari Islands. Poor Lucrezia! Maurice, I love Sicily and all things
+Sicilian. You know how much! But--but I'm glad you've got some drops of
+English blood in your veins. I'm glad you aren't all Sicilian."
+
+"Come," he said. "Let us go to the arch and meet him."
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+"So this is your Garden of Paradise?" Artois said.
+
+He got off his donkey slowly at the archway, and stood for a moment,
+after shaking them both by the hand, looking at the narrow terrace,
+bathed in sunshine despite the shelter of the awning, at the columns, at
+the towering rocks which dominated the grove of oak-trees, and at the
+low, white-walled cottage.
+
+"The garden from which you came to save my life," he added.
+
+He turned to Maurice.
+
+"I am grateful and I am ashamed," he said. "I was not your friend,
+monsieur, but you have treated me with more than friendship. I thank you
+in words now, but my hope is that some day I shall be given the
+opportunity to thank you with an act."
+
+He held out his hand again to Maurice. There had been a certain formality
+in his speech, but there was a warmth in his manner that was not formal.
+As Maurice held his hand the eyes of the two men met, and each took swift
+note of the change in the other.
+
+Artois's appearance was softened by his illness. In health he looked
+authoritative, leonine, very sure of himself, piercingly observant,
+sometimes melancholy, but not anxious. His manner, never blustering or
+offensive, was usually dominating, the manner of one who had the right to
+rule in the things of the intellect. Now he seemed much gentler, less
+intellectual, more emotional. One received, at a first meeting with him,
+the sensation rather of coming into contact with a man of heart than
+with a man of brains. Maurice felt the change at once, and was surprised
+by it. Outwardly the novelist was greatly altered. His tall frame was
+shrunken and slightly bent. The face was pale and drawn, the eyes were
+sunken, the large-boned body was frightfully thin and looked uncertain
+when it moved. As Maurice gazed he realized that this man had been to the
+door of death, almost over the threshold of the door.
+
+And Artois? He saw a change in the Mercury whom he had last seen at the
+door of the London restaurant, a change that startled him.
+
+"Come into our Garden of Paradise and rest," said Hermione. "Lean on my
+arm, Emile."
+
+"May I?" Artois asked of Maurice, with a faint smile that was almost
+pathetic.
+
+"Please do. You must be tired!"
+
+Hermione and Artois walked slowly forward to the terrace, arm linked in
+arm. Maurice was about to follow them when he felt a hand catch hold of
+him, a hand that was hot and imperative.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it?"
+
+"Signorino, signorino, I must speak to you!"
+
+Startled, Maurice looked into the boy's flushed face. The great eyes
+searched him fiercely.
+
+"Put the donkeys in the stable," Maurice said. "I'll come."
+
+"Come behind the house, signorino. Ah, Madonna!"
+
+The last exclamation was breathed out with an intensity that was like the
+intensity of despair. The boy's look and manner were tragic.
+
+"Gaspare," Maurice said, "what----?"
+
+He saw Hermione turning towards him.
+
+"I'll come in a minute, Gaspare."
+
+"Madonna!" repeated the boy. "Madonna!"
+
+He held up his hands and let them drop to his sides. Then he muttered
+something--a long sentence--in dialect. His voice sounded like a
+miserable old man's.
+
+"Ah--ah!"
+
+He called to the donkeys and drove them forward to the out-house. Maurice
+followed.
+
+What had happened? Gaspare had the manner, the look, of one confronted by
+a terror from which there was no escape. His eyes had surely at the same
+time rebuked and furiously pitied his master. What did they mean?
+
+"This is our Garden of Paradise!" Hermione was saying as Maurice came up
+to her and Artois. "Do you wonder that we love it?"
+
+"I wonder that you left it." Artois replied.
+
+He was sunk in a deep straw chair, a chaise longue piled up with
+cushions, facing the great and radiant view. After he had spoken he
+sighed.
+
+"I don't think," he said, "that either of you really know that this is
+Eden. That knowledge has been reserved for the interloper, for me."
+
+Hermione sat down close to him. Maurice was standing by the wall,
+listening furtively to the noises from the out-house, where Gaspare was
+unsaddling the donkeys. Artois glanced at him, and was more sharply
+conscious of change in him. To Artois this place, after the long journey,
+which had sorely tried his feeble body, seemed an enchanted place of
+peace, a veritable Elysian Field in which the saddest, the most driven
+man must surely forget his pain and learn how to rest and to be joyful in
+repose. But he felt that his host, the man who had been living in
+paradise, who ought surely to have been learning its blessed lessons
+through sunlit days and starry nights, was restless like a man in a city,
+was anxious, was intensely ill at ease. Once, watching this man, Artois
+had thought of the messenger, poised on winged feet, radiantly ready for
+movement that would be exquisite because it would be obedient. This man
+still looked ready for flight, but for a flight how different! As Artois
+was thinking this Maurice moved.
+
+"Excuse me just for an instant!" he said. "I want to speak to Gaspare."
+
+He saw now that Gaspare was taking into the cottage the provisions that
+had been carried up by the donkey from Marechiaro.
+
+"I--I told him to do something for me in the village," he added, "and I
+want just to know--"
+
+He looked at them, almost defiantly, as if he challenged them not to
+believe what he had said. Then, without finishing his sentence, he went
+quickly into the cottage.
+
+"You have chosen your garden well," Artois said to Hermione directly they
+were alone. "No other sea has ever given to me such an impression of
+tenderness and magical space as this; no other sea has surely ever had a
+horizon-line so distant from those who look as this."
+
+He went on talking about the beauty, leading her with him. He feared lest
+she might begin to speak about her husband.
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice had reached the mountain-side behind the house and was
+waiting there for Gaspare. He heard the boy's voice in the kitchen
+speaking to Lucrezia, angrily it seemed by the sound. Then the voice
+ceased and Gaspare appeared for an instant at the kitchen door, making
+violent motions with his arms towards the mountain. He disappeared. What
+did he want? What did he mean? The gestures had been imperative. Maurice
+looked round. A little way up the mountain there was a large, closed
+building, like a barn, built of stones. It belonged to a contadino, but
+Maurice had never seen it open, or seen any one going to or coming from
+it. As he stared at it an idea occurred to him. Perhaps Gaspare meant him
+to go and wait there, behind the barn, so that Lucrezia should not see or
+hear their colloquy. He resolved to do this, and went swiftly up the
+hill-side. When he was in the shadow of the building he waited. He did
+not know what was the matter, what Gaspare wanted, but he realized that
+something had occurred which had stirred the boy to the depths. This
+something must have occurred while he was at Marechiaro. Before he had
+time mentally to make a list of possible events in Marechiaro, Maurice
+heard light feet running swiftly up the mountain, and Gaspare came round
+the corner, still with the look of tragedy, a wild, almost terrible look
+in his eyes.
+
+"Signorino," he began at once, in a low voice that was full of the
+pressure of an intense excitement. "Tell me! Where were you last night
+when we were making the fireworks go off?"
+
+Maurice felt the blood mount to his face.
+
+"Close to where you left me," he answered.
+
+"Oh, signore! Oh, signore!"
+
+It was almost a cry. The sweat was pouring down the boy's face.
+
+"Ma non č mia colpa! Non č mia colpa!" he exclaimed.
+
+"What do you mean? What has happened, Gaspare?"
+
+"I have seen Salvatore."
+
+His voice was more quiet now. He fixed his eyes almost sternly on his
+padrone, as if in the effort to read his very soul.
+
+"Well? Well, Gaspare?"
+
+Maurice was almost stammering now. He guessed--he knew what was coming.
+
+"Salvatore came up to me just before I got to the village. I heard him
+calling, 'Stop!' I stood still. We were on the path not far from the
+fountain. There was a broken branch on the ground, a branch of olive.
+Salvatore said: 'Suppose that is your padrone, that branch there!' and he
+spat on it. He spat on it, signore, he spat--and he spat."
+
+Maurice knew now.
+
+"Go on!" he said.
+
+And this time there was no uncertainty in his voice. Gaspare was
+breathing hard. His breast rose and fell.
+
+"I was going to strike him in the face, but he caught my hand, and
+then--Signorino, signorino, what have you done?"
+
+His voice rose. He began to look uncontrolled, distracted, wild, as if he
+might do some frantic thing.
+
+"Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+Maurice had him by the arms.
+
+"Why did you?" panted the boy. "Why did you?"
+
+"Then Salvatore knows?"
+
+Maurice saw that any denial was useless.
+
+"He knows! He knows!"
+
+If Maurice had not held Gaspare tightly the boy would have flung himself
+down headlong on the ground, to burst into one of those storms of weeping
+which swept upon him when he was fiercely wrought up. But Maurice would
+not let him have this relief.
+
+"Gaspare! Listen to me! What is he going to do? What is Salvatore going
+to do?"
+
+"Santa Madonna! Santa Madonna!"
+
+The boy rocked himself to and fro. He began to invoke the Madonna and the
+saints. He was beside himself, was almost like one mad.
+
+"Gaspare--in the name of God----!"
+
+"H'sh!"
+
+Suddenly the boy kept still. His face changed, hardened. His body became
+tense. With his hand still held up in a warning gesture, he crept to the
+edge of the barn and looked round it.
+
+"What is it?" Maurice whispered.
+
+Gaspare stole back.
+
+"It is only Lucrezia. She is spreading the linen. I thought----"
+
+"What is Salvatore going to do?"
+
+"Unless you go down to the sea to meet him this evening, signorino, he
+is coming up here to-night to tell everything to the signora."
+
+Maurice went white.
+
+"I shall go," he said. "I shall go down to the sea."
+
+"Madonna! Madonna!"
+
+"He won't come now? He won't come this morning?"
+
+Maurice spoke almost breathlessly, with his hands on the boy's hands
+which streamed with sweat. Gaspare shook his head.
+
+"I told him if he came up I would meet him in the path and kill him."
+
+The boy had out a knife.
+
+Maurice put his arm round Gaspare's shoulder. At that moment he really
+loved the boy.
+
+"Will he come?"
+
+"Only if you do not go."
+
+"I shall go."
+
+"I will come with you, signorino."
+
+"No. I must go alone."
+
+"I will come with you!"
+
+A dogged obstinacy hardened his whole face, made even his shining eyes
+look cold, like stones.
+
+"Gaspare, you are to stay with the signora. I may miss Salvatore going
+down. While I am gone he may come up here. The signora is not to speak
+with him. He is not to come to her."
+
+Gaspare hesitated. He was torn in two by his dual affection, his dual
+sense of the watchful fidelity he owed to his padrone and to his padrona.
+
+"Va bene," he said, at last, in a half whisper.
+
+He hung down his head like one exhausted.
+
+"How will it finish?" he murmured, as if to himself. "How will it
+finish?"
+
+"I must go," Maurice said. "I must go now. Gaspare!"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"We must be careful, you and I, to-day. We must not let the signora,
+Lucrezia, any one suspect that--that we are not just as usual. Do you
+see?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The boy nodded. His eyes now looked tired.
+
+"And try to keep a lookout, when you can, without drawing the attention
+of the signora. Salvatore might change his mind and come up. The signora
+is not to know. She is never to know. Do you think"--he hesitated--"do
+you think Salvatore has told any one?"
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+The boy was silent. Then he lifted his hands again and said:
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+And Maurice seemed to hear at that moment the voice of an accusing angel.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, "I was mad. We men--we are mad sometimes. But now I
+must be sane. I must do what I can to--I must do what I can--and you must
+help me."
+
+He held out his hand. Gaspare took it. The grasp of it was strong, that
+of a man. It seemed to reassure the boy.
+
+"I will always help my padrone," he said.
+
+Then they went down the mountain-side.
+
+It was perhaps very strange--Maurice thought it was--but he felt now less
+tired, less confused, more master of himself than he had before he had
+spoken with Gaspare. He even felt less miserable. Face to face with an
+immediate and very threatening danger, courage leaped up in him, a
+certain violence of resolve which cleared away clouds and braced his
+whole being. He had to fight. There was no way out. Well, then, he would
+fight. He had played the villain, perhaps, but he would not play the
+poltroon. He did not know what he was going to do, what he could do, but
+he must act, and act decisively. His wild youth responded to this call
+made upon it. There was a new light in his eyes as he went down to the
+cottage, as he came upon the terrace.
+
+Artois noticed it at once, was aware at once that in this marvellous
+peace to which Hermione had brought him there were elements which had
+nothing to do with peace.
+
+"What hast thou to do with peace? Turn thee behind me."
+
+These words from the Bible came into his mind as he looked into the eyes
+of his host, and he felt that Hermione and he were surely near to some
+drama of which they knew nothing, of which Hermione, perhaps, suspected
+nothing.
+
+Maurice acted his part. The tonic of near danger gave him strength, even
+gave him at first a certain subtlety. From the terrace he could see far
+over the mountain flanks. As one on a tower he watched for the approach
+of his enemy from the sea, but he did not neglect his two companions. For
+he was fighting already. When he seemed natural in his cordiality to his
+guest, when he spoke and laughed, when he apologized for the misfortune
+of the previous day, he was fighting. The battle with circumstances was
+joined. He must bear himself bravely in it. He must not allow himself to
+be overwhelmed.
+
+Nevertheless, there came presently a moment which brought with it a sense
+of fear.
+
+Hermione got up to go into the house.
+
+"I must see what Lucrezia is doing," she said. "Your collazione must not
+be a fiasco, Emile."
+
+"Nothing could be a fiasco here, I think," he answered.
+
+She laughed happily.
+
+"But poor Lucrezia is not in paradise," she said. "Ah, why can't every
+one be happy when one is happy one's self? I always think of that when
+I----"
+
+She did not finish her sentence in words. Her look at the two men
+concluded it. Then she turned and went into the house.
+
+"What is the matter with Lucrezia?" asked Artois.
+
+"Oh, she--she's in love with a shepherd called Sebastiano."
+
+"And he's treating her badly?"
+
+"I'm afraid so. He went to the Lipari Isles, and he doesn't come back."
+
+"A girl there keeps him captive?"
+
+"It seems so."
+
+"Faithful women must not expect to have a perfect time in Sicily," Artois
+said.
+
+As he spoke he noticed that a change came in his companion's face. It was
+fleeting, but it was marked. It made Artois think:
+
+"This man understands Sicilian faithlessness in love."
+
+It made him, too, remember sharply some words of his own said long ago in
+London:
+
+"I love the South, but I distrust what I love, and I see the South in
+him."
+
+There was a silence between the two men. Heat was growing in the long
+summer day, heat that lapped them in the influence of the South. Africa
+had been hotter, but this seemed the breast of the South, full of glory
+and of languor, and of that strange and subtle influence which inclines
+the heart of man to passion and the body of man to yield to its desires.
+It was glorious, this wonderful magic of the South, but was it wholesome
+for Northern men? Was it not full of danger? As he looked at the great,
+shining waste of the sea, purple and gold, dark and intense and jewelled,
+at the outline of Etna, at the barbaric ruin of the Saracenic castle on
+the cliff opposite, like a cry from the dead ages echoing out of the
+quivering blue, at the man before him leaning against the blinding white
+wall above the steep bank of the ravine, Artois said to himself that the
+South was dangerous to young, full-blooded men, was dangerous, to such a
+man as Delarey. And he asked himself the question, "What has this man
+been doing here in this glorious loneliness of the South, while his wife
+has been saving my life in Africa?" And a sense of reproach, almost of
+alarm, smote him. For he had called Hermione away. In the terrible
+solitude that comes near to the soul with the footfalls of death he had
+not been strong enough to be silent. He had cried out, and his friend had
+heard and had answered. And Delarey had been left alone with the sun.
+
+"I'm afraid you must feel as if I were your enemy," he said.
+
+And as he spoke he was thinking, "Have I been this man's enemy?"
+
+"Oh no. Why?"
+
+"I deprived you of your wife. You've been all alone here."
+
+"I made friends of the Sicilians."
+
+Maurice spoke lightly, but through his mind ran the thought, "What an
+enemy this man has been to me, without knowing it!"
+
+"They are easy to get on with," said Artois. "When I was in Sicily I
+learned to love them."
+
+"Oh, love!" said Maurice, hastily.
+
+He checked himself.
+
+"That's rather a strong word, but I like them. They're a delightful
+race."
+
+"Have you found out their faults?"
+
+Both men were trying to hide themselves in their words.
+
+"What are their faults, do you think?" Maurice said.
+
+He looked over the wall and saw, far off on the path by the ravine, a
+black speck moving.
+
+"Treachery when they do not trust; sensuality, violence, if they think
+themselves wronged."
+
+"Are--are those faults? I understand them. They seem almost to belong to
+the sun."
+
+Artois had not been looking at Maurice. The sound of Maurice's voice now
+made him aware that the speaker had turned away from him. He glanced up
+and saw his companion staring over the wall across the ravine. What was
+he gazing at? Artois wondered.
+
+"Yes, the sun is perhaps partly responsible for them. Then you have
+become such a sun-worshipper that----"
+
+"No, no, I don't say that," Maurice interrupted.
+
+He looked round and met Artois's observant eyes. He had dreaded having
+those eyes fixed upon him.
+
+"But I think--I think things done in such a place, such an island as
+this, shouldn't be judged too severely, shouldn't be judged, I mean,
+quite as we might judge them, say, in England."
+
+He looked embarrassed as he ended, and shifted his gaze from his
+companion.
+
+"I agree with you," Artois said.
+
+Maurice looked at him again, almost eagerly. An odd feeling came to him
+that this man, who unwittingly had done him a deadly harm, would be able
+to understand what perhaps no woman could ever understand, the tyranny of
+the senses in a man, their fierce tyranny in the sunlit lands. Had he
+been so wicked? Would Artois think so? And the punishment that was
+perhaps coming--did he deserve that it should be terrible? He wondered,
+almost like a boy. But Hermione was not with them. When she was there he
+did not wonder. He felt that he deserved lashes unnumbered.
+
+And Artois--he began to feel almost clairvoyant. The new softness that
+had come to him with the pain of the body, that had been developed by the
+blessed rest from pain that was convalescence, had not stricken his
+faculty of seeing clear in others, but it had changed, at any rate for a
+time, the sentiments that followed upon the exercise of that faculty.
+Scorn and contempt were less near to him than they had been. Pity was
+nearer. He felt now almost sure that Delarey had fallen into some
+trouble while Hermione was in Africa, that he was oppressed at this
+moment by some great uneasiness or even fear, that he was secretly
+cursing some imprudence, and that his last words were a sort of
+surreptitious plea for forgiveness, thrown out to the Powers of the air,
+to the Spirits of the void, to whatever shadowy presences are about the
+guilty man ready to condemn his sin. He felt, too, that he owed much to
+Delarey. In a sense it might be said that he owed to him his life. For
+Delarey had allowed Hermione to come to Africa, and if Hermione had not
+come the end for him, Artois, might well have been death.
+
+"I should like to say something to you, monsieur," he said. "It is rather
+difficult to say, because I do not wish it to seem formal, when the
+feeling that prompts it is not formal."
+
+Maurice was again looking over the wall, watching with intensity the
+black speck that was slowly approaching on the little path.
+
+"What is it, monsieur?" he asked, quickly.
+
+"I owe you a debt--indeed I do. You must not deny it. Through your
+magnanimous action in permitting your wife to leave you, you, perhaps
+indirectly, saved my life. For, without her aid, I do not think I could
+have recovered. Of her nobility and devotion I will not, because I cannot
+adequately, speak. But I wish to say to you that if ever I can do you a
+service of any kind I will do it."
+
+As he finished Maurice, who was looking at him now, saw a veil over his
+big eyes. Could it--could it possibly be a veil of tears!
+
+"Thank you," he answered.
+
+He tried to speak warmly, cordially. But his heart said to him: "You can
+do nothing for me now. It is all too late!"
+
+Yet the words and the emotion of Artois were some slight relief to him.
+He was able to feel that in this man he had no secret enemy, but, if
+need be, a friend.
+
+"You have a nice fellow as servant," Artois said, to change the
+conversation.
+
+"Gaspare--yes. He's loyal. I intend to ask Hermione to let me take him to
+England with us."
+
+He paused, then added, with an anxious curiosity:
+
+"Did you talk to him much as you came up?"
+
+He wondered whether the novelist had noticed Gaspare's agitation or
+whether the boy had been subtle enough to conceal it.
+
+"Not very much. The path is narrow, and I rode in front. He sang most of
+the time, those melancholy songs of Sicily that came surely long ago
+across the sea from Africa."
+
+"They nearly always sing on the mountains when they are with the
+donkeys."
+
+"Dirges of the sun. There is a sadness of the sun as well as a joy."
+
+"Yes."
+
+As Maurice answered, he thought, "How well I know that now!" And as he
+looked at the black figure drawing nearer in the sunshine it seemed to
+him that there was a terror in that gold which he had often worshipped.
+If that figure should be Salvatore! He strained his eyes. At one moment
+he fancied that he recognized the wild, free, rather strutting walk of
+the fisherman. At another he believed that his fear had played him a
+trick, that the movements of the figure were those of an old man, some
+plodding contadino of the hills. Artois wondered increasingly what he was
+looking at. A silence fell between them. Artois lay back in the chaise
+longue and gazed up at the blue, then at the section of distant sea which
+was visible above the rim of the wall though the intervening mountain
+land was hidden. It was a paradise up here. And to have it with the great
+love of a woman, what an experience that must be for any man! It seemed
+to him strange that such an experience had been the gift of the gods to
+their messenger, their Mercury. What had it meant to him? What did it
+mean to him now? Something had changed him. Was it that? In the man by
+the wall Artois did not see any longer the bright youth he remembered.
+Yet the youth was still there, the supple grace, the beauty, bronzed now
+by the long heats of the sun. It was the expression that had changed. In
+cities one sees anxious-looking men everywhere. In London Delarey had
+stood out from the crowd not only because of his beauty of the South, but
+because of his light-hearted expression, the spirit of youth in his eyes.
+And now here, in this reality that seemed almost like a dream in its
+perfection, in this reality of the South, there was a look of strain in
+his eyes and in his whole body. The man had contradicted his surroundings
+in London--now he contradicted his surroundings here.
+
+While Artois was thinking this Maurice's expression suddenly changed, his
+attitude became easier. He turned round from the wall, and Artois saw
+that the keen anxiety had gone out of his eyes. Gaspare was below with
+his gun pretending to look for birds, and had made a sign that the
+approaching figure was not that of Salvatore. Maurice's momentary sense
+of relief was so great that it threw him off his guard.
+
+"What can have been happening beyond the wall?" Artois thought.
+
+He felt as if a drama had been played out there and the dénouement had
+been happy.
+
+Hermione came back at this moment.
+
+"Poor Lucrezia!" she said. "She's plucky, but Sebastiano is making her
+suffer horribly."
+
+"Here!" said Artois, almost involuntarily.
+
+"It does seem almost impossible, I know."
+
+She sat down again near him and smiled at her husband.
+
+"You are coming back to health, Emile. And Maurice and I--well, we are in
+our garden. It seems wrong, terribly wrong, that any one should suffer
+here. But Lucrezia loves like a Sicilian. What violence there is in these
+people!"
+
+"England must not judge them."
+
+He looked at Maurice.
+
+"What's that?" asked Hermione. "Something you two were talking about when
+I was in the kitchen?"
+
+Maurice looked uneasy.
+
+"I was only saying that I think the sun--the South has an influence," he
+said, "and that----"
+
+"An influence!" exclaimed Hermione. "Of course it has! Emile, you would
+have seen that influence at work if you had been with us on our first day
+in Sicily. Your tarantella, Maurice!"
+
+She smiled again happily, but her husband did not answer her smile.
+
+"What was that?" said Artois. "You never told me in Africa."
+
+"The boys danced a tarantella here on the terrace to welcome us, and it
+drove Maurice so mad that he sprang up and danced too. And the strange
+thing was that he danced as well as any of them. His blood called him,
+and he obeyed the call."
+
+She looked at Artois to remind him of his words.
+
+"It's good when the blood calls one to the tarantella, isn't it?" she
+asked him. "I think it's the most wildly innocent expression of extreme
+joy in the world. And yet"--her expressive face changed, and into her
+prominent brown eyes there stole a half-whimsical, half-earnest look--"at
+the end--Maurice, do you know that I was almost frightened that day at
+the end?"
+
+"Frightened! Why?" he said.
+
+He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a straw chair.
+
+[Illustration: "'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN--IN MY SICILIAN,' SHE
+SAID, TENDERLY"]
+
+"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the other and laying his
+brown hands on the arms of the chair.
+
+"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in the tarantella. Wasn't
+it absurd?"
+
+He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.
+
+"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced so well that I seemed to
+see before me a pure-blooded Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"But I soon learned to delight in--in my Sicilian," she said, tenderly.
+
+She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely natural, that it
+did not occur to her that though she was with her husband and her most
+intimate friend the two men were really strangers to each other.
+
+"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are back in London," Maurice
+said. There was a cold sound of determination in his voice.
+
+"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have gained here," Hermione
+protested, half laughingly, half tenderly.
+
+"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I don't think a
+Sicilian would be much good in England. We--we don't want romance there.
+We want cool-headed, practical men who can work, and who've no nonsense
+about them."
+
+"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche! And from you! Why, what
+has happened to you while I've been away?"
+
+"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing. What should happen to me
+here?"
+
+"Do you--are you beginning to long for England and English ways?"
+
+"I think it's time I began to do something," he said, resolutely. "I
+think I've had a long enough holiday."
+
+He was trying to put the past behind him. He was trying to rush into the
+new life, the life in which there would be no more wildness, no more
+yielding to the hot impulses that were surely showered down out of the
+sun. Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already. It was fading
+away, sinking into its purple sea, sinking out of his sight with his wild
+heart of youth, while he, cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady
+life befitting an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties, of
+husband and father, with a money-making ambition and a stake in his
+country.
+
+"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.
+
+But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice. Till now Maurice
+had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms, had even run before them,
+lighter-footed than she in the race towards the sunshine. It was
+difficult to accommodate herself to this abrupt change.
+
+"But don't let us think of going to-day," she added. "Remember--I have
+only just come back."
+
+"And I!" said Artois. "Be merciful to an invalid, Monsieur Delarey!"
+
+He spoke lightly, but he felt fully conscious now that his suspicion was
+well founded. Maurice was uneasy, unhappy. He wanted to get away from
+this peace that held no peace for him. He wanted to put something behind
+him. To a man like Artois, Maurice was a boy. He might try to be subtle,
+he might even be subtle--for him. But to this acute and trained observer
+of the human comedy he could not for long be deceptive.
+
+During his severe illness the mind of Artois had often been clouded, had
+been dispossessed of its throne by the clamor of the body's pain. And
+afterwards, when the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had been
+lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was delicious. But now it
+began to go again to its business. It began to work with the old rapidity
+that had for a time been lost. And as this power came back and was felt
+thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious man, he took alarm.
+What affected or threatened Delarey must affect, threaten Hermione.
+Whether he were one with her or not she was one with him. The feeling of
+Artois towards the woman who had shown him such noble, such unusual
+friendship was exquisitely delicate and intensely strong. Unmingled with
+any bodily passion, it was, or so it seemed to him, the more delicate and
+strong on that account. He was a man who had an instinctive hatred of
+heroics. His taste revolted from them as it revolted from violence in
+literature. They seemed to him a coarseness, a crudity of the soul, and
+almost inevitably linked with secret falseness. But he was conscious that
+to protect from sorrow or shame the woman who had protected him in his
+dark hour he would be willing to make any sacrifice. There would be no
+limit to what he would be ready to do now, in this moment, for Hermione.
+He knew that, and he took the alarm. Till now he had been feeling
+curiosity about the change in Delarey. Now he felt the touch of fear.
+
+Something had happened to change Maurice while Hermione had been in
+Africa. He had heard, perhaps, the call of the blood. All that he had
+said, and all that he had felt, on the night when he had met Maurice for
+the first time in London, came back to Artois. He had prophesied, vaguely
+perhaps. Had his prophecy already been fulfilled? In this great and
+shining peace of nature Maurice was not at peace. And now all sense of
+peace deserted Artois. Again, and fiercely now, he felt the danger of the
+South, and he added to his light words some words that were not light.
+
+"But I am really no longer an invalid," he said. "And I must be getting
+northward very soon. I need the bracing air, the Spartan touch of the
+cold that the Sybarite in me dreads. Perhaps we all need them."
+
+"If you go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed, "you will make me
+feel as if it were degraded to wish to live anywhere except at Clapham
+Junction or the North Pole. Let us be happy as we are, where we are,
+to-day and--yes, call me weak if you like--and to-morrow!"
+
+Maurice made no answer to this challenge, but Artois covered his silence,
+and kept the talk going on safe topics till Gaspare came to the terrace
+to lay the cloth for collazione.
+
+It was past noon now, and the heat was brimming up like a flood over the
+land. Flies buzzed about the terrace, buzzed against the white walls and
+ceilings of the cottage, winding their tiny, sultry horns ceaselessly,
+musicians of the sun. The red geraniums in the stone pots beneath the
+broken columns drooped their dry heads. The lizards darted and stopped,
+darted and stopped upon the wall and the white seats where the tiles were
+burning to the touch. There was no moving figure on the baked mountains,
+no moving vessel on the shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips
+of Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down and slain the
+fires of the earth.
+
+Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth, arranging the pots
+of flowers, the glasses, forks, and knives upon it. In his face there was
+little vivacity. But now and then his great eyes searched the hot world
+that lay beneath them, and Artois thought he saw in them the
+watchfulness, the strained anxiety that had been in Maurice's eyes.
+
+"Some one must be coming," he thought. "Or they must be expecting some
+one to come, these two."
+
+"Do you ever have visitors here?" he asked, carelessly.
+
+"Visitors! Emile, why are we here? Do you anticipate a knock and 'If you
+please, ma'am, Mrs. and the Misses Watson'? Good Heavens--visitors on
+Monte Amato!"
+
+He smiled, but he persisted.
+
+"Never a contadino, or a shepherd, or"--he looked down at the sea--"or a
+fisherman with his basket of sarde?"
+
+Maurice moved in his chair, and Gaspare, hearing a word he knew, looked
+hard at the speaker.
+
+"Oh, we sometimes have the people of the hills to see us," said Hermione.
+"But we don't call them 'visitors.' As to fishermen--here they are!"
+
+She pointed to her husband and Gaspare.
+
+"But they eat all the fish they catch, and we never see the fin of even
+one at the cottage."
+
+Collazione was ready now. Hermione helped Artois up from his chaise
+longue, and they went to the table under the awning.
+
+"You must sit facing the view, Emile," Hermione said.
+
+"What a dining-room!" Artois exclaimed.
+
+Now he could see over the wall. His gaze wandered over the
+mountain-sides, travelled down to the land that lay along the edge of the
+sea.
+
+"Have you been fishing much since I've been away, Maurice?" Hermione
+asked, as they began to eat.
+
+"Oh yes. I went several times. What wine do you like, Monsieur Artois?"
+
+He tried to change the conversation, but Hermione, quite innocently,
+returned to the subject.
+
+"They fish at night, you know, Emile, all along that coast by Isola Bella
+and on to the point there that looks like an island, where the House of
+the Sirens is."
+
+A tortured look went across Maurice's face. He had begun to eat, but now
+he stopped for a moment like a man suddenly paralyzed.
+
+"The House of the Sirens!" said Artois. "Then there are sirens here? I
+could well believe it. Have you seen them, Monsieur Maurice, at night,
+when you have been fishing?"
+
+He had been gazing at the coast, but now he turned towards his host.
+Maurice began hastily to eat again.
+
+"I'm afraid not. But we didn't look out for them. We were prosaic and
+thought of nothing but the fish."
+
+"And is there really a house down there?" said Artois.
+
+"Yes," said Hermione. "It used to be a ruin, but now it's built up and
+occupied. Gaspare"--she spoke to him as he was taking a dish from the
+table--"who is it lives in the Casa delle Sirene now? You told me, but
+I've forgotten."
+
+A heavy, obstinate look came into the boy's face, transforming it. The
+question startled him, and he had not understood a word of the
+conversation which had led up to it. What had they been talking about? He
+glanced furtively at his master. Maurice did not look at him.
+
+"Salvatore and Maddalena, signora," he answered, after a pause.
+
+Then he took the dish and went into the house.
+
+"What's the matter with Gaspare?" said Hermione. "I never saw him look
+like that before--quite ugly. Doesn't he like these people?"
+
+"Oh yes," replied Maurice. "Why--why, they're quite friends of ours. We
+saw them at the fair only yesterday."
+
+"Well, then, why should Gaspare look like that?"
+
+"Oh," said Artois, who saw the discomfort of his host, "perhaps there is
+some family feud that you know nothing of. When I was in Sicily I found
+the people singularly subtle. They can gossip terribly, but they can keep
+a secret when they choose. If I had won the real friendship of a
+Sicilian, I would rather trust him with my secret than a man of any other
+race. They are not only loyal--that is not enough--but they are also very
+intelligent."
+
+"Yes, they are both--the good ones," said Hermione. "I would trust
+Gaspare through thick and thin. If they were only as stanch in love as
+they can be in friendship!"
+
+Gaspare came out again with another course. The ugly expression had gone
+from his face, but he still looked unusually grave.
+
+"Ah, when the senses are roused they are changed beings," Artois said.
+"They hate and resent governance from outside, but their blood governs
+them."
+
+"Our blood governs us when the time comes--do you remember?"
+
+Hermione had said the words before she remembered the circumstances in
+which they had been spoken and of whom they were said. Directly she had
+uttered them she remembered.
+
+"What was that?" Maurice asked, before Artois could reply.
+
+He had seen a suddenly conscious look in Hermione's face, and instantly
+he was aware of a feeling of jealousy within him.
+
+"What was that?" he repeated, looking quickly from one to the other.
+
+"Something I remember saying to your wife," Artois answered. "We were
+talking about human nature--a small subject, monsieur, isn't it?--and I
+think I expressed the view of a fatalist. At any rate, I did say
+that--that our blood governs us when the time comes."
+
+"The time?" Maurice asked.
+
+His feeling of jealousy died away, and was replaced by a keen personal
+interest unmingled with suspicions of another.
+
+"Well, I confess it sometimes seems to me as if, when a certain hour
+strikes, a certain deed must be committed by a certain man or woman. It
+is perhaps their hour of madness. They may repent it to the day of their
+death. But can they in that hour avoid that deed? Sometimes, when I
+witness the tragic scenes that occur abruptly, unexpectedly, in the
+comedy of life, I am moved to wonder."
+
+"Then you should be very forgiving, Emile," Hermione said.
+
+"And you?" he asked. "Are you, or would you be, forgiving?"
+
+Maurice leaned forward on the table and looked at his wife with
+intensity.
+
+"I hope so, but I don't think it would be for that--I mean because I
+thought the deed might not have been avoided. I think I should forgive
+because I pitied so, because I know how desperately unhappy I should be
+myself if I were to do a hateful thing, a thing that was exceptional,
+that was not natural to my nature as I had generally known it. When one
+really does love cleanliness, to have thrown one's self down deliberately
+in the mud, to see, to feel, that one is soiled from head to foot--that
+must be terrible. I think I should forgive because I pitied so. What do
+you say, Maurice?"
+
+It was like a return to their talk in London at Caminiti's restaurant,
+when Hermione and Artois discussed topics that interested them, and
+Maurice listened until Hermione appealed to him for his opinion. But now
+he was more deeply interested than his companions.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about pitying and forgiving, but I
+expect you're right, Hermione."
+
+"How?"
+
+"In what you say about--about the person who's done the wrong thing
+feeling awful afterwards. And I think Monsieur Artois is right,
+too--about the hour of madness. I'm sure he is right. Sometimes an hour
+comes and one seems to forget everything in it. One seems not to be
+really one's self in it, but somebody else, and--and--"
+
+Suddenly he seemed to become aware that, whereas Hermione and Artois had
+been considering a subject impersonally, he was introducing the personal
+element into the conversation. He stopped short, looked quickly from
+Hermione to Artois, and said:
+
+"What I mean is that I imagine it's so, and that I've known fellows--in
+London, you know--who've done such odd things that I can only explain it
+like that. They must have--well, they must have gone practically mad for
+the moment. You--you see what I mean, Hermione?"
+
+The question was uneasy.
+
+"Yes, but I think we can control ourselves. If we couldn't, remorse would
+lose half its meaning. I could never feel remorse because I had been
+mad--horror, perhaps, but not remorse. It seems to me that remorse is our
+sorrow for our own weakness, the heart's cry of 'I need not have done the
+hateful thing, and I did it, I chose to do it!' But I could pity, I could
+pity, and forgive because of my pity."
+
+Gaspare came out with coffee.
+
+"And then, Emile, you must have a siesta," said Hermione. "This is a
+tiring day for you. Maurice and I will leave you quite alone in the
+sitting-room."
+
+"I don't think I could sleep," said Artois.
+
+He was feeling oddly excited, and attributed the sensation to his weak
+state of health. For so long he had been shut up, isolated from the
+world, that even this coming out was an event. He was accustomed to
+examine his feelings calmly, critically, to track them to their sources.
+He tried to do so now.
+
+"I must beware of my own extra sensitiveness," he said to himself. "I'm
+still weak. I am not normal. I may see things distorted. I may
+exaggerate, turn the small into the great. At least half of what I think
+and feel to-day may come from my peculiar state."
+
+Thus he tried to raise up barriers against his feeling that Delarey had
+got into some terrible trouble during the absence of Hermione, that he
+was now stricken with remorse, and that he was also in active dread of
+something, perhaps of some Nemesis.
+
+"All this may be imagination," Artois thought, as he sipped his coffee.
+But he said again:
+
+"I don't think I could sleep. I feel abnormally alive to-day. Do you
+know the sensation, as if one were too quick, as if all the nerves were
+standing at attention?"
+
+"Then our peace here does not soothe you?" Hermione said.
+
+"If I must be truthful--no," he answered.
+
+He met Maurice's restless glance.
+
+"I think I've had enough coffee," he added. "Coffee stimulates the nerves
+too much at certain times."
+
+Maurice finished his and asked for another cup.
+
+"He isn't afraid of being overstimulated," said Hermione. "But, Emile,
+you ought to sleep. You'll be dead tired this evening when you ride
+down."
+
+"This evening," Hermione had said. Maurice wondered suddenly how late
+Artois was going to stay at the cottage.
+
+"Oh no, it will be cool," Artois said.
+
+"Yes," Maurice said. "Towards five we get a little wind from the sea
+nearly always, even sooner sometimes. I--I usually go down to bathe about
+that time."
+
+"I must begin to bathe, too," Hermione said.
+
+"What--to-day!" Maurice said, quickly.
+
+"Oh no. Emile is here to-day."
+
+Then Artois did not mean to go till late. But he--Maurice--must go down
+to the sea before nightfall.
+
+"Unless I bathe," he said, trying to speak naturally--"unless I bathe I
+feel the heat too much at night. A dip in the sea does wonders for me."
+
+"And in such a sea!" said Artois. "You must have your dip to-day. I shall
+go directly that little wind you speak of comes. I told a boy to come up
+from the village at four to lead the donkey down."
+
+He smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"Dreadful to be such a weakling, isn't it?" he said.
+
+"Hush. Don't talk, like that. It's all going away. Strength is coming.
+You'll soon be your old self. But you've got to look forward all the
+time."
+
+Hermione spoke with a warmth, an energy that braced. She spoke to Artois,
+but Maurice, eager to grasp at any comfort, strove to take the words to
+himself. This evening the climax of his Sicilian tragedy must come. And
+then? Beyond, might there not be the calm, the happiness of a sane life?
+He must look forward, he would look forward.
+
+But when he looked, there stood Maddalena weeping.
+
+He hated himself. He loved happiness, he longed for it, but he knew he
+had lost his right to it, if any man ever has such a right. He had
+created suffering. How dared he expect, how dared he even wish, to escape
+from suffering?
+
+"Now, Emile," Hermione said, "you have really got to go in and lie down
+whether you feel sleepy or not. Don't protest. Maurice and I have hardly
+seen anything of each other yet. We want to get rid of you."
+
+She spoke laughingly, and laughingly he obeyed her. When she had settled
+him comfortably in the sitting-room she came out again to the terrace
+where her husband was standing, looking towards the sea. She had a rug
+over her arm and was holding two cushions.
+
+"I thought you and I might go down and take our siesta under the
+oak-trees, Maurice. Would you like that?"
+
+He was longing to get away, to go up to the heap of stones on the
+mountain-top and set a match to the fragments of Hermione's letter, which
+the dangerous wind might disturb, might bring out into the light of day.
+But he acquiesced at once. He would go later--if not this afternoon, then
+at night when he came back from the sea. They went down and spread the
+rug under the shadow of the oaks.
+
+"I used to read to Gaspare here," he said. "When you were away in
+Africa."
+
+"What did you read?"
+
+"The _Arabian Nights_."
+
+She stretched herself on the rug.
+
+"To lie here and read the _Arabian Nights_! And you want to go away,
+Maurice?"
+
+"I think it's time to go. If I stayed too long here I should become fit
+for nothing."
+
+"Yes, that's true, I dare say. But--Maurice, it's so strange--I have a
+feeling as if you would always be in Sicily. I know it's absurd, and yet
+I have it. I feel as if you belonged to Sicily, and Sicily did not mean
+to part from you."
+
+"That can't be. How could I stay here always?"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Unless," he said, as if some new thought had started suddenly into his
+mind--"unless I were--"
+
+He stopped. He had remembered his sensation in the sea that gray morning
+of sirocco. He had remembered how he had played at dying.
+
+"What?"
+
+She looked at him and understood.
+
+"Maurice--don't! I--I can't bear that!"
+
+"Not one of us can know," he answered.
+
+"I--I thought of that once," she said--"long ago, on the first night that
+we were here. I don't know why--but perhaps it was because I was so
+happy. I think it must have been that. I suppose, in this world, there
+must aways be dread in one's happiness, the thought it may stop soon, it
+may end. But why should it? Is God cruel? I think He wants us to be
+happy."
+
+"If he wants us--"
+
+"And that we prevent ourselves from being happy. But we won't do that,
+Maurice--you and I--will we?"
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"This world--nature--is so wonderfully beautiful, so happily beautiful.
+Surely we can learn to be happy, to keep happy in it. Look at that sky,
+that sea! Look at the plain over there by the foot of Etna, and the
+coast-line fading away, and Etna. The God who created it all must have
+meant men to be happy in such a world. It isn't my brain tells me that,
+Maurice, it's my heart, my whole heart that you have made whole. And I
+know it tells the truth."
+
+Her words were terrible to him. The sound of a step, a figure standing
+before her, a few Sicilian words--and all this world in which she gloried
+would be changed for her. But she must not know. He felt that he would be
+willing to die to keep her ignorant of the truth forever.
+
+"Now we must try to sleep," he said, to prevent her from speaking any
+more of the words that were torturing him. "We must have our siesta. I
+had very little sleep last night."
+
+"And I had none at all. But now--we're together."
+
+He arranged the cushion for her. They lay in soft shadow and could see
+the shining world. The distant gleams upon the sea spoke to her. She
+fancied them voices rising out of the dream of the waters, voices from
+the breast of nature that was the breast of God, saying that she was not
+in error, that God did mean men to be happy, that they could be happy if
+they would learn of Him.
+
+She watched those gleams until she fell asleep.
+
+
+
+XX
+
+When Hermione woke it was four o'clock. She sat up on the rug, looked
+down over the mountain flank to the sea, then turned and saw her husband.
+He was lying with his face half buried in his folded arms.
+
+"Maurice!" she said, softly.
+
+"Yes," he answered, lifting his face.
+
+"Then you weren't asleep!"
+
+"No."
+
+"Have you been asleep?"
+
+"No."
+
+She looked at her watch.
+
+"All this time! It's four. What a disgraceful siesta! But I was really
+tired after the long journey and the night."
+
+She stood up. He followed her example and threw the rug over his arm.
+
+"Emile will think we've deserted him and aren't going to give him any
+tea."
+
+"Yes."
+
+They began to walk up the track towards the terrace.
+
+"Maurice," Hermione said, presently, more thoroughly wide-awake now. "Did
+you get up while I was asleep? Did you begin to move away from me, and
+did I stop you, or was it a dream? I have a kind of vague
+recollection--or is it only imagination?--of stretching out my hand and
+saying, 'Don't leave me alone--don't leave me alone!'"
+
+"I moved a little," he answered, after a slight pause.
+
+"And you did stretch out your hand and murmur something."
+
+"It was that--'don't leave me alone.'"
+
+"Perhaps. I couldn't hear. It was such a murmur."
+
+"And you only moved a little? How stupid of me to think you were getting
+up to go away!"
+
+"When one is half asleep one has odd ideas often."
+
+He did not tell her that he had been getting up softly, hoping to steal
+away to the mountain-top and destroy the fragments of her letter, hidden
+there, while she slept.
+
+"You won't mind," he added, "if I go down to bathe this evening. I
+sha'n't sleep properly to-night unless I do."
+
+"Of course--go. But won't it be rather late after tea?"
+
+"Oh no. I've often been in at sunset."
+
+"How delicious the water must look then! Maurice!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Shall I come with you? Shall I bathe, too? It would be lovely,
+refreshing, after this heat! It would wash away all the dust of the
+train!"
+
+Her face was glowing with the anticipation of pleasure. Every little
+thing done with him was an enchantment after the weeks of separation.
+
+"Oh, I don't think you'd better, Hermione," he answered, hastily.
+"I--you--there might be people. I--I must rig you up something first, a
+tent of some kind. Gaspare and I will do it. I can't have my wife--"
+
+"All right," she said.
+
+She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
+
+"How lucky you men are! You can do anything. And there's no fuss. Ah,
+there's poor Emile, patiently waiting!"
+
+Artois was already established once more in the chaise longue. He greeted
+them with a smile that was gentle, almost tender. Those evil feelings to
+which he had been a prey in London had died away. He loved now to see
+the happiness in Hermione's face. His illness had swept out his
+selfishness, and in it he had proved her affection. He did not think that
+he could ever be jealous of her again.
+
+"Sleeping all this time?" he said.
+
+"I was. I'm ashamed of myself. My hair is full of mountain-side, but you
+must forgive me, Emile. Ah, there's Lucrezia! Is tea ready, Lucrezia?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Then ask Gaspare to bring it."
+
+"Gaspare--he isn't here, signora. But I'll bring it."
+
+She went away.
+
+"Where's Gaspare, I wonder?" said Hermione. "Have you seen him, Emile?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Perhaps he's sleeping, too. He sleeps generally among the hens."
+
+She looked round the corner into the out-house.
+
+"No, he isn't there. Have you sent him anywhere, Maurice?"
+
+"I? No. Where should I--"
+
+"I only thought you looked as if you knew where he was."
+
+"No. But he may have gone out after birds and forgotten the time. Here's
+tea!"
+
+These few words had renewed in Maurice the fever of impatience to get
+away and meet his enemy. This waiting, this acting of a part, this
+suspense, were almost unbearable. All the time that Hermione slept he had
+been thinking, turning over again and again in his mind the coming scene,
+trying to imagine how it would be, how violent or how deadly, trying to
+decide exactly what line of conduct he should pursue. What would
+Salvatore demand? What would he say or do? And where would they meet? If
+Salvatore waited for his coming they would meet at the House of the
+Sirens. And Maddalena? She would be there. His heart sickened. He was
+ready to face a man--but not Maddalena. He thought of Gaspare's story of
+the fallen olive-branch upon which Salvatore had spat. It was strange to
+be here in this calm place with these two happy people, wife and friend,
+and to wonder what was waiting for him down there by the sea.
+
+How lonely our souls are!--something like that he thought. Circumstances
+were turning him away from his thoughtless youth. He had imagined it
+sinking down out of his sight into the purple sea, with the magic island
+in which it had danced the tarantella and heard the voice of the siren.
+But was it not leaving him, vanishing from him while still his feet trod
+the island and his eyes saw her legendary mountains?
+
+Gaspare, he knew, was on the watch. That was why he was absent from his
+duties. But the hour was at hand when he would be relieved. The evening
+was coming. Maurice was glad. He was ready to face even violence, but he
+felt that he could not for much longer endure suspense and play the quiet
+host and husband.
+
+Tea was over and Gaspare had not returned. The clock he had bought at the
+fair struck five.
+
+"I ought to be going," Artois said.
+
+There was reluctance in his voice. Hermione noticed it and knew what he
+was feeling.
+
+"You must come up again very soon," she said.
+
+"Yes, monsieur, come to-morrow, won't you?" Maurice seconded her.
+
+The thought of what was going to happen before to-morrow made it seem to
+him a very long way off.
+
+Hermione looked pleased.
+
+"I must not be a bore," Artois answered. "I must not remind you and
+myself of limpets. There are rocks in your garden which might suggest the
+comparison. I think to-morrow I ought to stay quietly in Marechiaro."
+
+"No, no," said Maurice. "Do come to-morrow."
+
+"Thank you very much. I can't pretend that I do not wish to come. And,
+now that donkey-boy--has he climbed up, I wonder?"
+
+"I'll go and see," said Maurice.
+
+He was feverishly impatient to get rid of Artois. He hurried to the arch.
+A long way off, near the path that led up from the ravine, he saw a
+figure with a gun. He was not sure, but he was almost sure that it was
+Gaspare. It must be he. The gun made him look, indeed, a sentinel. If
+Salvatore came the boy would stop him, stop him, if need be, at the cost
+of his own life. Maurice felt sure of that, and realized the danger of
+setting such faithfulness and violence to be sentinel. He stood for a
+moment looking at the figure. Yes, he knew it now for Gaspare. The boy
+had forgotten tea-time, had forgotten everything, in his desire to carry
+out his padrone's instructions. The signora was not to know. She was
+never to know. And Salvatore might come. Very well, then, he was there in
+the sun--ready.
+
+"We'll never part from Gaspare," Maurice thought, as he looked and
+understood.
+
+He saw no other figure. The donkey-boy had perhaps forgotten his mission
+or had started late. Maurice chafed bitterly at the delay. But he could
+not well leave his guest on this first day of his coming to Monte Amato,
+more especially after the events of the preceding day. To do so would
+seem discourteous. He returned to the terrace ill at ease, but strove to
+disguise his restlessness. It was nearly six o'clock when the boy at last
+appeared. Artois at once bade Hermione and Maurice good-bye and mounted
+his donkey.
+
+"You will come to-morrow, then?" Maurice said to him at parting.
+
+"I haven't the courage to refuse," Artois replied. "Good-bye."
+
+He had already shaken Maurice's hand, but now he extended his hand again.
+
+"It is good of you to make me so welcome," he said.
+
+He paused, holding Maurice's hand in his. Both Hermione and Maurice
+thought he was going to say something more, but he glanced at her,
+dropped his host's hand, lifted his soft hat, and signed to the boy to
+lead the donkey away.
+
+Hermione and Maurice followed to the arch, and from there watched him
+riding slowly down till he was out of sight. Maurice looked for Gaspare,
+but did not see him. He must have moved into the shadow of the ravine.
+
+"Dear old Emile!" Hermione said. "He's been happy to-day. You've made him
+very happy, Maurice. Bless you for it!"
+
+Maurice said nothing. Now the moment had arrived when he could go he felt
+a strange reluctance to say good-bye to Hermione, even for a short time.
+So much might--must--happen before he saw her again that evening.
+
+"And you?" she said, at last, as he was silent. "Are you really going
+down to bathe? Isn't it too late?"
+
+"Oh no. I must have a dip. It will do me all the good in the world." He
+tried to speak buoyantly, but the words seemed to himself to come heavily
+from his tongue.
+
+"Will you take Tito?"
+
+"I--no, I think I'll walk. I shall get down quicker, and I like going
+into the sea when I'm hot. I'll just fetch my bathing things."
+
+They walked back together to the house. Maurice wondered what had
+suddenly come to him. He felt horribly sad now--yet he wished to get the
+scene that awaited him over. He was longing to have it over. He went into
+the house, got his bathing-dress and towels, and came out again onto the
+terrace.
+
+"I shall be a little late back, I suppose," he said.
+
+"Yes. It's six o'clock now. Shall we dine at half-past eight--or better
+say nine? That will give you plenty of time to come up quietly."
+
+"Yes. Let's say nine."
+
+Still he did not move to go.
+
+"Have you been happy to-day, Hermione?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, very--since this morning."
+
+"Since?"
+
+"Yes. This morning I--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"I was a little puzzled," she said, after a minute, with her usual
+frankness. "Tell me, Maurice--you weren't made unhappy by--by what I told
+you?"
+
+"About--about the child?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He did not answer with words, but he put his arms about her and kissed
+her, as he had not kissed her since she went away to Africa. She shut her
+eyes. Presently she felt the pressure of his arms relax.
+
+"I'm perfectly happy now," she said. "Perfectly happy."
+
+He moved away a step or two. His face was flushed, and she thought that
+he looked younger, that the boyish expression she loved had come back to
+him.
+
+"Good-bye, Hermione," he said.
+
+Still he did not go. She thought that he had something more to say but
+did not know how to say it. She felt so certain of this that she said:
+
+"What is it, Maurice?"
+
+"We shall come back to Sicily, I suppose, sha'n't we, some time or
+other?"
+
+"Surely. Many times, I hope."
+
+"Suppose--one can never tell what will happen--suppose one of us were to
+die here?"
+
+"Yes," she said, soberly.
+
+"Don't you think it would be good to lie there where we lay this
+afternoon, under the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea? I think it
+would. Good-bye, Hermione."
+
+He swung the bathing-dress and the towels up over his shoulder and went
+away through the arch. She followed and watched him springing down the
+mountain-side. Just before he reached the ravine he turned and waved his
+hand to her. His movements, that last gesture, were brimful of energy and
+of life. He acted better then than he had that day upon the terrace. But
+the sense of progress, the feeling that he was going to meet fate in the
+person of Salvatore, quickened the blood within him. At last the suspense
+would be over. At last he would be obliged to play not the actor but the
+man. He longed to be down by the sea. The youth in him rose up at the
+thought of action, and his last farewell to Hermione, looking down to him
+from the arch, was bold and almost careless.
+
+Scarcely had he got into the ravine before he met Gaspare. He stopped.
+The boy's face was aflame with expression as he stood, holding his gun,
+in front of his padrone.
+
+"Gaspare!" Maurice said to him.
+
+He held out his hand and grasped the boy's hot hand.
+
+"I sha'n't forget your faithful service," he said. "Thank you, Gaspare."
+
+He wanted to say more, to find other and far different words. But he
+could not.
+
+"Let me come with you, signorino."
+
+The boy's voice was intensely, almost savagely, earnest.
+
+"No. You must stay with the signora."
+
+"I want to come with you."
+
+His great eyes were fastened on his padrone's face.
+
+"I have always been with you."
+
+"But you were with the signora first. You were her servant. You must stay
+with her now. Remember one thing, Gaspare--the signora is never to know."
+
+The boy nodded. His eyes still held Maurice. They glittered as if with
+leaping fires. That deep and passionate spirit of Sicilian loyalty, which
+is almost savage in its intensity and heedless of danger, which is ready
+to go to hell with, or for, a friend or a master who is beloved and
+believed in, was awake in Gaspare, illuminated him at this moment. The
+peasant boy looked noble.
+
+"Mayn't I come with you, signorino?"
+
+"Gaspare," Maurice said, "I must leave some one with the padrona.
+Salvatore might come still. I may miss him going down. Whom can I trust
+to stop Salvatore, if he comes, but you? You see?"
+
+"Va bene, signorino."
+
+The boy seemed convinced, but he suffered and did not try to conceal it.
+
+"Now I must go," Maurice said.
+
+He shook Gaspare's hand.
+
+"Have you got the revolver, signorino?" said the boy.
+
+"No. I am not going to fight with Salvatore."
+
+"How do you know what Salvatore will do?"
+
+Maurice looked down upon the stones that lay on the narrow path.
+
+"My revolver can have nothing to do with Maddalena's father," he said.
+
+He sighed.
+
+"That's how it is, Gaspare. Addio!"
+
+"Addio, signorino."
+
+Maurice went on down the path into the shadow of the trees. Presently he
+turned. Gaspare stood quite still, looking after him.
+
+"Signorino!" he called. "May I not come? I want to come with you."
+
+Maurice waved his hand towards the mountain-side.
+
+"Go to the signora," he called back. "And look out for me to-night.
+Addio, Gaspare!"
+
+The boy's "Addio!" came to him sadly through the gathering shadows of the
+evening.
+
+Presently Hermione, who was sitting alone on the terrace with a book in
+her lap which she was not reading, saw Gaspare walking listlessly through
+the archway holding his gun. He came slowly towards her, lifted his hat,
+and was going on without a word, but she stopped him.
+
+"Why, Gaspare," she said, lightly, "you forgot us to-day. How was that?"
+
+"Signora?"
+
+Again she saw the curious, almost ugly, look of obstinacy, which she had
+already noticed, come into his face.
+
+"You didn't remember about tea-time!"
+
+"Signora," he answered, "I am sorry."
+
+He looked at her fixedly while he spoke.
+
+"I am sorry," he said again.
+
+"Never mind," Hermione said, unable to blame him on this first day of her
+return. "I dare say you have got out of regular habits while I've been
+away. What have you been doing all the time?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Niente."
+
+Again she wondered what was the matter with the boy to-day. Where were
+his life and gayety? Where was his sense of fun? He used to be always
+joking, singing. But now he was serious, almost heavy in demeanor.
+
+"Gaspare," she said, jokingly, "I think you've all become very solemn
+without me. I am the old person of the party, but I begin to believe that
+it is I who keep you lively. I mustn't go away again."
+
+"No, signora," he answered, earnestly; "you must never go away from us
+again. You should never have gone away from us."
+
+The deep solemnity of his great eyes startled her. He put on his hat and
+went away round the angle of the cottage.
+
+"What can be the matter with him?" she thought.
+
+She remained sitting there on the terrace, wondering. Now she thought
+over things quietly, it struck her as strange the fact that she had left
+behind her in the priest's house three light-hearted people, and had
+come back to find Lucrezia drowned in sorrow, Gaspare solemn, even
+mysterious in his manner, and her husband--but here her thoughts paused,
+not labelling Maurice. At first he had puzzled her the most. But she
+thought she had found reasons for the change--a passing one, she felt
+sure--in him. He had secretly resented her absence, and, though utterly
+free from any ignoble suspicion of her, he had felt boyishly jealous of
+her friendship with Emile. That was very natural. For this was their
+honeymoon. She considered it their honeymoon prolonged, delightfully
+prolonged, beyond any fashionable limit. Lucrezia's depression was easily
+comprehensible. The change in her husband she accounted for; but now here
+was Gaspare looking dismal!
+
+"I must cheer them all up," she thought to herself. "This beautiful time
+mustn't end dismally."
+
+And then she thought of the inevitable departure. Was Maurice looking
+forward to it, desiring it? He had spoken that day as if he wished to be
+off. In London she had been able to imagine him in the South, in the
+highway of the sun. But now that she was here in Sicily she could not
+imagine him in London.
+
+"He is not in his right place there," she thought.
+
+Yet they must go, and soon. She knew that they were going, and yet she
+could not feel that they were going. What she had said under the
+oak-trees was true. In the spring her tender imagination had played
+softly with the idea of Sicily's joy in the possession of her son, of
+Maurice. Would Sicily part from him without an effort to retain him?
+Would Sicily let him go? She smiled to herself at her fancies. But if
+Sicily kept him, how would she keep him? The smile left her lips and her
+eyes as she thought of Maurice's suggestion. That would be too horrible.
+God would not allow that. And yet what tragedies He allowed to come into
+the lives of others. She faced certain facts, as she sat there, facts
+permitted, or deliberately brought about by the Divine Will. The scourge
+of war--that sowed sorrows over a land as the sower in the field scatters
+seeds. She, like others, had sat at home and read of battles in which
+thousands of men had been killed, and she had grieved--or had she really
+grieved, grieved with her heart? She began to wonder, thinking of
+Maurice's veiled allusion to the possibility of his death. He was the
+spirit of youth to her. And all the boys slain in battle! Had not each
+one of them represented the spirit of youth to some one, to some
+woman--mother, sister, wife, lover?
+
+What were those women's feelings towards God?
+
+She wondered. She wondered exceedingly. And presently a terrible thought
+came into her mind. It was this. How can one forgive God if He snatches
+away the spirit of youth that one loves?
+
+Under the shadow of the oak-trees she had lain that day and looked out
+upon the shining world--upon the waters, upon the plains, upon the
+mountains, upon the calling coast-line and the deep passion of the blue.
+And she had felt the infinite love of God. When she had thought of God,
+she had thought of Him as the great Provider of happiness, as One who
+desired, with a heart too large and generous for the mere accurate
+conception of man, the joy of man.
+
+But Maurice was beside her then.
+
+Those whose lives had been ruined by great tragedies, when they looked
+out upon the shining world what must they think, feel?
+
+She strove to imagine. Their conception of God must surely be very
+different from hers.
+
+Once she had been almost unable to believe that God could choose her to
+be the recipient of a supreme happiness. But we accustom ourselves with a
+wonderful readiness to a happy fate. She had come back--she had been
+allowed to return to the Garden of Paradise. And this fact had given to
+her a confidence in life which was almost audacious. So now, even while
+she imagined the sorrows of others, half strove to imagine what her own
+sorrows might be, her inner feeling was still one of confidence. She
+looked out on the shining world, and in her heart was the shining world.
+She looked out on the glory of the blue, and in her heart was the glory
+of the blue. The world shone for her because she had Maurice. She knew
+that. But there was light in it. There would always be light whatever
+happened to any human creature. There would always be the sun, the great
+symbol of joy. It rose even upon the battle-field where the heaps of the
+dead were lying.
+
+She could not realize sorrow to-day. She must see the sunlight even in
+the deliberate visions conjured up by her imagination.
+
+Gaspare did not reappear. For a long time she was alone. She watched the
+changing of the light, the softening of the great landscape as the
+evening approached. Sometimes she thought of Maurice's last words about
+being laid to rest some day in the shadows of the oak-trees, in sight of
+Etna and the sea. When the years had gone, perhaps they would lie
+together in Sicily, wrapped in the final siesta of the body. Perhaps the
+unborn child, of whose beginning she was mystically conscious, would lay
+them to rest there.
+
+"Buon riposo." She loved the Sicilian good-night. Better than any text
+she would love to have those simple words written above her
+sleeping-place and his. "Buon riposo!"--she murmured the words to herself
+as she looked at the quiet of the hills, at the quiet of the sea. The
+glory of the world was inspiring, but the peace of the world was almost
+more uplifting, she thought. Far off, in the plain, she discerned tiny
+trails of smoke from Sicilian houses among the orange-trees beside the
+sea. The gold was fading. The color of the waters was growing paler,
+gentler, the color of the sky less passionate. The last point of the
+coast-line was only a shadow now, scarcely that. Somewhere was the
+sunset, its wonder unseen by her, but realized because of this growing
+tenderness, that was like a benediction falling upon her from a distant
+love, intent to shield her and her little home from sorrow and from
+danger. Nature was whispering her "Buon riposo!" Her hushed voice spoke
+withdrawn among the mountains, withdrawn upon the spaces of the sea. The
+heat of the golden day was blessed, but after it how blessed was the cool
+of the dim night!
+
+Again she thought that the God who had placed man in the magnificent
+scheme of the world must have intended and wished him to be always happy
+there. Nature seemed to be telling her this, and her heart was convinced
+by Nature, though the story of the Old Testament had sometimes left her
+smiling or left her wondering. Men had written a Bible. God had written a
+Bible, too. And here she read its pages and was made strong by it.
+
+"Signora!"
+
+Hermione started and turned her head.
+
+"Lucrezia! What is it?"
+
+"What time is it, signora?"
+
+Hermione looked at her watch.
+
+"Nearly eight o'clock. An hour still before supper."
+
+"I've got everything ready."
+
+"To-night we've only cold things, haven't we? You made us a very nice
+collazione. The French signore praised your cooking, and he's very
+particular, as French people generally are. So you ought to be proud of
+yourself."
+
+Lucrezia smiled, but only for an instant. Then she stood with an anxious
+face, twisting her apron.
+
+"Signora!"
+
+"Yes? What is it?"
+
+"Would you mind--may I--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"Why, Lucrezia, are you afraid of me? I've certainly been away too long!"
+
+"No, no, signora, but--" Tears hung in her eyes. "Will you let me go away
+if I promise to be back by nine?"
+
+"But you can't go to Marechiaro in--"
+
+"No, signora. I only want to go to the mountain over there under Castel
+Vecchio. I want to go to the Madonna."
+
+Hermione took one of the girl's hands.
+
+"To the Madonna della Rocca?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"I understand."
+
+"I have a candle to burn to the Madonna. If I go now I can be back before
+nine."
+
+She stood gazing pathetically, like a big child, at her padrona.
+
+"Lucrezia," Hermione said, moved to a great pity by her own great
+happiness, "would you mind if I came, too? I think I should like to say a
+prayer for you to-night. I am not a Catholic, but my prayer cannot hurt
+you."
+
+Lucrezia suddenly forgot distinctions, threw her arms round Hermione, and
+began to sob.
+
+"Hush, you must be brave!"
+
+She smoothed the girl's dark hair gently.
+
+"Have you got your candle?"
+
+"Si."
+
+She showed it.
+
+"Let us go quickly, then. Where's Gaspare?"
+
+"Close to the house, signora, on the mountain. One cannot speak with him
+to-day."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Non lo so. But he is terrible to-day!"
+
+So Lucrezia had noticed Gaspare's strangeness, too, even in the midst of
+her sorrow!
+
+"Gaspare!" Hermione called.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+She called louder.
+
+"Si, signora!"
+
+The voice came from somewhere behind the house.
+
+"I am going for a walk with Lucrezia. We shall be back at nine. Tell the
+padrone if he comes."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+The two women set out without seeing Gaspare. They walked in silence down
+the mountain-path. Lucrezia held her candle carefully, like one in a
+procession. She was not sobbing now. There were no tears in her eyes. The
+companionship and the sympathy of her padrona had given her some courage,
+some hope, had taken away from her the desolate feeling, the sensation of
+abandonment which had been torturing her. And then she had an almost
+blind faith in the Madonna della Rocca. And the padrona was going to
+pray, too. She was not a Catholic, but she was a lady and she was good.
+The Madonna della Rocca must surely be influenced by her petition.
+
+So Lucrezia plucked up a little courage. The activity of the walk helped
+her. She knew the solace of movement. And perhaps, without being
+conscious of it, she was influenced by the soft beauty of the evening, by
+the peace of the hills. But as they crossed the ravine they heard the
+tinkle of bells, and a procession of goats tripped by them, following a
+boy who was twittering upon a flute. He was playing the tune of the
+tarantella, that tune which Hermione associated with careless joy in the
+sun. He passed down into the shadows of the trees, and gradually the airy
+rapture of his fluting and the tinkle of the goat-bells died away towards
+Marechiaro. Then Hermione saw tears rolling down over Lucrezia's brown
+cheeks.
+
+"He can't play it like Sebastiano, signora!" she said.
+
+The little tune had brought back all her sorrow.
+
+"Perhaps we shall soon hear Sebastiano play it again," said Hermione.
+
+They began to climb upward on the far side of the ravine towards the
+fierce silhouette of the Saracenic castle on the height. Beneath the
+great crag on which it was perched was the shrine of the Madonna della
+Rocca. Night was coming now, and the little lamp before the shrine shone
+gently, throwing a ray of light upon the stones of the path. When they
+reached it, Lucrezia crossed herself, and they stood together for a
+moment looking at the faded painting of the Madonna, almost effaced
+against its rocky background. Within the glass that sheltered it stood
+vases of artificial flowers, and on the ledge outside the glass were two
+or three bunches of real flowers, placed there by peasants returning to
+their homes in Castel Vecchio from their labors in the vineyards and the
+orchards. There were also two branches with clustering, red-gold oranges
+lying among the flowers. It was a strange, wild place. The precipice of
+rock, which the castello dominated, leaned slightly forward above the
+head of the Madonna, as if it meditated overwhelming her. But she smiled
+gently, as if she had no fear of it, bending down her pale eyes to the
+child who lay upon her girlish knees. Among the bowlders, the wild cactus
+showed its spiked leaves, and in the daytime the long black snakes sunned
+themselves upon the stones.
+
+To Hermione this lonely and faded Madonna, smiling calmly beneath the
+savagely frowning rock upon which dead men had built long years ago a
+barbarous fastness, was touching in her solitude. There was something
+appealing in her frailness, in her thin, anćmic calm. How long had she
+been here? How long would she remain? She was fading away, as things fade
+in the night. Yet she had probably endured for years, would still be here
+for years to come, would be here to receive the wild flowers of peasant
+children, the prayers of peasant lovers, the adoration of the poor, who,
+having very little here, put their faith in far-off worlds, where they
+will have harvests surely without reaping in the heat of the sun, where
+they will have good wine without laboring in the vineyards, where they
+will be able to rest without the thought coming to them, "If to-day I
+rest, to-morrow I shall starve."
+
+As Hermione looked at the painting lit by the little lamp, at the gifts
+of the flowers and the fruit, she began to feel as if indeed a woman
+dwelt there, in that niche of the crag, as if a heart were there, a soul
+to pity, an ear to listen.
+
+Lucrezia knelt down quietly, lit her candle, turned it upside down till
+the hot wax dripped onto the rock and made a foundation for it, then
+stuck it upright, crossed herself silently, and began to pray. Her lips
+moved quickly. The candle-flame flickered for a moment, then burned
+steadily, sending its thin fire up towards the evening star. After a
+moment Hermione knelt down beside her.
+
+She had never before prayed at a shrine. It was curious to be kneeling
+under this savage wall of rock above which the evening star showed itself
+in the clear heaven of night. She looked at the star and at the Madonna,
+then at the little bunches of flowers, and at Lucrezia's candle. These
+gifts of the poor moved her heart. Poverty giving is beautiful. She
+thought that, and was almost ashamed of the comfort of her life. She
+wished she had brought a candle, too. Then she bent her head and began to
+pray that Sebastiano might remember Lucrezia and return to her. To make
+her prayer more earnest, she tried to realize Lucrezia's sorrow by
+putting herself in Lucrezia's place, and Maurice in Sebastiano's. It was
+such a natural effort as people make every day, every hour. If Maurice
+had forgotten her in absence, had given his love to another, had not
+cared to return to her! If she were alone now in Sicily while he was
+somewhere else, happy with some one else!
+
+Suddenly the wildness of this place where she knelt became terrible to
+her. She felt the horror of solitude, of approaching darkness. The
+outlines of the rocks and of the ruined castle looked threatening,
+alarming. The pale light of the lamp before the shrine and of Lucrezia's
+votive candle drew to them not only the fluttering night-moths, but the
+spirits of desolation and of hollow grief that dwell among the waste
+places and among the hills. Night seemed no more beneficent, but dreary
+as a spectre that came to rob the world of all that made it beautiful.
+The loneliness of deserted women encompassed her. Was there any other
+loneliness comparable to it?
+
+She felt sure that there was not, and she found herself praying not only
+for Lucrezia, but for all women who were sad because they loved, for all
+women who were deserted by those whom they loved, or who had lost those
+whom they loved.
+
+At first she believed that she was addressing her prayer to the Madonna
+della Rocca, the Blessed Virgin of the Rocks, whose pale image was before
+her. But presently she knew that her words, the words of her lips and the
+more passionate words of her heart, were going out to a Being before whom
+the sun burned as a lamp and the moon as a votive taper. She was thinking
+of women, she was praying for women, but she was no longer praying to a
+woman. It seemed to her as if she was so ardent a suitor that she pushed
+past the Holy Mother of God into the presence of God Himself. He had
+created women. He had created the love of women. To Him she would, she
+must, appeal.
+
+Often she had prayed before, but never as now, never with such passion,
+with such a sensation of personally pleading. The effort of her heart was
+like the effort of womanhood. It seemed to her--and she had no feeling
+that this was blasphemous--as if God knew, understood, everything of the
+world He had created except perhaps this--the inmost agony some women
+suffer, as if she, perhaps, could make Him understand this by her prayer.
+And she strove to recount this agony, to make it clear to God.
+
+Was it a presumptuous effort? She did not feel that it was. And now she
+felt selfless. She was no more thinking of herself, was no longer obliged
+to concentrate her thoughts and her imagination upon herself and the one
+she loved best. She had passed beyond that, as she had passed beyond the
+Madonna della Rocca. She was the voice and the heart not of a woman, but
+of woman praying in the night to the God who had made woman and the
+night.
+
+From behind a rock Gaspare watched the two praying women. He had not
+forgotten his padrone's words, and when Hermione and Lucrezia set off
+from the cottage he had followed them, faithful to his trust. Intent upon
+their errand, they had not seen him. His step was light among the stones,
+and he had kept at a distance. Now he stood still, gazing at them as they
+prayed.
+
+Gaspare did not believe in priests. Very few Sicilians do. An uncle of
+his was a priest's son, and he had other reasons, quite sufficient to his
+mind, for being incredulous of the sanctity of those who celebrated the
+mass to which he seldom went. But he believed in God, and he believed
+superstitiously in the efficacy of the Madonna and in the powers of the
+saints. Once his little brother had fallen dangerously ill on the festa
+of San Giorgio, the santo patrono of Castel Vecchio. He had gone to the
+festa, and had given all his money, five lire, to the saint to heal his
+brother. Next day the child was well. In misfortune he would probably
+utter a prayer, or burn a candle, himself. That Lucrezia might think that
+she had reason to pray he understood, though he doubted whether the
+Madonna and all the saints could do much for the reclamation of his
+friend Sebastiano. But why should the padrona kneel there out-of-doors
+sending up such earnest petitions? She was not a Catholic. He had never
+seen her pray before. He looked on with wonder, presently with
+discomfort, almost with anger. To-night he was what he would himself have
+called "nervoso," and anything that irritated his already strung-up
+nerves roused his temper. He was in anxiety about his padrone, and he
+wanted to be back at the priest's house, he wanted to see his padrone
+again at the earliest possible moment. The sight of his padrona
+committing an unusual action alarmed him. Was she, then, afraid as he was
+afraid? Did she know, suspect anything? His experience of women was that
+whenever they were in trouble they went for comfort and advice to the
+Madonna and the saints.
+
+He grew more and more uneasy. Presently he drew softly a little nearer.
+It was getting late. Night had fallen. He must know the result of the
+padrone's interview with Salvatore, and he could not leave the padrona.
+Well, then--! He crept nearer and nearer till at last he was close to the
+shrine and could see the Madonna smiling. Then he crossed himself and
+said, softly:
+
+"Signora!"
+
+Hermione did not hear him. She was wrapped in the passion of her prayer.
+
+"Signora!"
+
+He bent forward and touched her on the shoulder. She started, turned her
+head, and rose to her feet.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+She looked startled. This abrupt recall to the world confused her for a
+moment.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it? The padrone?"
+
+He took off his cap.
+
+"Signora, do you know how late it is?"
+
+"Has the padrone come back?"
+
+Lucrezia was on her feet, too. The tears were in her eyes.
+
+"Scusi, signora!" said Gaspare.
+
+Hermione began to look more natural.
+
+"Has the padrone come back and sent you for us?"
+
+"He did not send me, signora. It was getting dark. I thought it best to
+come. But I expect he is back. I expect he is waiting for us now."
+
+"You came to guard me?"
+
+She smiled. She liked his watchfulness.
+
+"What's the time?"
+
+She looked at her watch.
+
+"Why, it is nine already! We must hurry. Come, Lucrezia!"
+
+They went quickly down the path.
+
+They did not talk as they went. Gaspare led the way. It was obvious that
+he was in great haste. Sometimes he forgot that the padrona was not so
+light-footed as he was, and sprang on so swiftly that she called to him
+to wait. When at last they came in sight of the arch Hermione and
+Lucrezia were panting.
+
+"The padrone will--forgive us--when--he--sees how we have--hurried," said
+Hermione, laughing at her own fatigue. "Go on, Gaspare!"
+
+She stood for a moment leaning against the arch.
+
+"And you go quickly, Lucrezia, and get the supper. The padrone--will
+be--hungry after his bath."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia went off to the back of the house. Then Hermione drew a long
+breath, recovered herself, and walked to the terrace.
+
+Gaspare met her with flaming eyes.
+
+"The padrone is not here, signora. The padrone has not come back!"
+
+He stood and stared at her.
+
+It was not yet very dark. They stood in a sort of soft obscurity in which
+all objects could be seen, not with sharp clearness, but distinctly.
+
+"Are you sure, Gaspare?"
+
+"Si, signora! The padrone has not come back. He is not here."
+
+The boy's voice sounded angry, Hermione thought. It startled her. And the
+way he looked at her startled her too.
+
+"You have looked in the house? Maurice!" she called. "Maurice!"
+
+"I say the padrone is not here, signora!"
+
+Never before had Gaspare spoken to Hermione like this, in a tone almost
+that she ought to have resented. She did not resent it, but it filled her
+with a creeping uneasiness.
+
+"What time is it? Nearly half-past nine. He ought to be here by now."
+
+The boy nodded, keeping his flaming eyes on her.
+
+"I said nine to give him lots of time to get cool, and change his
+clothes, and--it's very odd."
+
+"I will go down to the sea, signora. A rivederci."
+
+He swung round to go, but Hermione caught his arm.
+
+"No; don't go. Wait a moment, Gaspare. Don't leave me like this!"
+
+She detained him.
+
+"Why, what's the matter? What--what are you afraid of?"
+
+Instantly there came into his face the ugly, obstinate look she had
+already noticed, and wondered at, that day.
+
+"What are you afraid of, Gaspare?" she repeated.
+
+Her voice vibrated with a strength of feeling that as yet she herself
+scarcely understood.
+
+"Niente!" the boy replied, doggedly.
+
+"Well, but then"--she laughed--"why shouldn't the padrone be a few
+minutes late? It would be absurd to go down. You might miss him on the
+way."
+
+Gaspare said nothing. He stood there with his arms hanging and the ugly
+look still on his face.
+
+"Mightn't you? Mightn't you, Gaspare, if he came up by Marechiaro?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+They stood there in silence for a minute. Hermione broke it.
+
+"He--you know how splendidly the padrone swims," she said. "Don't you,
+Gaspare?"
+
+The boy said nothing.
+
+"Gaspare, why don't you answer when I speak to you?"
+
+"Because I've got nothing to say, signora."
+
+His tone was almost rude. At that moment he nearly hated Hermione for
+holding him by the arm. If she had been a man he would have struck her
+off and gone.
+
+"Gaspare!" she said, but not angrily.
+
+Her instinct told her that he was obliged to be utterly natural just then
+under the spell of some violent feeling. She knew he loved his padrone.
+The feeling must be one of anxiety. But it was absurd to be so anxious.
+It was ridiculous, hysterical. She said to herself that it was Gaspare's
+excitement that was affecting her. She was catching his mood.
+
+"My dear Gaspare," she said, "we must just wait. The padrone will be here
+in a minute. Perhaps he has come up by Marechiaro. Very likely he has
+looked in at the hotel to see how the sick signore is after his day up
+here. That is it, I feel sure."
+
+She looked at him for agreement and met his stern and flaming eyes,
+utterly unmoved by what she had said, utterly unconvinced. At this moment
+she could not deny that this untrained, untutored nature had power over
+hers. She let go his arm and sat down by the wall.
+
+"Let us wait out here for a minute," she said.
+
+"Va bene, signora."
+
+He stood there quite still, but she felt as if in this unnatural
+stillness there was violent movement, and she looked away from him. It
+was fully night now. She gazed down at the ravine. By that way Maurice
+would come, unless he really had gone to Marechiaro to see Artois. She
+had suggested to Gaspare that this might be the reason of Maurice's
+delay, but she knew that she did not think it was. Yet what other reason
+could there be? He swam splendidly. She said that to herself. She kept on
+saying it. Why?
+
+Slowly the minutes crept by. The silence around them was intense, yet she
+felt no calm, no peace in it. Like the stillness of Gaspare it seemed to
+be violent. It began to frighten her. She began to wish for movement, for
+sound. Presently a light shone in the cottage.
+
+"Signora! Signora!"
+
+Lucrezia's voice was calling.
+
+"What is it?" she said.
+
+"Supper is quite ready, signora."
+
+"The signore has not come back yet. He is a little late."
+
+Lucrezia came to the top of the steps.
+
+"Where can the signore be, signora?" she said. "It only takes--"
+
+Her voice died suddenly away. Hermione looked quickly at Gaspare, and saw
+that he was gazing ferociously at Lucrezia as if to bid her be silent.
+
+"Gaspare!" Hermione said, suddenly getting up.
+
+"Signora?"
+
+"I--it's odd the signore's not coming."
+
+The boy answered nothing.
+
+"Perhaps--perhaps there really has been an--an accident."
+
+She tried to speak lightly.
+
+"I don't think he would keep me waiting like this if--"
+
+"I will go down to the sea," the boy said. "Signora, let me go down to
+the sea!"
+
+There was a fury of pleading in his voice. Hermione hesitated, but only
+for a moment. Then she answered:
+
+"Yes, you shall go. Stop, Gaspare!"
+
+He had moved towards the arch.
+
+"I'm coming with you."
+
+"You, signora?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You cannot come! You are not to come!"
+
+He was actually commanding her--his padrona.
+
+"You are not to come, signora!" he repeated, violently.
+
+"But I am coming," she said.
+
+They stood facing each other. It was like a battle, Gaspare's manner, his
+words, the tone in which they were spoken--all made her understand that
+there was some sinister terror in his soul. She did not ask what it was.
+She did not dare to ask. But she said again:
+
+"I am coming with you, Gaspare."
+
+He stared at her and knew that from that decision there was no appeal. If
+he went she would accompany him.
+
+"Let us wait here, signora," he said. "The padrone will be coming
+presently. We had better wait here."
+
+But now she was as determined on activity as before she had been--or
+seemed--anxious for patience.
+
+"I am going," she answered. "If you like to let me go alone you can."
+
+She spoke very quietly, but there was a thrill in her voice. The boy saw
+it was useless just then to pit his will against hers. He dropped his
+head, and the ugly look came back to his face, but he made no reply.
+
+"We shall be back very soon, Lucrezia. We are going a little way down to
+meet the padrone. Come, Gaspare!"
+
+She spoke to him gently, kindly, almost pleadingly. He made an odd sound.
+It was not a word, nor was it a sob. She had never heard anything like it
+before. It seemed to her to be like a smothered outcry of a heart torn by
+some acute emotion.
+
+"Gaspare!" she said. "We shall meet him. We shall meet him in the
+ravine!"
+
+Then they set out. As she was going, Hermione cast a look down towards
+the sea. Always at this hour, when night had come, a light shone there,
+the light in the siren's house. To-night that little spark was not
+kindled. She saw only the darkness. She stopped.
+
+"Why," she said, "there's no light!"
+
+"Signora?"
+
+She pointed over the wall.
+
+"There's no light!" she repeated.
+
+This little fact--she did not know why--frightened her.
+
+"Signora, I am going!"
+
+"Gaspare!" she said. "Give me your hand to help me down the path. It's so
+dark. Isn't it?"
+
+She put out her hand. The boy's hand was cold.
+
+They set out towards the sea.
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+They did not talk as they went down the steep mountain-side, but when
+they reached the entrance of the ravine Gaspare stopped abruptly and took
+his cold hand away from his padrona's hand.
+
+"Signora," he said, almost in a whisper. "Let me go alone!"
+
+They were under the shade of the trees here and it was much darker than
+upon the mountain-side. Hermione could not see the boy's face plainly.
+She came close up to him.
+
+"Why do you want to go alone?" she asked.
+
+Without knowing it, she, too, spoke in an under-voice.
+
+"What is it you are afraid of?" she added.
+
+"I am not afraid."
+
+"Yes," she said, "you are. Your hand is quite cold."
+
+"Let me go alone, signora."
+
+"No, Gaspare. There is nothing to be afraid of, I believe. But if--if
+there should have been an accident, I ought to be there. The padrone is
+my husband, remember."
+
+She went on and he followed her.
+
+Hermione had spoken firmly, even almost cheerfully, to comfort the boy,
+whose uneasiness was surely greater than the occasion called for. So many
+little things may happen to delay a man. And Maurice might really have
+made the détour to Marechiaro on his way home. If he had, then they would
+miss him by taking this path through the ravine. Hermione knew that, but
+she did not hesitate to take it. She could not remain inactive to-night.
+Patience was out of her reach. It was only by making a strong effort that
+she had succeeded in waiting that short time on the terrace. Now she
+could wait no longer. She was driven. Although she had not yet sincerely
+acknowledged it to herself, fear was gradually taking possession of her,
+a fear such as she had never yet known or even imagined.
+
+She had never yet known or imagined such a fear. That she felt. But she
+had another feeling, contradictory, surely. It began to seem to her as if
+this fear, which was now coming upon her, had been near her for a long
+time, ever since the night when she knew that she was going to Africa.
+Had she not even expressed it to Maurice?
+
+Those beautiful days and nights of perfect happiness--can they ever come
+again? Had she not thought that many times? Was it not the voice of this
+fear which had whispered those words, and others like them, to her mind?
+And had there not been omens? Had there not been omens?
+
+She heard Gaspare's feet behind her in the ravine, and it seemed to her
+that she could tell by the sound of them upon the many little loose
+stones that he was wild with impatience, that he was secretly cursing her
+for obliging him to go so slowly. Had he been alone he would have sped
+down with a rapidity almost like that of travelling light. She was
+strong, active. She was going fast. Instinctively she went fast. But she
+was a woman, not a boy.
+
+"I can't help it, Gaspare!"
+
+She was saying that mentally, saying it again and again, as she hurried
+onward.
+
+Had there not been omens?
+
+That last letter of hers, whose loss had prevented Maurice from meeting
+her on her return, from welcoming her! When she had reached the station
+of Cattaro, and had not seen him upon the platform, she had felt "I have
+lost him." Afterwards, directly almost, she had laughed at the feeling as
+absurd. But she had had it. And then, when at last he had come, she had
+been moved to suggest that he might like to sleep outside upon the
+terrace. And he had agreed to the suggestion. They had not resumed their
+old, sweet relation of husband and wife.
+
+Had there not been omens?
+
+And only an hour ago, scarcely that, not that, she had knelt before the
+Madonna della Rocca and she had prayed, she had prayed passionately for
+deserted women, for women who loved and who had lost those whom they
+loved.
+
+The fear was upon her fully now, and she fully knew that it was. Why had
+she prayed for lonely, deserted women? What had moved her to such a
+prayer?
+
+"Was I praying for myself?"
+
+At that thought a physical weakness came to her, and she felt as if she
+could not go on. By the side of the path, growing among pointed rocks,
+there was a gnarled olive-tree, whose branches projected towards her.
+Before she knew what she was doing she had caught hold of one and stood
+still. So suddenly she had stopped that Gaspare, unprepared, came up
+against her in the dark.
+
+"Signora! What is the matter?"
+
+His voice was surely angry. For a moment she thought of telling him to go
+on alone, quickly.
+
+"What is it, signora?"
+
+"Nothing--only--I've walked so fast. Wait one minute!"
+
+She felt the agony of his impatience, and it seemed to her that she was
+treating him very cruelly to-night.
+
+"You know, Gaspare," she said, "it's not easy for women--this rough
+walking, I mean. We've got our skirts."
+
+She laughed. How unnatural, how horrible her laugh sounded in the
+darkness! He did not say any more. She knew he was wondering why she had
+laughed like that. After a moment she let go the branch. But her legs
+were trembling, and she stumbled when she began to walk on.
+
+"Signora, you are tired already. You had better let me go alone."
+
+For the first time she told him a lie.
+
+"I should be afraid to wait here all by myself in the night," she said.
+"I couldn't do that."
+
+"Who would come?"
+
+"I should be frightened."
+
+She thought she saw him look at her incredulously in the dark, but was
+not sure.
+
+"Be kind to me to-night, Gaspare!" she said.
+
+She felt a sudden passionate need of gentleness, of support, a woman's
+need of sympathy.
+
+"Won't you?" she added.
+
+"Signora!" he said.
+
+His voice sounded shocked, she thought; but in a moment, when they came
+to an awkward bit of the path, he put his hand under her arm, and very
+carefully, almost tenderly, helped her over it. Tears rushed into her
+eyes. For such a small thing she was crying! She turned her head so that
+Gaspare should not see, and tried to control her emotion. That terrible
+question kept on returning to her heart.
+
+"Was I praying for myself when I prayed at the shrine of the Madonna
+della Rocca?"
+
+Hermione was gifted, or cursed, with imagination, and as she never made
+use of her imaginative faculty in any of the arts, it was, perhaps, too
+much at the service of her own life. In happiness it was a beautiful
+handmaid, helping her to greater joy, but in unhappy, or in only anxious
+moments, it was, as it usually is, a cursed thing. It stood at her elbow,
+then, like a demon full of suggestions that were terrible. With an
+inventiveness that was diabolic it brought vividly before her scenes to
+shake the stoutest courage. It painted the future black. It showed her
+the world as a void. And in that void she was as something falling,
+falling, yet reaching nothing.
+
+Now it was with her in the ravine, and as she asked questions, terrible
+questions, it gave her terrible answers. And it reminded her of other
+omens--it told her these facts were really omens--which till now she had
+not thought of.
+
+Why had both she and Maurice been led to think and to speak of death
+to-day?
+
+Upon the mountain-top the thought of death had come to her when she
+looked at the glory of the dawn. She had said to Maurice, "'The mountains
+will endure'--but we!" Of course it was a truism, such a thing as she
+might say at any time when she was confronted by the profound stability
+of nature. Thousands of people had said much the same thing on thousands
+of occasions. Yet now the demon at her elbow whispered to her that the
+remark had had a peculiar significance. She had even said, "What is it
+makes one think most of death when--when life, new life, is very near?"
+
+Existence is made up of loss and gain. New beings rush into life day by
+day and hour by hour. Birth is about us, but death is about us too. And
+when we are given something, how often is something also taken from us!
+Was that to be her fate?
+
+And Maurice--he had been led to speak of death, afterwards, just as he
+was going away to the sea. She recalled his words, or the demon whispered
+them over to her:
+
+"'One can never tell what will happen--suppose one of us were to die
+here? Don't you think it would be good to lie there where we lay this
+afternoon, under the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea? I think it
+would."
+
+They were his very last words, his who was so full of life, who scarcely
+ever seemed to realize the possibility of death. All through the day
+death had surely been in the air about them. She remembered her dream, or
+quasi-dream. In it she had spoken. She had muttered an appeal, "Don't
+leave me alone!" and at another time she had tried to realize Maurice in
+England and had failed. She had felt as if Sicily would never let him go.
+And when she had spoken her thought he had hinted that Sicily could only
+keep him by holding him in arms of earth, holding him in those arms that
+keep the body of man forever.
+
+Perhaps it was ordained that her Sicilian should never leave the island
+that he loved. In all their Sicilian days how seldom had she thought of
+their future life together in England! Always she had seen herself with
+Maurice in the south. He had seemed to belong to the south, and she had
+brought him to the south. And now--would the south let him go? The
+thought of the sirens of legend flitted through her mind. They called men
+to destruction. She imagined them sitting among the rocks near the Casa
+della Sirene, calling--calling to her Sicilian.
+
+Long ago, when she first knew him well and loved his beauty, she had
+sometimes thought of him as a being of legend. She had let her fancy play
+about him tenderly, happily. He had been Mercury, Endymion, a dancing
+faun, Cupid vanishing from Psyche as the dawn came. And now she let a
+cruel fancy have its will for a moment. She imagined the sirens calling
+among the rocks, and Maurice listening to their summons, and going to his
+destruction. The darkness of the ravine helped the demon who hurried with
+her down the narrow path, whispering in her ears. But though she yielded
+for a time to the nightmare spell, common-sense had not utterly deserted
+her, and presently it made its voice heard. She began to say to herself
+that in giving way to such fantastic fears she was being unworthy of
+herself, almost contemptible. In former times she had never been a
+foolish woman or weak. She had, on the contrary, been strong and
+sensible, although unconventional and enthusiastic. Many people had
+leaned upon her, even strong people. Artois was one. And she had never
+yet failed any one.
+
+"I must not fail myself," she suddenly thought. "I must not be a fool
+because I love."
+
+She loved very much, and she had been separated from her lover very soon.
+Her eagerness to return to him had been so intense that it had made her
+afraid. Yet she had returned, been with him again. Her fear in Africa
+that they would perhaps never be together again in their Sicilian home
+had been groundless. She remembered how it had often tormented her,
+especially at night in the dark. She had passed agonizing hours, for no
+reason. Her imagination had persecuted her. Now it was trying to
+persecute her more cruelly. Suddenly she resolved not to let it have its
+way. Why was she so frightened at a delay that might be explained in a
+moment and in the simplest manner? Why was she frightened at all?
+
+Gaspare's foot struck a stone and sent it flying down the path past her.
+
+Ah! it had been Gaspare. His face, his manner, had startled her, had
+first inclined her to fear.
+
+"Gaspare!" she said.
+
+"Si, signora?"
+
+"Come up beside me. There's room now."
+
+The boy joined her.
+
+"Gaspare," she continued, "do you know that when we meet the padrone, you
+and I, we shall look like two fools?"
+
+"Meet the padrone?" he repeated, sullenly.
+
+"Yes. He'll laugh at us for rushing down like this. He'll think we've
+gone quite mad."
+
+Silence was the only response she had.
+
+"Won't he?" she asked.
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+"Oh, Gaspare!" she exclaimed. "Don't--don't be like this to-night. Do you
+know that you are frightening me?"
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"What is the matter with you? What has been the matter with you all day?"
+
+"Niente."
+
+His voice was hard, and he fell behind again.
+
+Hermione knew that he was concealing something from her. She wondered
+what it was. It must be something surely in connection with his anxiety.
+Her mind worked rapidly. Maurice--the sea--bathing--Gaspare's
+fear--Maurice and Gaspare had bathed together often while she had been in
+Africa.
+
+"Gaspare," she said. "Walk beside me--I wish it."
+
+He came up reluctantly.
+
+"You've bathed with the padrone lately?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Many times?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Have you ever noticed that he was tired in the sea, or afterwards, or
+that bathing seemed to make him ill in any way?"
+
+"Tired, signora?"
+
+"You know there's a thing, in English we call it cramp. Sometimes it
+seizes the best swimmers. It's a dreadful pain, I believe, and the limbs
+refuse to move. You've never--when he's been swimming with you, the
+padrone has never had anything of that kind, has he? It wasn't that which
+made you frightened this evening when he didn't come?"
+
+She had unwittingly given the boy the chance to save her from any worse
+suspicion. With Sicilian sharpness he seized it. Till now he had been in
+a dilemma, and it was that which had made him sullen, almost rude. His
+position was a difficult one. He had to keep his padrone's confidence.
+Yet he could not--physically he could not--stay on the mountain when he
+knew that some tragedy was probably being enacted, or had already been
+enacted by the sea. He was devoured by an anxiety which he could not
+share and ought not to show because it was caused by the knowledge which
+he was solemnly pledged to conceal. This remark of Hermione gave him a
+chance of shifting it from the shoulders of the truth to the shoulders of
+a lie. He remembered the morning of sirocco, his fear, his passion of
+tears in the boat. The memory seemed almost to make the lie he was going
+to tell the truth.
+
+"Si, signora. It was that."
+
+His voice was no longer sullen.
+
+"The padrone had an attack like that?"
+
+Again the terrible fear came back to her.
+
+"Signora, it was one morning."
+
+"Used you to bathe in the morning?"
+
+A hot flush came in Gaspare's face, but Hermione did not see it in the
+darkness.
+
+"Once we did, signora. We had been fishing."
+
+"Go on. Tell me!"
+
+Then Gaspare related the incident of his padrone's sinking in the sea.
+Only he made Maurice's travesty appear a real catastrophe. Hermione
+listened with painful attention. So Maurice had nearly died, had been
+into the jaws of death, while she had been in Africa! Her fears there had
+been less ill-founded than she had thought. A horror came upon her as she
+heard Gaspare's story.
+
+"And then, signora, I cried," he ended. "I cried."
+
+"You cried?"
+
+"I thought I never could stop crying again."
+
+How different from an English boy's reticence was this frank confession!
+and yet what English boy was ever more manly than this mountain lad?
+
+"Why--but then you saved the padrone's life! God bless you!"
+
+Hermione had stopped, and she now put her hand on Gaspare's arm.
+
+"Oh, signora, there were two of us. We had the boat."
+
+"But"--another thought came to her--"but, Gaspare, after such a thing as
+that, how could you let the padrone go down to bathe alone?"
+
+Gaspare, a moment before credited with a faithful action, was now to be
+blamed for a faithless one. For neither was he responsible, if strict
+truth were to be regarded. But he had insisted on saving his padrone from
+the sea when it was not necessary. And he knew his own faithfulness and
+was secretly proud of it, as a good woman knows and is proud of her
+honor. He had borne the praise therefore. But one thing he could not
+bear, and that was an imputation of faithlessness in his stewardship.
+
+"It was not my fault, signora!" he cried, hotly. "I wanted to go. I
+begged to go, but the padrone would not let me."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Hermione, peering in the darkness, thought she saw the ugly look come
+again into the boy's face.
+
+"Why not, signora?"
+
+"Yes, why not?"
+
+"He wished me to stay with you. He said: 'Stay with the padrona, Gaspare.
+She will be all alone.'"
+
+"Did he? Well, Gaspare, it is not your fault. But I never thought it was.
+You know that."
+
+She had heard in his voice that he was hurt.
+
+"Come! We must go on!"
+
+Her fear was now tangible. It had a definite form, and with every moment
+it grew greater in the night, towering over her, encompassing her about.
+For she had hoped to meet Maurice coming up the ravine, and, with each
+moment that went by, her hope of hearing his footstep decreased, her
+conviction that something untoward must have occurred grew more solid.
+Only once was her terror abated. When they were not far from the mouth of
+the ravine Gaspare suddenly seized her arm from behind.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it?" she said, startled.
+
+He held up one hand.
+
+"Zitta!" he whispered.
+
+Hermione listened, holding her breath. It was a silent night, windless
+and calm. The trees had no voices, the watercourse was dry, no longer
+musical with the falling stream. Even the sea was dumb, or, if it were
+not, murmured so softly that these two could not hear it where they
+stood. And now, in this dark silence, they heard a faint sound. It was
+surely a foot-fall upon stones. Yes, it was.
+
+By the fierce joy that burst up in her heart Hermione measured her
+previous fear.
+
+"It's he! It's the padrone!"
+
+She put her face close to Gaspare's and whispered the words. He nodded.
+His eyes were shining.
+
+"Andiamo!" he whispered back.
+
+With a boy's impetuosity he wished to rush on and meet the truant pilgrim
+from the sea, but Hermione held him back. She could not bear to lose that
+sweet sound, the foot-fall on the stones, coming nearer every moment.
+
+"No. Let's wait for him here! Let's give him a surprise."
+
+"Va bene!"
+
+His body was quivering with suppressed movement. But they waited. The
+step was slow, or so it seemed to Hermione as she listened again, like
+the step of a tired man. Maurice seldom walked like that, she thought. He
+was light-footed, swift. His actions were ardent as were his eyes. But it
+must be he! Of course it was he! He was languid after a long swim, and
+was walking slowly for fear of getting hot. That must be it. The walker
+drew nearer, the crunch of the stones was louder under his feet.
+
+"It isn't the padrone!"
+
+Gaspare had spoken. All the light had gone out of his eyes.
+
+"Si! Si! It is he!"
+
+Hermione contradicted him.
+
+"No, signora. It is a contadino."
+
+Her joy was failing. Although she contradicted Gaspare, she began to feel
+that he was right. This step was heavy, weary, an old man's step. It
+could not be her Mercury coming up to his home on the mountain. But still
+she waited. Presently there detached itself from the darkness a faint
+figure, bent, crowned with a long Sicilian cap.
+
+"Andiamo!"
+
+This time she did not keep Gaspare back. Without a word they went on. As
+they came to the figure it stopped. She did not even glance at it, but as
+she went by it she heard an old, croaky voice say:
+
+"Benedicite!"
+
+Never before had the Sicilian greeting sounded horrible in her ears. She
+did not reply to it. She could not. And Gaspare said nothing. They
+hastened on in silence till they reached the high-road by Isola Bella,
+the road where Maurice had met Maddalena on the morning of the fair.
+
+It was deserted. The thick white dust upon it looked ghastly at their
+feet. Now they could hear the faint and regular murmur of the oily sea by
+which the fishermen's boats were drawn up, and discern, far away on the
+right, the serpentine lights of Cattaro.
+
+"Where do you go to bathe?" Hermione asked, always speaking in a hushed
+voice. "Here, by Isola Bella?"
+
+She looked down at the rocks of the tiny island, at the dimness of the
+spreading sea. Till now she had always gloried in its beauty, but
+to-night it looked to her mysterious and cruel.
+
+"No, signora."
+
+"Where then?"
+
+"Farther on--a little. I will go."
+
+His voice was full of hesitation. He did not know what to do.
+
+"Please, signora, stay here. Sit on the bank by the line. I will go and
+be back in a moment. I can run. It is better. If you come we shall take
+much longer."
+
+"Go, Gaspare!" she said. "But--stop--where do you bathe exactly?"
+
+"Quite near, signora."
+
+"In that little bay underneath the promontory where the Casa delle Sirene
+is?"
+
+"Sometimes there and sometimes farther on by the caves. A rivederla!"
+
+The white dust flew up from the road as he disappeared.
+
+Hermione did not sit down on the bank. She had never meant to wait by
+Isola Bella, but she let him go because what he had said was true, and
+she did not wish to delay him. If anything serious had occurred every
+moment might be valuable. After a short pause she followed him. As she
+walked she looked continually at the sea. Presently the road mounted and
+she came in sight of the sheltered bay in which Maurice had heard
+Maddalena's cry when he was fishing. A stone wall skirted the road here.
+Some twenty feet below was the railway line laid on a bank which sloped
+abruptly to the curving beach. She leaned her hands upon the wall and
+looked down, thinking she might see Gaspare. But he was not there. The
+dark, still sea, protected by the two promontories, and by an islet of
+rock in the middle of the bay, made no sound here. It lay motionless as
+a pool in a forest under the stars. To the left the jutting land, with
+its turmoil of jagged rocks, was a black mystery. As she stood by the
+wall, Hermione felt horribly lonely, horribly deserted. She wished she
+had not let Gaspare go. Yet she dreaded his return. What might he have to
+tell her? Now that she was here by the sea she felt how impossible it was
+for Maurice to have been delayed upon the shore. For there was no one
+here. The fishermen were up in the village. The contadini had long since
+left their work. No one passed upon the road. There was nothing, there
+could have been nothing to keep a man here. She felt as if it were
+already midnight, the deepest hour of darkness and of silence.
+
+As she took her hands from the wall, and turned to go on up the hill to
+the point which commanded the open sea and the beginning of the Straits
+of Messina, she was terrified. Suspicion was hardening into certainty.
+Something dreadful must have happened to Maurice.
+
+Her legs had begun to tremble again. All her body felt weak and
+incapable, like the body of an old person whose life was drawing to an
+end. The hill, not very steep, faced her like a precipice, and it seemed
+to her that she would not be able to mount it. In the road the deep dust
+surely clung to her feet, refusing to let her lift them. And she felt
+sick and contemptible, no longer her own mistress either physically or
+mentally. The voices within her that strove to whisper commonplaces of
+consolation, saying that Maurice had gone to Marechiaro, or that he had
+taken another path home, not the path from Isola Bella, brought her no
+comfort. The thing within her soul that knew what she, the human being
+containing it, did not know, told her that her terror had its reason,
+that she was not suffering in this way without cause. It said, "Your
+terror is justified."
+
+[Illustration: "SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE CAVES WHERE THE
+FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN THE DAWN"]
+
+At last she was at the top of the hill, and could see vaguely the shore
+by the caves where the fishermen had slept in the dawn. To her right was
+the path which led to the wall of rock connecting the Sirens' Isle with
+the main-land. She glanced at it, but did not think of following it.
+Gaspare must have followed the descending road. He must be down there on
+that beach searching, calling his padrone's name, perhaps. She began to
+descend slowly, still physically distressed. True to her fixed idea that
+if there had been a disaster it must be connected with the sea, she
+walked always close to the wall, and looked always down to the sea.
+Within a short time, two or three minutes, she came in sight of the
+lakelike inlet, a miniature fiord which lay at the feet of the woods
+where hid the Casa delle Sirene. The water here looked black like ebony.
+She stared down at it and saw a boat lying on the shore. Then she gazed
+for a moment at the trees opposite from which always, till to-night, had
+shone the lamp which she and Maurice had seen from the terrace. All was
+dark. The thickly growing trees did not move. Secret and impenetrable
+seemed to her the hiding-place they made. She could scarcely imagine that
+any one lived among them. Yet doubtless the inhabitants of the Casa delle
+Sirene were sleeping quietly there while she wandered on the white road
+accompanied by her terror.
+
+She had stopped for a minute, and was just going to walk on, when she
+heard a sound that, though faint and distant, was sharp and imperative.
+It seemed to her to be a violent beating on wood, and it was followed by
+the calling of a voice. She waited. The sound died away. She listened,
+straining her ears. In this absolutely still night sound travelled far.
+At first she had no idea from what direction came this noise which had
+startled her. But almost immediately it was repeated, and she knew that
+it must be some one striking violently and repeatedly upon wood--probably
+a wooden door.
+
+Then again the call rang out. This time she recognized, or thought she
+recognized, Gaspare's voice raised angrily, fiercely, in a summons to
+someone. She looked across the ebon water at the ebon mass of the trees
+on its farther side, and realized swiftly that Gaspare must be there. He
+had gone to the only house between the two bathing-places to ask if its
+inhabitants had seen anything of the padrone.
+
+This seemed to her to be a very natural and intelligent action, and she
+waited eagerly and watched, hoping to see a light shine out as
+Salvatore--yes, that had been the name told to her by Gaspare--as
+Salvatore got up from sleep and came to open. He might know something,
+know at least at what hour Maurice had left the sea.
+
+Again came the knocking and the call, again--four, five times. Then there
+was a long silence. Always the darkness reigned, unbroken by the
+earth-bound star, the light she looked for. The silence began to seem to
+her interminable. At first she thought that perhaps Gaspare was having a
+colloquy with the owner of the house, was learning something of Maurice.
+But presently she began to believe that there could be no one in the
+house, and that he had realized this. If so, he would have to return
+either to the road or the beach. She could see no boat moored to the
+shore opposite. He would come by the wall of rock, then, unless he swam
+the inlet. She went back a little way to a point from which dimly she saw
+the wall, and waited there a few minutes. Surely it would be dangerous to
+traverse that wall on such a dark night! Now, to her other fear was added
+fear for Gaspare. If an accident were to happen to him! Suddenly she
+hastened back to the path which led from the high-road along the spit of
+cultivated land to the wall, turned from the road, traversed the spit,
+and went down till she stood at the edge of the wall. She looked at the
+black rock, the black sea that lay motionless far down on either side of
+it. Surely Gaspare would not venture to come this way. It seemed to her
+that to do so would mean death, or, if not that, a dangerous fall into
+the sea--and probably there were rocks below, hidden under the surface of
+the water. But Gaspare was daring. She knew that. He was as active as a
+cat and did not know the meaning of fear for his own safety. He might--
+
+Out of the darkness on the land beyond the wall, something came, the form
+of some one hurrying.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+The form stopped.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+"Signora! What are you doing here? Madonna!"
+
+"Gaspare, don't come this way! You are not to come this way."
+
+"Why are you here, signora? I told you to wait for me by Isola Bella."
+
+The startled voice was hard.
+
+"You are not to cross the wall. I won't have it."
+
+"The wall--it is nothing, signora. I have crossed it many times. It is
+nothing for a man."
+
+"In the day, perhaps, but at night--don't, Gaspare--d'you hear me?--you
+are not--"
+
+She stopped, holding her breath, for she saw him coming lightly, poised
+on bare feet, straight as an arrow, and balancing himself with his
+out-stretched arms.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+She had shrieked out. Just as he was midway Gaspare had looked down at
+the sea--the open sea on the far side of the wall. Instantly his foot
+slipped, he lost his balance and fell. She thought he had gone, but he
+caught the wall with his hands, hung for a moment suspended above the
+sea, then raised himself, as a gymnast does on a parallel bar, slowly
+till his body was above the wall. Then--Hermione did not know how--he was
+beside her.
+
+She caught hold of him with both hands. She felt furiously angry.
+
+"How dare you disobey me?" she said, panting and trembling. "How dare
+you--"
+
+But his eyes silenced her. She broke off, staring at him. All the healthy
+color had left his face. There was a leaden hue upon it.
+
+"Gaspare--are you--you aren't hurt--you--"
+
+"Let me go, signora! Let me go!"
+
+She let him go instantly.
+
+"What is it? Where are you going?"
+
+He pointed to the beach.
+
+"To the boat. There's--down there in the water--there's something in the
+water!"
+
+"Something?" she said.
+
+"Wait in the road."
+
+He rushed away from her, and she heard him saying: "Madonna! Madonna!
+Madonna!"--crying it out as he ran.
+
+Something in the water! She felt as if her heart stood still for a
+century, then at last beat again somewhere up in her throat, choking her.
+Something--could Gaspare have seen what? She moved on a step. One of her
+feet was on the wall, the other still on the firm earth. She leaned down
+and tried to look over into the sea beyond, the sea close to the wall.
+But her head swam. Had she not moved back hastily, obedient to an
+imperious instinct of self-preservation, she would have fallen. She sat
+down, there where she had been standing, and dropped her face into her
+hands close to her knees, and kept quite still. She felt as if she were
+in a train going through a tunnel. Her ears were full of a roaring
+clamor. How long she sat and heard tumult she did not know. When she
+looked up the night seemed to her to be much darker than before,
+intensely dark. Yet all the stars were there in the sky. No clouds had
+come to hide them. She tried to get up quickly, but there was surely
+something wrong with her body. It would not obey her will at first.
+Presently she lay down, turned over on her side, put both hands on the
+ground, and with an effort, awkward as that of a cripple, hoisted herself
+up and stood on her feet. Gaspare had said, "Wait in the road." She must
+find the road. That was what she must do.
+
+"Wait in the road--wait in the road." She kept on saying that to herself.
+But she could not remember for a moment where the road was. She could
+only think of rock, of water black like ebony. The road was white. She
+must look for something white. And when she found it she must wait.
+Presently, while she thought she was looking, she found that she was
+walking in the dust. It flew up into her nostrils, dry and acrid. Then
+she began to recover herself and to realize more clearly what she was
+doing.
+
+She did not know yet. She knew nothing yet. The night was dark, the sea
+was dark. Gaspare had only cast one swift glance down before his foot had
+slipped. It was impossible that he could have seen what it was that was
+there in the water. And she was always inclined to let her imagination
+run riot. God isn't cruel. She had said that under the oak-trees, and it
+was true. It must be true.
+
+"I've never done God any harm," she was saying to herself now. "I've
+never meant to. I've always tried to do the right thing. God knows that!
+God wouldn't be cruel to me."
+
+In this moment all the subtlety of her mind deserted her, all that in her
+might have been called "cleverness." She was reduced to an extraordinary
+simplicity like that of a child, or a very instinctive, uneducated
+person.
+
+"I don't think I'm bad," she thought. "And God--He isn't bad. He wouldn't
+wish to hurt me. He wouldn't wish to kill me."
+
+She was walking on mechanically while she thought this, but presently
+she remembered again that Gaspare had told her to wait in the road. She
+looked over the wall down to the narrow strip of beach that edged the
+inlet between the main-land and the Sirens' Isle. The boat which she had
+seen there was gone. Gaspare had taken it. She stood staring at the place
+where the boat had been. Then she sought a means of descending to that
+strip of beach. She would wait there. A little lower down the road some
+of the masonry of the wall had been broken away, perhaps by a winter
+flood, and at this point there was a faint track, trodden by fishermen's
+feet, leading down to the line. Hermione got over the wall at this point
+and was soon on the beach, standing almost on the spot where Maurice had
+stripped off his clothes in the night to seek the voice that had cried
+out to him in the darkness. She waited here. Gaspare would presently come
+back. His arms were strong. He could row fast. She would only have to
+wait a few minutes. In a few minutes she would know. She strained her
+eyes to catch sight of the boat rounding the promontory as it returned
+from the open sea. At first she stood, but presently, as the minutes went
+by and the boat did not come, her sense of physical weakness returned and
+she sat down on the stones with her feet almost touching the water.
+
+"Gaspare knows now," she thought. "I don't know, but Gaspare knows."
+
+That seemed to her strange, that any one should know the truth of this
+thing before she did. For what did it matter to any one but her? Maurice
+was hers--was so absolutely hers that she felt as if no one else had any
+concern in him. He was Gaspare's padrone. Gaspare loved him as a Sicilian
+may love his padrone. Others in England, too, loved him--his mother, his
+father. But what was any love compared with the love of the one woman to
+whom he belonged. His mother had her husband. Gaspare--he was a boy. He
+would love some girl presently; he would marry. No, she was right. The
+truth about that "something in the water" only concerned her. God's
+dealing with this creature of his to-night only really mattered to her.
+
+As she waited, pressing her hands on the stones and looking always at the
+point of the dark land round which the boat must come, a strange and
+terrible feeling came to her, a feeling that she knew she ought to drive
+out of her soul, but that she was powerless to expel.
+
+She felt as if at this moment God were on His trial before her--before a
+poor woman who loved.
+
+"If God has taken Maurice from me," she thought, "He is cruel,
+frightfully cruel, and I cannot love Him. If He has not taken Maurice
+from me, He is the God who is love, the God I can, I must worship!"
+
+Which God was he?
+
+The vast scheme of the world narrowed; the wide horizons vanished. There
+was nothing beyond the limit of her heart. She felt, as almost all
+believing human beings feel in such moments, that God's attention was
+entirely concentrated upon her life, that no other claimed His care,
+begged for His pity, demanded His tenderness because hers was so intense.
+
+Did God wish to lose her love? Surely not! Then He could not commit this
+frightful act which she feared. He had not committed it.
+
+A sort of relief crept through her as she thought this. Her agony of
+apprehension was suddenly lessened, was almost driven out.
+
+God wants to be loved by the beings He has created. Then He would not
+deliberately, arbitrarily destroy a love already existing in the heart of
+one of them--a love thankful to Him, enthusiastically grateful for
+happiness bestowed by Him.
+
+Beyond the darkness of the point there came out of the dimness of the
+night that brooded above the open sea a moving darkness, and Hermione
+heard the splash of oars in the calm water. She got up quickly. Now her
+body was trembling again. She stared at the boat as if she would force it
+to yield its secret to her eyes. But that was only for an instant. Then
+her ears seemed to be seeking the truth, seeking it from the sound of the
+oars in the water!
+
+There was no rhythmic regularity in the music they made, no steadiness,
+no--no--
+
+She listened passionately, instinctively bending down her head sideways.
+It seemed to her that she was listening to a drunken man rowing. Now
+there was a quick beating of the oars in the water, then silence, then a
+heavy splash as if one of the oars had escaped from an uncertain hand,
+then some uneven strokes, one oar striking the water after the other.
+
+"But Gaspare is a contadino," she said to herself, "not a fisherman.
+Gaspare is a contadino and--"
+
+"Gaspare!" she called out. "Gaspare!"
+
+The boat stopped midway in the mouth of the inlet.
+
+"Gaspare! Is it you?"
+
+She saw a dark figure standing up in the boat.
+
+"Gaspare, is it you?" she cried, more loudly.
+
+"Si."
+
+Was it Gaspare's voice? She did not recognize it. Yet the voice had
+answered "Yes." The boat still remained motionless on the water midway
+between shore and shore. She did not speak again; she was afraid to
+speak. She stood and stared at the boat and at the motionless figure
+standing up in it. Why did not he row in to land? What was he doing
+there? She stared at the boat and at the figure standing in it till she
+could see nothing. Then she shut her eyes.
+
+"Gaspare!" she called, keeping her eyes shut. "What are you doing?
+Gaspare!"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+She opened her eyes, and now she could see the boat again and the rower.
+
+"Gaspare!" she cried, with all her strength, to the black figure. "Why
+don't you row to the shore? Why don't you come to me?"
+
+"Vengo!"
+
+Loudly the word came to her, loudly and sullenly as if the boy were angry
+with her, almost hated her. It was followed by a fierce splash of oars.
+The boat shot forward, coming straight towards her. Then suddenly the
+oars ceased from moving, the dark figure of the rower fell down in a
+heap, and she heard cries, like cries of despair, and broken
+exclamations, and then a long sound of furious weeping.
+
+"Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+Her voice was strangled in her throat and died away.
+
+"And then, signora, I cried--I cried!"
+
+When had Gaspare said that to her? And why had he cried?
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+It came from her lips in a whisper almost inaudible to herself.
+
+Then she rushed forward into the dark water.
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Late that night Dr. Marini, the doctor of the commune of Marechiaro, was
+roused from sleep in his house in the Corso by a violent knocking on his
+street door. He turned over in his bed, muttered a curse, then lay still
+for a moment and listened. The knocking was renewed more violently.
+Evidently the person who stood without was determined to gain admission.
+There was no help for it. The good doctor, who was no longer young,
+dropped his weary legs to the floor, walked across to the open window,
+and thrust his head out of it. A man was standing below.
+
+"What is it? What do you want?" said the doctor, in a grumbling voice.
+"Is it another baby? Upon my word, these--"
+
+"Signor Dottore, come down, come down instantly! The signore of Monte
+Amato, the signore of the Casa del Prete has had an accident. You must
+come at once. I will go to fetch a donkey."
+
+The doctor leaned farther out of the window.
+
+"An accident! What--?"
+
+But the man, a fisherman of Marechiaro, was already gone, and the doctor
+saw only the narrow, deserted street, black with the shadows of the tall
+houses.
+
+He drew in quickly and began to dress himself with some expedition. An
+accident, and to a forestiere! There would be money in this case. He
+regretted his lost sleep less now and cursed no more, though he thought
+of the ride up into the mountains with a good deal of self-pity. It was
+no joke to be a badly paid Sicilian doctor, he thought, as he tugged at
+his trousers buttons, and fastened the white front that covered the
+breast of his flannel shirt, and adjusted the cuffs which he took out of
+a small drawer. Without lighting a candle he went down-stairs, fumbled
+about, and found his case of instruments. Then he opened the street door
+and waited, yawning on the stone pavement. In two or three minutes he
+heard the tripping tip-tap of a donkey's hoofs, and the fisherman came up
+leading a donkey apparently as disinclined for a nocturnal flitting as
+the doctor.
+
+"Ah, Giuseppe, it's you, is it?"
+
+"Si, Signor Dottore!"
+
+"What's this accident?"
+
+The fisherman looked grave and crossed himself.
+
+"Oh, signore, it is terrible! They say the poor signore is dead!"
+
+"Dead!" exclaimed the doctor, startled. "You said is was an accident.
+Dead you say now?"
+
+"Signore, he is dead beyond a doubt. I was going to the fishing when I
+heard dreadful cries in the water by the inlet--you know, by Salvatore's
+terreno!"
+
+"In the water?"
+
+"Si, signore. I went down quickly and I found Gaspare, the signore's--"
+
+"I know--I know!"
+
+"Gaspare in a boat with the padrone lying at the bottom, and the signora
+standing up to her middle in the sea."
+
+"Z't! z't!" exclaimed the doctor, "the signora in the sea! Is she mad?"
+
+"Signor Dottore, how do I know? I brought the boat to shore. Gaspare was
+like one crazed. Then we lifted the signore out upon the stones. Oh, he
+is dead, Signor Dottore; dead beyond a doubt. They had found him in the
+sea--"
+
+"They?"
+
+"Gaspare--under the rocks between Salvatore's terreno and the main-land.
+He had all his clothes on. He must have been there in the dark--"
+
+"Why should he go in the dark?"
+
+"How do I know, Signor Dottore?--and have fallen, and struck his head
+against the rocks. For there was a wound and--"
+
+"The body should not have been moved from where it lay till the Pretore
+had seen it. Gaspare should have left the body."
+
+"But perhaps the povero signore is not really dead, after all! Madonna!
+How--"
+
+"Come! come! we must not delay! One minute! I will get some lint and--"
+
+He disappeared into the house. Almost directly he came out again with a
+package under his arm and a long, black cigar lighted in his mouth.
+
+"Take these, Giuseppe! Carry them carefully. Now then!"
+
+He hoisted himself onto the donkey.
+
+"A-ah! A-ah!"
+
+They set off, the fisherman walking on naked feet beside the donkey.
+
+"Then we have to go down to the sea?"
+
+"No, Signor Dottore. There were others on the road, Antonio and--"
+
+"The rest of you going to the boats--I know. Well?"
+
+"And the signora would have him carried up to Monte Amato."
+
+"She could give directions?"
+
+"Si, signore. She ordered everything. When she came out of the sea she
+was all wet, the poor signora, but she was calm. I called the others.
+When they saw the signore they all cried out. They knew him. Some of them
+had been to the fishing with him. Oh, they were sorry! They all began to
+speak and to try to--"
+
+"Diavolo! They could only make things worse! If the breath of life was
+in the signore's body they would drive it out. Per Dio!"
+
+"But the signora stopped them. She told them to be silent and to carry
+the signore up to the Casa del Prete. Signore, she--the povera
+signora--she took his head in her hands. She held his head and she never
+cried, not a tear!"
+
+The man brushed his hand across his eyes.
+
+"Povera signora! Povera signora!" murmured the doctor.
+
+"And she comforted Gaspare, too!" Giuseppe added. "She put her arm round
+him and told him to be brave, and help her. She made him walk by her and
+put his hand under the padrone's shoulder. Madonna!"
+
+They turned away from the village into a narrow path that led into the
+hills.
+
+"And I came to fetch you, Signor Dottore. Perhaps the povero signore is
+not really dead. Perhaps you can save him, Signor Dottore!"
+
+"Chi lo sa?" replied the doctor.
+
+He had let his cigar go out and did not know it.
+
+"Chi lo sa?" he repeated, mechanically.
+
+Then they went on in silence--till they reached the shoulder of the
+mountain under Castel Vecchio. From here they could see across the ravine
+to the steep slope of Monte Amato. Upon it, high up, a light shone, and
+presently a second light detached itself from the first, moved a little
+way, and then was stationary.
+
+Giuseppe pointed.
+
+"Ecco, Signor Dottore! They have carried the poor signore up."
+
+The second light moved waveringly back towards the first.
+
+"They are carrying him into the house, Signor Dottore. Madonna! And all
+this to happen in the night!"
+
+The doctor nodded without speaking. He was watching the lights up there
+in that lonely place. He was not a man of strong imagination, and was
+accustomed to look on misery, the misery of the poor. But to-night he
+felt a certain solemnity descend upon him as he rode by these dark
+by-paths up into the bosom of the hills. Perhaps part of this feeling
+came from the fact that his mission had to do with strangers, with rich
+people from a distant country who had come to his island for pleasure,
+and who were now suddenly involved in tragedy in the midst of their
+amusement. But also he had a certain sense of personal sympathy. He had
+known Hermione on her former visit to Sicily and had liked her; and
+though this time he had seen scarcely anything of her he had seen enough
+to be aware that she was very happy with her young husband. Maurice, too,
+he had seen, full of the joy of youth and of bounding health. And now all
+that was put out, if Giuseppe's account were true. It was a pity, a sad
+pity.
+
+The donkey crossed the mouth of the ravine, and picked its way upward
+carefully amid the loose stones. In the ravine a little owl hooted twice.
+
+"Giuseppe!" said the doctor.
+
+"Signore?"
+
+"The signora has been away, hasn't she?"
+
+"Si signore. In Africa."
+
+"Nursing that sick stranger. And now directly she comes back here's this
+happening to her! Per Dio!"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Somebody must have looked on the povera signora with the evil-eye,
+Signor Dottore."
+
+Giuseppe crossed himself.
+
+"It seems so," the doctor replied, gravely.
+
+He was almost as superstitious as the contadini among whom he labored.
+
+"Ecco, Signor Dottore!"
+
+The doctor looked up. At the arch stood a figure holding a little lamp.
+Almost immediately, two more figures appeared behind it.
+
+"Il dottore! Ecco il dottore!"
+
+There was a murmur of voices in the dark. As the donkey came up the
+excited fishermen crowded round, all speaking at once.
+
+"He is dead, Signor Dottore. The povero signore is dead!"
+
+"Let the Signor Dottore come to him, Beppe! What do you know? Let the--"
+
+"Sure enough he is dead! Why, he must have been in the water a good hour.
+He is all swollen with the water and--"
+
+"It is his head, Signor Dottore! If it had not been for his coming
+against the rocks he would not have been hurt. Per Dio, he can swim like
+a fish, the povero signorino. I have seen him swim. Why, even Peppino--"
+
+"The signora wants us all to go away, Signor Dottore. She begs us to go
+and leave her alone with the povero signore!"
+
+"Gaspare is in such a state! You would not know him. And the povera
+signora, she is all dripping wet. She has been into the sea, and now she
+has carried the head of the povero signore all the way up the mountain.
+She would not let any one--"
+
+A succession of cries came out of the darkness, hysterical cries that
+ended in prolonged sobbing.
+
+"That is Lucrezia!" cried one of the fishermen. "Madonna! That is
+Lucrezia!"
+
+"Mamma mia! Mamma mia!"
+
+Their voices were loud in the night. The doctor pushed his way between
+the men and came onto the terrace in front of the steps that led into the
+sitting-room.
+
+Gaspare was standing there alone. His face was almost unrecognizable. It
+looked battered, puffy, and inflamed, as if he had been drinking and
+fighting. There were no tears in his eyes now, but long, violent sobs
+shook his body from time to time, and his blistered lips opened and shut
+mechanically with each sob. He stared dully at the doctor, but did not
+say a word, or move to get out of the way.
+
+"Gaspare!" said the doctor. "Where is the padrona?"
+
+The boy sobbed and sobbed, always in the same dry and terribly mechanical
+way.
+
+"Gaspare!" repeated the doctor, touching him. "Gaspare!"
+
+"E' morto!" the boy suddenly cried out, in a loud voice.
+
+And he flung himself down on the ground.
+
+The doctor felt a thrill of cold in his veins. He went up the steps into
+the little sitting-room. As he did so Hermione came to the door of the
+bedroom. Her dripping skirts clung about her. She looked quite calm.
+Without greeting the doctor she said, quietly:
+
+"You heard what Gaspare said?"
+
+"Si, signora, ma--"
+
+The doctor stopped, staring at her. He began to feel almost dazed. The
+fishermen had followed him and stood crowding together on the steps and
+staring into the room.
+
+"He is dead. I am sorry you came all this way."
+
+They stood there facing one another. From the kitchen came the sound of
+Lucrezia's cries. Hermione put her hands up to her ears.
+
+"Please--please--oh, there should be a little silence here now!" she
+said.
+
+For the first time there was a sound of something like despair in her
+voice.
+
+"Let me come in, signora!" stammered the doctor. "Let me come in and
+examine him."
+
+"He is dead."
+
+"Well, but let me. I must!"
+
+"Please come in," she said.
+
+The doctor turned round to the fishermen.
+
+"Go, one of you, and make that girl keep quiet," he said, angrily. "Take
+her away out of the house--directly! Do you hear? And the rest of you
+stay outside, and don't make a sound."
+
+The fishermen slunk a little way back into the darkness, while Giuseppe,
+walking on the toes of his bare feet, and glancing nervously at the
+furniture and the pictures upon the walls, crossed the room and
+disappeared into the kitchen. Then the doctor laid down his cigar on a
+table and went into the bedroom whither Hermione had preceded him.
+
+There was a lighted candle on the white chest of drawers. The window and
+the shutters of the room were closed against the glances of the
+fishermen. On one of the two beds--Hermione's--lay the body of a man
+dripping with water. The doctor took the candle in his hand, went to this
+bed and leaned down, then set down the candle at the bedhead and made a
+brief examination. He found at once that Gaspare had spoken the truth.
+This man had been dead for some time. Nevertheless, something--he
+scarcely knew what--kept the doctor there by the bed for some moments
+before he pronounced his verdict. Never before had he felt so great a
+reluctance to speak the simple words that would convey a great truth. He
+fingered his shirt-front uneasily, and stared at the body on the bed and
+at the wet sheets and pillows. Meanwhile, Hermione had sat down on a
+chair near the door that opened into what had been Maurice's
+dressing-room, and folded her hands in her lap. The doctor did not look
+towards her, but he felt her presence painfully. Lucrezia's cries had
+died away, and there was complete silence for a brief space of time.
+
+The body on the bed was swollen, but not very much, the face was sodden,
+the hair plastered to the head, and on the left temple there was a large
+wound, evidently, as the doctor had seen, caused by the forehead striking
+violently against a hard, resisting substance. It was not the sea alone
+which had killed this man. It was the sea and the rock in the sea. He
+had fallen, been stunned and then drowned. The doctor knew the place
+where he had been found. The explanation of the tragedy was very
+simple--very simple.
+
+While the doctor was thinking this, and fingering his shirt-front
+mechanically, and bracing himself to turn towards the quiet woman in the
+chair, he heard a loud, dry noise in the sitting-room, then in the
+bedroom. Gaspare had come in, and was standing at the foot of the bed,
+sobbing and staring at the doctor with hopeless eyes, that yet asked a
+last question, begged desperately for a lie.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+The woman in the chair whispered to him. He took no notice.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+She got up and crossed over to the boy, and took one of his hands.
+
+"It's no use," she said. "Perhaps he is happy."
+
+Then the boy began to cry passionately. Tears poured out of his eyes
+while he held his padrona's hand. The doctor got up.
+
+"He is dead, signora," he said.
+
+"We knew it," Hermione replied.
+
+She looked at the doctor for a minute. Then she said:
+
+"Hush, Gaspare!"
+
+The doctor stood by the bed.
+
+"Scusi, signora," he said, "but--but will you take him into the next
+room?"
+
+He pointed to Gaspare, who shivered as he wept.
+
+"I must make a further examination."
+
+"Why? You see that he is dead."
+
+"Yes, but--there are certain formalities."
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Formalities!" she said. "He is dead."
+
+"Yes. But--but the authorities will have to be informed. I am very
+sorry. I should wish to leave everything undisturbed."
+
+"What do you mean? Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+"But--according to the law, our law, the body should never have been
+moved. It should have been left where it was found until--"
+
+"We could not leave him in the sea."
+
+She still spoke quite quietly, but the doctor felt as if he could not go
+on.
+
+"Since it is done--" he began.
+
+He pulled himself together with an effort.
+
+"There will have to be an inquiry, signora--the cause of death will have
+to be ascertained."
+
+"You see it. He was coming from the island. He fell and was drowned. It
+is very simple."
+
+"Yes, no doubt. Still, there must be an inquiry. Gaspare will have to
+explain--"
+
+He looked at the weeping boy, then at the woman who stood there holding
+the boy's hand in hers.
+
+"But that will be for to-morrow," he muttered, fingering his shirt-front
+and looking down. "That will be for to-morrow."
+
+As he went out he added:
+
+"Signora, do not remain in your wet clothes."
+
+"I--oh, thank you. They do not matter."
+
+She did not follow him into the next room. As he went down the steps to
+the terrace the sound of Gaspare's passionate weeping followed him into
+the night.
+
+When the doctor was on the donkey and was riding out through the arch,
+after a brief colloquy with the fishermen and with Giuseppe, whom he had
+told to remain at the cottage for the rest of the night, he suddenly
+remembered the cigar which he had left upon the table, and he pulled up.
+
+"What is it, Signor Dottore?" said one of the fishermen.
+
+"I've left something, but--never mind. It does not matter."
+
+He rode on again.
+
+"It does not matter," he repeated.
+
+He was thinking of the English signora standing beside the bed in her wet
+skirts and holding the hand of the weeping boy.
+
+It was the first time in his life that he had ever sacrificed a good
+cigar.
+
+He wondered why he did so now, but he did not care to return just then to
+the Casa del Prete.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+Hermione longed for quiet, for absolute silence.
+
+It seemed strange to her that she still longed for anything--strange and
+almost horrible, almost inhuman. But she did long for that, to be able to
+sit beside her dead husband and to be undisturbed, to hear no voice
+speaking, no human movement, to see no one. If it had been possible she
+would have closed the cottage against every one, even against Gaspare and
+Lucrezia. But it was not possible. Destiny did not choose that she should
+have this calm, this silence. It had seemed to her, when fear first came
+upon her, as if no one but herself had any real concern with Maurice, as
+if her love conferred upon her a monopoly. This monopoly had been one of
+joy. Now it should be one of sorrow. But now it did not exist. She was
+not weeping for Maurice. But others were. She had no one to go to. But
+others came to her, clung to her. She could not rid herself of the human
+burden.
+
+She might have been selfish, determined, she might have driven the
+mourners out. But--and that was strange, too--she found herself pitying
+them, trying to use her intellect to soothe them.
+
+Lucrezia was terrified, almost like one assailed suddenly by robbers,
+terrified and half incredulous. When her hysteria subsided she was at
+first unbelieving.
+
+"He cannot be really dead, signora!" she sobbed to Hermione. "The povero
+signorino. He was so gay! He was so--"
+
+She talked and talked, as Sicilians do when face to face with tragedy.
+
+She recalled Maurice's characteristics, his kindness, his love of
+climbing, fishing, bathing, his love of the sun--all his love of life.
+
+Hermione had to listen to the story with that body lying on her bed.
+
+Gaspare's grief was speechless, but needed comfort more. There was an
+element in it of fury which Hermione realized without rightly
+understanding. She supposed it was the fury of a boy from whom something
+is taken by one whom he cannot attack.
+
+For God is beyond our reach.
+
+She could not understand the conflict going on in the boy's heart and
+mind.
+
+He knew that this death was probably no natural death, but a murder.
+
+Neither Maddalena nor her father had been in the Casa delle Sirene when
+he knocked upon the door in the night. Salvatore had sent Maddalena to
+spend the night with relations in Marechiaro, on the pretext that he was
+going to sail to Messina on some business. And he had actually sailed
+before Gaspare's arrival on the island. But Gaspare knew that there had
+been a meeting, and he knew what the Sicilian is when he is wronged. The
+words "vengeance is mine!" are taken in Sicily by each wronged man into
+his own mouth, and Salvatore was notoriously savage and passionate.
+
+As the first shock of horror and despair passed away from Gaspare he was
+devoured, as by teeth, devoured by the desire to spring upon Salvatore
+and revenge the death of his padrone. But the padrone had laid a solemn
+injunction upon him. Solemn, indeed, it seemed to the boy now that the
+lips which had spoken were sealed forever. The padrona was never to know.
+If he obeyed his impulse, if he declared the vendetta against Salvatore,
+the padrona would know. The knife that spilled the murderer's blood would
+give the secret to the world--and to the padrona.
+
+Tremendous that night was the conflict in the boy's soul. He would not
+leave Hermione. He was like the dog that creeps to lie at the feet of his
+sorrowing mistress. But he was more than that. For he had his own sorrow
+and his own fury. And he had the battle with his own instincts.
+
+What was he going to do?
+
+As he began to think, really to think, and to realize things, he knew
+that after such a death the authorities of Marechiaro, the Pretore and
+the Cancelliere, would proceed to hold a careful examination into the
+causes of death. He would be questioned. That was certain. The
+opportunity would be given him to denounce Salvatore.
+
+And was he to keep silence? Was he to act for Salvatore, to save
+Salvatore from justice? He would not have minded doing that, he would
+have wished to do it, if afterwards he could have sprung upon Salvatore
+and buried his knife in the murderer of his padrone.
+
+But--the padrona? She was not to know. She was never to know. And she had
+been the first in his life. She had found him, a poor, ragged little boy
+working among the vines, and she had given him new clothes and had taken
+him into her home and into her confidence. She had trusted him. She had
+remembered him in England. She had written to him from far away, telling
+him to prepare everything for her and the padrone when they were coming.
+
+He began to sob violently again, thinking of it all, of how he had
+ordered the donkeys to fetch the luggage from the station, of how--
+
+"Hush, Gaspare!"
+
+Hermione again put her hand on his. She was sitting near the bed on which
+the body was lying between dry sheets. For she had changed them with
+Gaspare's assistance. Maurice still wore the clothes which had been on
+him in the sea. Giuseppe, the fisherman, had explained to Hermione that
+she must not interfere with the body till it had been visited by the
+authorities, and she had obeyed him. But she had changed the sheets. She
+scarcely knew why. Now the clothes had almost dried on the body, and she
+did not see any more the stains of water. One sheet was drawn up over the
+body, to the chin. The matted dark hair was visible against the pillow,
+and had made her think several times vaguely of that day after the
+fishing when she had watched Maurice taking his siesta. She had longed
+for him to wake then, for she had known that she was going to Africa,
+that they had only a few hours together before she started. It had seemed
+almost terrible to her, his sleeping through any of those hours. And now
+he was sleeping forever. She was sitting there waiting for nothing, but
+she could not realize that yet. She felt as if she must be waiting for
+something, that something must presently occur, a movement in the bed,
+a--she scarcely knew what.
+
+Presently the clock Gaspare had brought from the fair chimed, then played
+the "Tre Colori." Lucrezia had set it to play that evening when she was
+waiting for the padrone to return from the sea.
+
+When he heard the tinkling tune Gaspare lifted his head and listened till
+it was over. It recalled to him all the glories of the fair. He saw his
+padrone before him. He remembered how he had decorated Maurice with
+flowers, and he felt as if his heart would break.
+
+"The povero signorino! the povero signorino!" he cried, in a choked
+voice. "And I put roses above his ears! Si, signora, I did! I said he
+should be a real Siciliano!"
+
+He began to rock himself to and fro. His whole body shook, and his face
+had a frantic expression that suggested violence.
+
+"I put roses above his ears!" he repeated. "That day he was a real
+Siciliano!"
+
+"Gaspare--Gaspare--hush! Don't! Don't!"
+
+She held his hand and went on speaking softly.
+
+"We must be quiet in here. We must remember to be quiet. It isn't our
+fault, Gaspare. We did all we could to make him happy. We ought to be
+glad of that. You did everything you could, and he loved you for it. He
+was happy with us. I think he was. I think he was happy till the very
+end. And that is something to be glad of. Don't you think he was very
+happy here?"
+
+"Si, signora!" the boy whispered, with twitching lips.
+
+"I'm glad I came back in time," Hermione said, looking at the dark hair
+on the pillow. "It might have happened before, while I was away. I'm glad
+we had one more day together."
+
+Suddenly, as she said that, something in the mere sound of the words
+seemed to reveal more clearly to her heart what had befallen her, and for
+the first time she began to cry and to remember. She remembered all
+Maurice's tenderness for her, all his little acts of kindness. They
+seemed to pass rapidly in procession through her mind on their way to her
+heart. Not one surely was absent. How kind to her he had always been! And
+he could never be kind to her again. And she could never be kind to
+him--never again.
+
+Her tears went on falling quietly. She did not sob like Gaspare. But she
+felt that now she had begun to cry she would never be able to stop again;
+that she would go on crying till she, too, died.
+
+Gaspare looked up at her.
+
+"Signora!" he said. "Signora!"
+
+Suddenly he got up, as if to go out of the room, out of the house. The
+sight of his padrona's tears had driven him nearly mad with the desire to
+wreak vengeance upon Salvatore. For a moment his body seemed to get
+beyond his control. His eyes saw blood, and his hand darted down to his
+belt, and caught at the knife that was there, and drew it out. When
+Hermione saw the knife she thought the boy was going to kill himself
+with it. She sprang up, went swiftly to Gaspare, and put her hand on it
+over his hand.
+
+"Gaspare, what are you doing?" she said.
+
+For a moment his face was horrible in its savagery. He opened his mouth,
+still keeping his grasp on the knife, which she tried to wrest from him.
+
+"Lasci andare! Lasci andare!" he said, beginning to struggle with her.
+
+"No, Gaspare."
+
+"Allora--"
+
+He paused with his mouth open.
+
+At that moment he was on the very verge of a revelation of the truth. He
+was on the point of telling Hermione that he was sure that the padrone
+had been murdered, and that he meant to avenge the murder. Hermione
+believed that for the moment he was mad, and was determined to destroy
+himself in her presence. It was useless to pit her strength against his.
+In a physical struggle she must be overcome. Her only chance was to
+subdue him by other means.
+
+"Gaspare," she said, quickly, breathlessly, pointing to the bed. "Don't
+you think the padrone would have wished you to take care of me now? He
+trusted you. I think he would. I think he would rather you were with me
+than any one else in the whole world. You must take care of me. You must
+take care of me. You must never leave me!"
+
+The boy looked at her. His face changed, grew softer.
+
+"I've got nobody now," she added. "Nobody but you."
+
+The knife fell on the floor.
+
+In that moment Gaspare's resolve was taken. The battle within him was
+over. He must protect the padrona. The padrone would have wished it. Then
+he must let Salvatore go.
+
+He bent down and kissed Hermione's hand.
+
+"Lei non piange!" he muttered. "Forse Dio la aiuterŕ."
+
+In the morning, early, Hermione left the body for the first time, went
+into the dressing-room, changed her clothes, then came back and said to
+Gaspare:
+
+"I am going a little way up the mountain, Gaspare. I shall not be long.
+No, don't come with me. Stay with him. Are you dreadfully tired?"
+
+"No, signora."
+
+"We shall be able to rest presently," she said.
+
+She was thinking of the time when they would take Maurice from her. She
+left Gaspare sitting near the bed, and went out onto the terrace.
+Lucrezia and Gaspare, both thoroughly tired out, were sleeping soundly.
+She was thankful for that. Soon, she knew, she would have to be with
+people, to talk, to make arrangements. But now she had a short spell of
+solitude.
+
+She went slowly up the mountain-side till she was near the top. Then she
+sat down on a rock and looked out towards the sea.
+
+The world was not awake yet, although the sun was coming. Etna was like a
+great phantom, the waters at its foot were pale in their tranquillity.
+The air was fresh, but there was no wind to rustle the leaves of the
+oak-trees, upon whose crested heads Hermione gazed down with quiet,
+tearless eyes.
+
+She had a strange feeling of being out of the world, as if she had left
+it, but still had the power to see it. She wondered if Maurice felt like
+that.
+
+He had said it would be good to lie beneath those oak-trees in sight of
+Etna and the sea. How she wished that she could lay his body there,
+alone, away from all other dead. But that was impossible, she supposed.
+She remembered the doctor's words. What were they going to do? She did
+not know anything about Italian procedure in such an event. Would they
+take him away? She had no intention of trying to resist anything, of
+offering any opposition. It would be useless, and besides he had gone
+away. Already he was far off. She did not feel, as many women do, that so
+long as they are with the body of their dead they are also with the soul.
+She would like to keep the dear body, to have it always near to her, to
+live close to the spot where it was committed to the earth. But Maurice
+was gone. Her Mercury had winged his way from her, obedient to a summons
+that she had not heard. Always she had thought of him as swift, and
+swiftly, without warning, he had left her. He had died young. Was that
+wonderful? She thought not. No; age could have nothing to say to him,
+could hold no commerce with him. He had been born to be young and never
+to be anything else. It seemed to her now strange that she had not felt
+this, foreseen that it must be so. And yet, only yesterday, she had
+imagined a far future, and their child laying them in the ground of
+Sicily, side by side, and murmuring "Buon riposo" above their mutual
+sleep.
+
+Their child! A life had been taken from her. Soon a life would be given
+to her. Was that what is called compensation? Perhaps so. Many strange
+thoughts, come she could not tell why, were passing through her mind as
+she sat upon this height in the dawn. The thought of compensation
+recalled to her the Book of Job. Everything was taken from Job; not only
+his flocks and his herds, but his sons and his daughters. And then at the
+last he was compensated. He was given new flocks and herds and new sons
+and daughters. And it was supposed to be well with Job. If it was well
+with Job, then Job had been a man without a heart.
+
+Never could she be compensated for this loss, which she was trying to
+realize, but which she would not be able to realize until the days went
+by, and the nights, the days and the nights of the ordinary life, when
+tragedy was supposed to be over and done with, and people would say, and
+no doubt sincerely believe, that she was "getting accustomed" to her
+loss.
+
+Thinking of Job led her on to think of God's dealings with His creatures.
+
+Hermione was a woman who clung to no special religion, but she had
+always, all her life, had a very strong personal consciousness of a
+directing Power in the world, had always had an innate conviction that
+this directing Power followed with deep interest the life of each
+individual in the scheme of His creation. She had always felt, she felt
+now, that God knew everything about her and her life, was aware of all
+her feelings, was constantly intent upon her.
+
+He was intent. But was He kindly or was He cruelly intent?
+
+Surely He had been dreadfully cruel to her!
+
+Only yesterday she had been wondering what bereaved women felt about God.
+Now she was one of these women.
+
+"Was Maurice dead?" she thought--"was he already dead when I was praying
+before the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"
+
+She longed to know. Yet she scarcely knew why she longed. It was like a
+strange, almost unnatural curiosity which she could not at first explain
+to herself. But presently her mind grew clearer and she connected this
+question with that other question--of God and what He really was, what He
+really felt towards His creatures, towards her.
+
+Had God allowed her to pray like that, with all her heart and soul, and
+then immediately afterwards deliberately delivered her over to the fate
+of desolate women, or had Maurice been already dead? If that were so, and
+it must surely have been so, for when she prayed it was already night,
+she had been led to pray for herself ignorantly, and God had taken away
+her joy before He had heard her prayer. If He had heard it first He
+surely could not have dealt so cruelly with her--so cruelly! No human
+being could have, she thought, even the most hard-hearted.
+
+But perhaps God was not all-powerful.
+
+She remembered that once in London she had asked a clever and good
+clergyman if, looking around upon the state of things in the world, he
+was able to believe without difficulty that the world was governed by an
+all-wise, all-powerful, and all-merciful God. And his reply to her had
+been, "I sometimes wonder whether God is all-powerful--yet." She had not
+pursued the subject, but she had not forgotten this answer; and she
+thought of it now.
+
+Was there a conflict in the regions beyond the world which was the only
+one she knew? Had an enemy done this thing, an enemy not only of hers,
+but of God's, an enemy who had power over God?
+
+That thought was almost more terrible than the thought that God had been
+cruel to her.
+
+She sat for a long time wondering, thinking, but not praying. She did not
+feel as if she could ever pray any more. The world was lighted up by the
+sun. The sea began to gleam, the coast-line to grow more distinct, the
+outlines of the mountains and of the Saracenic Castle on the height
+opposite to her more hard and more barbaric against the deepening blue.
+She saw smoke coming from the mouth of Etna, sideways, as if blown
+towards the sea. A shepherd boy piped somewhere below her. And still the
+tune was the tarantella. She listened to it--the tarantella. So short a
+time ago Maurice had danced with the boys upon the terrace! How can such
+life be so easily extinguished? How can such joy be not merely clouded
+but utterly destroyed? A moment, and from the body everything is
+expelled; light from the eyes, speech from the lips, movement from the
+limbs, joy, passion from the heart. How can such a thing be?
+
+The little shepherd boy played on and on. He was nearer now. He was
+ascending the slope of the mountain, coming up towards heaven with his
+little happy tune. She heard him presently among the oak-trees
+immediately below her, passing almost at her feet.
+
+To Hermione the thin sound of the reed-flute always had suggested Arcady.
+Even now it suggested Arcady--the Arcady of the imagination: wide soft
+airs, blue skies and seas, eternal sunshine and delicious shade, and
+happiness where is a sweet noise of waters and of birds, a sweet and deep
+breathing of kind and bounteous nature.
+
+And that little boy with the flute would die. His foot might slip now as
+he came upward, and no more could he play souls into Arcady!
+
+The tune wound away to her left, like a gay and careless living thing
+that was travelling ever upward, then once more came towards her. But now
+it was above her. She turned her head and she saw the little player
+against the blue. He was on a rock, and for a moment he stood still. On
+his head was a long woollen cap, hanging over at one side. It made
+Hermione think of the woollen cap she had seen come out of the darkness
+of the ravine as she waited with Gaspare for the padrone. Against the
+blue, standing on the gray and sunlit rock, with the flute at his lips,
+and his tiny, deep-brown fingers moving swiftly, he looked at one with
+the mountain and yet almost unearthly, almost as if the blue had given
+birth to him for a moment, and in a moment would draw him back again into
+the womb of its wonder. His goats were all around him, treading
+delicately among the rocks. As Hermione watched he turned and went away
+into the blue, and the tarantella went away into the blue with him.
+
+Her Sicilian and his tarantella, the tarantella of his joy in
+Sicily--they had gone away into the blue.
+
+She looked at it, deep, quivering, passionate, intense; thousands and
+thousands of miles of blue! And she listened as she looked; listened for
+some far-off tarantella, for some echo of a fainting tarantella, that
+might be a message to her, a message left on the sweet air of the
+enchanted island, telling her where the winged feet of her beloved one
+mounted towards the sun.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Giuseppe came to fetch Hermione from the mountain. He had a note in his
+hand and also a message to give. The authorities were already at the
+cottage; the Pretore of Marechiaro with his Cancelliere, Dr. Marini and
+the Maresciallo of the Carabinieri.
+
+"They have come already?" Hermione said. "So soon?"
+
+She took the note. It was from Artois.
+
+"There is a boy waiting, signora," said Giuseppe. "Gaspare is with the
+Signor Pretore."
+
+She opened Emile's note.
+
+     "I cannot write anything except this--do you wish me to come?--E."
+
+"Do I wish him to come?" she thought.
+
+She repeated the words mentally several times, while the fisherman stood
+by her, staring at her with sympathy. Then she went down to the cottage.
+
+Dr. Marini met her on the terrace. He looked embarrassed. He was
+expecting a terrible scene.
+
+"Signora," he said, "I am very sorry, but--but I am obliged to perform my
+duty."
+
+"Yes," she said. "Of course. What is it?"
+
+"As there is a hospital in Marechiaro--"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Yes?" she said.
+
+"The autopsy of the body must take place there. Otherwise I could have--"
+
+"You have come to take him away," she said. "I understand. Very well."
+
+But they could not take him away, these people. For he was gone; he had
+gone away into the blue.
+
+The doctor looked relieved, though surprised, at her apparent
+nonchalance.
+
+"I am very sorry, signora," he said--"very sorry."
+
+"Must I see the Pretore?" she said.
+
+"I am afraid so, signora. They will want to ask you a few questions. The
+body ought not to have been moved from the place where--"
+
+"We could not leave him in the sea," she said, as she had said in the
+night.
+
+"No, no. You will only just have to say--"
+
+"I will tell them what I know. He went down to bathe."
+
+"Yes. But the Pretore will want to know why he went to Salvatore's
+terreno."
+
+"I suppose he bathed from there. He knew the people in the Casa delle
+Sirene, I believe."
+
+She spoke indifferently. It seemed to her so utterly useless, this
+inquiry by strangers into the cause of her sorrow.
+
+"I must just write something," she added.
+
+She went up the steps into the sitting-room. Gaspare was there with three
+men--the Pretore, the Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. As she came in the
+strangers turned and saluted her with grave politeness, all looking
+earnestly at her with their dark eyes. But Gaspare did not look at her.
+He had the ugly expression on his face that Hermione had noticed the day
+before.
+
+"Will you please allow me to write a line to a friend?" Hermione said.
+"Then I shall be ready to answer your questions."
+
+"Certainly, signora," said the Pretore; "we are very sorry to disturb
+you, but it is our duty."
+
+He had gray hair and a dark mustache, and his black eyes looked as if
+they had been varnished.
+
+Hermione went to the writing-table, while the men stood in silence
+filling up the little room.
+
+"What shall I say?" she thought.
+
+She heard the boots of the Cancelliere creak as he shifted his feet upon
+the floor. The Maresciallo cleared his throat. There was a moment of
+hesitation. Then he went to the steps and spat upon the terrace.
+
+"Don't come yet," she wrote, slowly.
+
+Then she turned round.
+
+"How long will your inquiry take, do you think, signore?" she asked of
+the Pretore. "When will--when can the funeral take place?"
+
+"Signora, I trust to-morrow. I hope--I do not suppose there will be any
+reason to suspect, after what Dr. Marini has told us and we have seen,
+that the death was anything but an accident--an accident which we all
+most deeply grieve for."
+
+"It was an accident."
+
+She stood by the table with the pen in her hand.
+
+"I suppose--I suppose he must be buried in the Campo Santo?" she said.
+
+"Do you wish to convey the body to England, signora?"
+
+"Oh no. He loved Sicily. He wished to stay always here, I think,
+although--"
+
+She broke off.
+
+"I could never take him away from Sicily. But there is a place
+here--under the oak-trees. He was very fond of it."
+
+Gaspare began to sob, then controlled himself with a desperate effort,
+turned round and stood with his face to the wall.
+
+"I suppose, if I could buy a piece of land there, it could not be
+permitted--?"
+
+She looked at the Pretore.
+
+"I am very sorry, signora, such a thing could not possibly be allowed. If
+the body is buried here it must be in the Campo Santo."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+She turned to the table and wrote after "Don't come yet":
+
+     "They are taking him away now to the hospital in the village. I
+     shall come down. I think the funeral will be to-morrow. They tell
+     me he must be buried in the Campo Santo. I should have liked him to
+     lie here under the oak-trees.
+                                                   HERMIONE."
+
+When Artois read this note tears came into his eyes.
+
+No event in his life had shocked him so much as the death of Delarey.
+
+It had shocked both his intellect and his heart. And yet his intellect
+could hardly accept it as a fact. When, early that morning, one of the
+servants of the Hôtel Regina Margherita had rushed into his room to tell
+him, he had refused to believe it. But then he had seen the fishermen,
+and finally Dr. Marini. And he had been obliged to believe. His natural
+impulse was to go to his friend in her trouble as she had come to him in
+his. But he checked it. His agony had been physical. Hers was of the
+affections, and how far greater than his had ever been! He could not bear
+to think of it. A great and generous indignation seized him, an
+indignation against the catastrophes of life. That this should be
+Hermione's reward for her noble unselfishness roused in him something
+that was like fury; and then there followed a more torturing fury against
+himself.
+
+He had deprived her of days and weeks of happiness. Such a short span of
+joy had been allotted to her, and he had not allowed her to have even
+that. He had called her away. He dared not trust himself to write any
+word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do so would be a hideous
+irony, and he sent the line in pencil which she had received. And then he
+walked up and down in his little sitting-room, raging against himself,
+hating himself.
+
+In his now bitterly acute consideration of his friendship with Hermione
+he realized that he had always been selfish, always the egoist claiming
+rather than the generous donor. He had taken his burdens to her, not
+weakly, for he was not a weak man, but with a desire to be eased of some
+of their weight. He had always been calling upon her for sympathy, and
+she had always been lavishly responding, scattering upon him the wealth
+of her great heart.
+
+And now he had deprived her of nearly all the golden time that had been
+stored up for her by the decree of the Gods, of God, of Fate,
+of--whatever it was that ruled, that gave and that deprived.
+
+A bitterness of shame gripped him. He felt like a criminal. He said to
+himself that the selfish man is a criminal.
+
+"She will hate me," he said to himself. "She must. She can't help it."
+
+Again the egoist was awake and speaking within him. He realized that
+immediately and felt almost a fear of this persistence of character. What
+is the use of cleverness, of clear sight into others, even of genius,
+when the self of a man declines to change, declines to be what is not
+despicable?
+
+"Mon Dieu!" he thought, passionately. "And even now I must be thinking of
+my cursed self!"
+
+He was beset by an intensity of desire to do something for Hermione. For
+once in his life his heart, the heart she believed in and he was inclined
+to doubt or to despise, drove him as it might have driven a boy, even
+such a one as Maurice. It seemed to him that unless he could do something
+to make atonement he could never be with Hermione again, could never bear
+to be with her again. But what could he do?
+
+"At least," he thought, "I may be able to spare her something to-day. I
+may be able to arrange with these people about the funeral, about all the
+practical things that are so frightful a burden to the living who have
+loved the dead, in the last moments before the dead are given to the
+custody of the earth."
+
+And then he thought of the inquiry, of the autopsy. Could he not help
+her, spare her perhaps, in connection with them?
+
+Despite his weakness of body he felt feverishly active, feverishly
+desirous to be of practical use. If he could do something he would think
+less, too; and there were thoughts which seemed furtively trying to press
+themselves forward in the chambers of his mind, but which, as yet, he
+was, also furtively, pushing back, striving to keep in the dark place
+from which they desired to emerge.
+
+Artois knew Sicily well, and he knew that such a death as this would
+demand an inquiry, might raise suspicions in the minds of the authorities
+of Marechiaro. And in his own mind?
+
+He was a mentally courageous man, but he longed now to leave Marechiaro,
+to leave Sicily at once, carrying Hermione with him. A great dread was
+not actually with him, but was very near to him.
+
+Presently something, he did not know what, drew him to the window of his
+bedroom which looked out towards the main street of the village. As he
+came to it he heard a dull murmur of voices, and saw the Sicilians
+crowding to their doors and windows, and coming out upon their balconies.
+
+The body of Maurice was being borne to the hospital which was at the far
+end of the town. As soon as he realized that, Artois closed his window.
+He could not look with the curious on that procession. He went back into
+his sitting-room, which faced the sea. But he felt the procession going
+past, and was enveloped in the black wonder of death.
+
+That he should be alive and Delarey dead! How extraordinary that was! For
+he had been close to death, so close that it would have seemed quite
+natural to him to die. Had not Hermione come to him, he thought, he
+would almost, at the crucial stage in his illness, have preferred to die.
+It would have been a far easier, far simpler act than the return to
+health and his former powers. And now he stood here alive, looking at the
+sea, and Delarey's dead body was being carried to the hospital.
+
+Was the fact that he was alive the cause of the fact that Delarey was
+dead? Abruptly one of those furtive thoughts had leaped forward out of
+its dark place and challenged him boldly, even with a horrible brutality.
+Too late now to try to force it back. It must be faced, be dealt with.
+
+Again, and much more strongly than on the previous day, Artois felt that
+in Hermione's absence the Sicilian life of the dead man had not run
+smoothly, that there had been some episode of which she knew nothing,
+that he, Artois, had been right in his suspicions at the cottage. Delarey
+had been in fear of something, had been on the watch. When he had sat by
+the wall he had been tortured by some tremendous anxiety.
+
+He had gone down to the sea to bathe. That was natural enough. And he had
+been found dead under a precipice of rock in the sea. The place was a
+dangerous one, they said. A man might easily fall from the rock in the
+night. Yes; but why should he be there?
+
+That thought now recurred again and again to the mind of Artois. Why had
+Delarey been at the place where he had met his death? The authorities of
+Marechiaro were going to inquire into that, were probably down at the sea
+now. Suppose there had been some tragic episode? Suppose they should find
+out what it was?
+
+He saw Hermione in the midst of her grief the central figure of some
+dreadful scandal, and his heart sickened.
+
+But then he told himself that perhaps he was being led by his
+imagination. He had thought that possible yesterday. To-day, after what
+had occurred, he thought it less likely. This sudden death seemed to tell
+him that his mind had been walking in the right track. Left alone in
+Sicily, Delarey might have run wild. He might have gone too far. This
+death might be a vengeance.
+
+Artois was deeply interested in all human happenings, but he was not a
+vulgarly curious man. He was not curious now, he was only afraid for
+Hermione. He longed to protect her from any further grief. If there were
+a dreadful truth to know, and if, by knowing it, he could guard her more
+efficiently, he wished to know it. But his instinct was to get her away
+from Sicily at once, directly the funeral was over and the necessary
+arrangements could be made. For himself, he would rather go in ignorance.
+He did not wish to add to the heavy burden of his remorse.
+
+There came at this moment a knock at his door.
+
+"Avanti!" he said.
+
+The waiter of the hotel came in.
+
+"Signore," he said. "The poor signora is here."
+
+"In the hotel?"
+
+"Si, signore. They have taken the body of the signore to the hospital.
+Everybody was in the street to see it pass. And now the poor signora has
+come here. She has taken the rooms above you on the little terrace."
+
+"The signora is going to stay here?"
+
+"Si, signore. They say, if the Signor Pretore allows after the inquiry is
+over, the funeral will be to-morrow."
+
+Artois looked at the man closely. He was a young fellow, handsome and
+gentler-looking than are most Sicilians. Artois wondered what the people
+of Marechiaro were saying. He knew how they must be gossiping on such an
+occasion. And then it was summer, when they have little or nothing to do,
+no forestieri to divide their attentions and to call their ever-ready
+suspicions in various directions. The minds of the whole community must
+undoubtedly be fixed upon this tragic episode and its cause.
+
+"If the Pretore allows?" Artois said. "But surely there can be no
+difficulty? The poor signore fell from the rock and was drowned."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The man stood there. Evidently he was anxious to talk.
+
+"The Signor Pretore has gone down to the place now, signore, with the
+Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. They have taken Gaspare with them."
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+Artois thought of this boy, Maurice's companion during Hermione's
+absence.
+
+"Si, signore. Gaspare has to show them the exact place where he found the
+poor signore."
+
+"I suppose the inquiry will soon be over?"
+
+"Chi lo sa?"
+
+"Well, but what is there to do? Whom can they inquire of? It was a lonely
+place, wasn't it? No one was there."
+
+"Chi lo sa?"
+
+"If there had been any one, surely the signore would have been rescued at
+once? Did not every one here love the signore? He was like one of you,
+wasn't he, one of the Sicilians?"
+
+"Si, signore. Maddalena has been crying about the signore."
+
+"Maddalena?"
+
+"Si, signore, the daughter of Salvatore, the fisherman, who lives at the
+Casa delle Sirene."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Artois paused; then he said:
+
+"Were she and her--Salvatore is her father, you say?"
+
+"Her father, signore."
+
+"Were they at the Casa delle Sirene yesterday?"
+
+Artois spoke quietly, almost carelessly, as if merely to say something,
+but without special intention.
+
+"Maddalena was here in the town with her relations. And they say
+Salvatore is at Messina. This morning Maddalena went home. She was
+crying. Every one saw her crying for the signore."
+
+"That is very natural if she knew him."
+
+"Oh yes, signore, she knew him. Why, they were all at the fair of San
+Felice together only the day before."
+
+"Then, of course, she would cry."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The man put his hand on the door.
+
+"If the signora wishes to see me at any time I am here," said Artois.
+"But, of course, I shall not disturb her. But if I can do anything to
+help her--about the funeral, for instance--"
+
+"The signora is giving all the directions now. The poor signore is to be
+buried in the high part of the Campo Santo by the wall. Those who are not
+Catholics are buried there, and the poor signore was not a Catholic. What
+a pity!"
+
+"Thank you, Ferdinando."
+
+The man went out slowly, as if he were reluctant to stop the
+conversation.
+
+So the villagers were beginning to gossip already! Ferdinando had not
+said so, but Artois knew his Sicily well enough to read the silences that
+had made significant his words. Maddalena had been crying for the
+signore. Everybody had seen Maddalena crying for the signore. That was
+enough. By this time the village would be in a ferment, every woman at
+her door talking it over with her next-door neighbor, every man in the
+Piazza, or in one of the wine-shops.
+
+Maddalena--a Sicilian girl--weeping, and Delarey's body found among the
+rocks at night in a lonely place close to her cottage. Artois divined
+something of the truth and hated himself the more. The blood, the
+Sicilian blood in Delarey, had called to him in the sunshine when he was
+left alone, and he had, no doubt, obeyed the call. How far had he gone?
+How strongly had he been governed? Probably Artois would never know. Long
+ago he had prophesied, vaguely perhaps, still he had prophesied. And now
+had he not engineered perhaps the fulfilment of his own prophecy?
+
+But at all costs Hermione must be spared any knowledge of that
+fulfilment.
+
+He longed to go to her and to guard her door against the Sicilians. But
+surely in such a moment they would not speak to her of any suspicions, of
+any certainties, even if they had them. She would surely be the last
+person to hear anything, unless--he thought of the "authorities"--of the
+Pretore, the Cancelliere, the Maresciallo, and suddenly it occurred to
+him to ride down to the sea. If the inquiry had yielded any terrible
+result he might do something to protect Hermione. If not, he might be
+able to prepare her. She must not receive any coarse shock from these
+strangers in the midst of her agony.
+
+He got his hat, opened his door, and went quietly down-stairs. He did not
+wish to see Hermione before he went. Perhaps he would return with his
+mind relieved of its heaviest burden, and then at least he could meet her
+eyes without a furtive guilt in his.
+
+At the foot of the stairs he met Ferdinando.
+
+"Can you get me a donkey, Ferdinando?" he said.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"I don't want a boy. Just get me a donkey, and I shall go for a short
+ride. You say the signora has not asked for me?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"If she does, explain to her that I have gone out, as I did not like to
+disturb her."
+
+Hermione might think him heartless to go out riding at such a time. He
+would risk that. He would risk anything to spare her the last, the
+nameless agony that would be hers if what he suspected were true, and she
+were to learn of it, to know that all these people round her knew it.
+
+That Hermione should be outraged, that the sacredness of her despair
+should be profaned, and the holiness of her memories utterly
+polluted--Artois felt he would give his life willingly to prevent that.
+
+When the donkey came he set off at once. He had drawn his broad-brimmed
+hat down low over his pale face, and he looked neither to right nor left,
+as he was carried down the long and narrow street, followed by the
+searching glances of the inhabitants, who, as he had surmised, were all
+out, engaged in eager conversation, and anxiously waiting for the return
+of the Pretore and his assistants, and the announcement of the result of
+the autopsy. His appearance gave them a fresh topic to discuss. They fell
+upon it like starveling dogs on a piece of offal found in the gutter.
+
+Once out of the village, Artois felt a little safer, a little easier; but
+he longed to be in the train with Hermione, carrying her far from the
+chance of that most cruel fate in life--the fate of disillusion, of the
+loss of holy belief in the truth of one beloved.
+
+When presently he reached the high-road by Isola Bella he encountered the
+fisherman, Giuseppe, who had spent the night at the Casa del Prete.
+
+"Are you going to see the place where the poor signore was found,
+signore?" asked the man.
+
+"Si," said Artois. "I was his friend. I wish to see the Pretore, to hear
+how it happened. Can I? Are they there, he and the others?"
+
+"They are in the Casa delle Sirene, signore. They are waiting to see if
+Salvatore comes back this morning from Messina."
+
+"And his daughter? Is she there?"
+
+"Si, signore. But she knows nothing. She was in the village. She can
+only cry. She is crying for the poor signore."
+
+Again that statement. It was becoming a refrain in the ears of Artois.
+
+"Gaspare is angry with her," added the fisherman. "I believe he would
+like to kill her."
+
+"It makes him sad to see her crying, perhaps," said Artois. "Gaspare
+loved the signore."
+
+He saluted the fisherman and rode on. But the man followed and kept by
+his side.
+
+"I will take you across in a boat, signore," he said.
+
+"Grazie."
+
+Artois struck the donkey and made it trot on in the dust.
+
+Giuseppe rowed him across the inlet and to the far side of the Sirens'
+Isle, from which the little path wound upward to the cottage. Here, among
+the rocks, a boat was moored.
+
+"Ecco, signore!" cried Giuseppe. "Salvatore has come back from Messina!
+Here is his boat!"
+
+Artois felt a pang of anxiety, of regret. He wished he had been there
+before the fisherman had returned. As he got out of the boat he said:
+
+"Did Salvatore know the signore well?"
+
+"Si, signore. The poor signore used to go out fishing with Salvatore.
+They say in the village that he gave Salvatore much money."
+
+"The signore was generous to every one."
+
+"Si, signore. But he did not give donkeys to every one."
+
+"Donkeys? What do you mean, Giuseppe?"
+
+"He gave Salvatore a donkey, a fine donkey. He bought it at the fair of
+San Felice."
+
+Artois said no more. Slowly, for he was still very weak, and the heat was
+becoming fierce as the morning wore on, he walked up the steep path and
+came to the plateau before the Casa delle Sirene.
+
+A group of people stood there: the Pretore, the Cancelliere, the
+Maresciallo, Gaspare, and Salvatore. They seemed to be in strong
+conversation, but directly Artois appeared there was a silence, and they
+all turned and stared at him as if in wonder. Then Gaspare came forward
+and took off his hat.
+
+The boy looked haggard with grief, and angry and obstinate, desperately
+obstinate.
+
+"Signore," he said. "You know my padrone! Tell them--"
+
+But the Pretore interrupted him with an air of importance.
+
+"It is my duty to make an inquiry," he said. "Who is this signore?"
+
+Artois explained that he was an intimate friend of the signora and had
+known her husband before his marriage.
+
+"I have come to hear if you are satisfied, as no doubt you are, Signor
+Pretore," he said, "that this terrible death was caused by an accident.
+The poor signora naturally wishes that this necessary business should be
+finished as soon as possible. It is unavoidable, I know, but it can only
+add to her unhappiness. I am sure, signore, that you will do your best to
+conclude the inquiry without delay. Forgive me for saying this. But I
+know Sicily, and know that I can always rely on the chivalry of Sicilian
+gentlemen where an unhappy lady is concerned."
+
+He spoke intentionally with a certain pomp, and held his hat in his hand
+while he was speaking.
+
+The Pretore looked pleased and flattered.
+
+"Certainly, Signor Barone," he said. "Certainly. We all grieve for the
+poor signora."
+
+"You will allow me to stay?" said Artois.
+
+"I see no objection," said the Pretore.
+
+He glanced at the Cancelliere, a small, pale man, with restless eyes and
+a pointed chin that looked like a weapon.
+
+"Niente, niente!" said the Cancelliere, obsequiously.
+
+He was reading Artois with intense sharpness. The Maresciallo, a broad,
+heavily built man, with an enormous mustache, uttered a deep "Buon
+giorno, Signor Barone," and stood calmly staring. He looked like a
+magnificent bull, with his short, strong brown neck, and low-growing hair
+that seemed to have been freshly crimped. Gaspare stood close to Artois,
+as if he felt that they were allies and must keep together. Salvatore was
+a few paces off.
+
+Artois glanced at him now with a carefully concealed curiosity. Instantly
+the fisherman said:
+
+"Povero signorino! Povero signorino! Mamma mia! and only two days ago we
+were all at the fair together! And he was so generous, Signor Barone." He
+moved a little nearer, but Artois saw him glance swiftly at Gaspare, like
+a man fearful of violence and ready to repel it. "He paid for everything.
+We could all keep our soldi in our pockets. And he gave Maddalena a
+beautiful blue dress, and he gave me a donkey. Dio mio! We have lost a
+benefactor. If the poor signorino had lived he would have given me a new
+boat. He had promised me a boat. For he would come fishing with me nearly
+every day. He was like a compare--"
+
+Salvatore stopped abruptly. His eyes were again on Gaspare.
+
+"And you say," began the Pretore, with a certain heavy pomposity, "that
+you did not see the signore at all yesterday?"
+
+"No, signore. I suppose he came down after I had started for Messina."
+
+"What did you go to Messina for?"
+
+"Signore, I went to see my nephew, Guido, who is in the hospital. He
+has--"
+
+"Non fa niente! non fa niente!" interrupted the Cancelliere.
+
+"Non fa niente! What time did you start?" said the Pretore.
+
+The Maresciallo cleared his throat with great elaboration, and spat with
+power twice.
+
+"Signor Pretore, I do not know. I did not look at the clock. But it was
+before sunset--it was well before sunset."
+
+"And the signore only came down from the Casa del Prete very late,"
+interposed Artois, quietly. "I was there and kept him. It was quite
+evening before he started."
+
+An expression of surprise went over Salvatore's face and vanished. He had
+realized that for some reason this stranger was his ally.
+
+"Had you any reason to suppose the signore was coming to fish with you
+yesterday?" asked the Pretore of Salvatore.
+
+"No, signore. I thought as the signora was back the poor signore would
+stay with her at the house."
+
+"Naturally, naturally!" said the Cancelliere.
+
+"Naturally! It seems the signore had several times passed across the
+rocks, from which he appears to have fallen, without any difficulty,"
+remarked the Pretore.
+
+"Si, signore," said Gaspare.
+
+He looked at Salvatore, seemed to make a great effort, then added:
+
+"But never when it was dark, signore. And I was always with him. He used
+to take my hand."
+
+His chest began to heave.
+
+"Corragio, Gaspare!" said Artois to him, in a low voice.
+
+His strong intuition enabled him to understand something of the conflict
+that was raging in the boy. He had seen his glances at Salvatore, and
+felt that he was longing to fly at the fisherman, that he only restrained
+himself with agony from some ferocious violence.
+
+The Pretore remained silent for a moment. It was evident that he was at
+a loss. He wished to appear acute, but the inquiry yielded nothing for
+the exercise of his talents.
+
+At last he said:
+
+"Did any one see you going to Messina? Is there any corroboration of your
+statement that you started before the signore came down here?"
+
+"Do you think I am not speaking the truth, Signor Pretore?" said
+Salvatore, proudly. "Why should I lie? The poor signore was my
+benefactor. If I had known he was coming I should have been here to
+receive him. Why, he has eaten in my house! He has slept in my house. I
+tell you we were as brothers."
+
+"Si, si," said the Cancelliere.
+
+Gaspare set his teeth, walked away to the edge of the plateau, and stood
+looking out to sea.
+
+"Then no one saw you?" persisted the Pretore.
+
+"Non lo so," said Salvatore. "I did not think of such things. I wanted to
+go to Messina, so I sent Maddalena to pass the night in the village, and
+I took the boat. What else should I do?"
+
+"Va bene! Va bene!" said the Cancelliere.
+
+The Maresciallo cleared his throat again. That, and the ceremony which
+invariably followed, were his only contributions to this official
+proceeding.
+
+The Pretore, receiving no assistance from his colleagues, seemed doubtful
+what more to do. It was evident to Artois that he was faintly suspicious,
+that he was not thoroughly satisfied about the cause of this death.
+
+"Your daughter seems very upset about all this," he said to Salvatore.
+
+"Mamma mia! And how should she not? Why, Signor Pretore, we loved the
+poor signore. We would have thrown ourselves into the sea for him. When
+we saw him coming down from the mountain to us it was as if we saw God
+coming down from heaven."
+
+"Certo! Certo!" said the Cancelliere.
+
+"I think every one who knew the signore at all grew to be very fond of
+him," said Artois, quietly. "He was greatly beloved here by every one."
+
+His manner to the Pretore was very civil, even respectful. Evidently it
+had its effect upon that personage. Every one here seemed to be assured
+that this death was merely an accident, could only have been an accident.
+He did not know what more to do.
+
+"Va bene!" he said at last, with some reluctance. "We shall see what the
+doctors say when the autopsy is concluded. Let us hope that nothing will
+be discovered. I do not wish to distress the poor signora. At the same
+time I must do my duty. That is evident."
+
+"It seems to me you have done it with admirable thoroughness," said
+Artois.
+
+"Grazie, Signor Barone, grazie!"
+
+"Grazie, grazie, Signor Barone!" added the Cancelliere.
+
+"Grazie, Signor Barone!" said the deep voice of the Maresciallo.
+
+The authorities now slowly prepared to take their departure.
+
+"You are coming with us, Signor Barone?" said the Pretore.
+
+Artois was about to say yes, when he saw pass across the aperture of the
+doorway of the cottage the figure of a girl with bent head. It
+disappeared immediately.
+
+"That must be Maddalena!" he thought.
+
+"Scusi, signore," he said, "but I have been seriously ill. The ride down
+here has tired me, and I should be glad to rest for a few minutes longer,
+if--" He looked at Salvatore.
+
+"I will fetch a chair for the signore!" said the fisherman, quickly.
+
+He did not know what this stranger wanted, but he felt instinctively that
+it was nothing that would be harmful to him.
+
+The Pretore and his companions, after polite inquiries as to the illness
+of Artois, took their leave with many salutations. Only Gaspare remained
+on the edge of the plateau staring at the sea. As Salvatore went to fetch
+the chair Artois went over to the boy.
+
+"Gaspare!" he said.
+
+"Si!" said the boy.
+
+"I want you to go up with the Pretore. Go to the signora. Tell her the
+inquiry is finished. It will relieve her to know."
+
+"You will come with me, signore?"
+
+"No."
+
+The boy turned and looked him full in the face.
+
+"Why do you stay?"
+
+For a moment Artois did not speak. He was considering rapidly what to
+say, how to treat Gaspare. He was now sure that there had been a tragedy,
+with which the people of the sirens' house were, somehow, connected. He
+was sure that Gaspare either knew or suspected what had happened, yet
+meant to conceal his knowledge despite his obvious hatred for the
+fisherman. Was the boy's reason for this strange caution, this strange
+secretiveness, akin to his--Artois's--desire? Was the boy trying to
+protect his padrona or the memory of his padrone? Artois wondered. Then
+he said:
+
+"Gaspare, I shall only stay a few minutes. We must have no gossip that
+can get to the padrona's ears. We understand each other, I think, you and
+I. We want the same thing. Men can keep silence, but girls talk. I wish
+to see Maddalena for a minute."
+
+"Ma--"
+
+Gaspare stared at him almost fiercely. But something in the face of
+Artois inspired him with confidence. Suddenly his reserve disappeared. He
+put his hand on Artois's arm.
+
+"Tell Maddalena to be silent and not to go on crying, signore," he said,
+violently. "Tell her that if she does not stop crying I will come down
+here in the night and kill her."
+
+"Go, Gaspare! The Pretore is wondering--go!"
+
+Gaspare went down over the edge of the land and disappeared towards the
+sea.
+
+"Ecco, signore!"
+
+Salvatore reappeared from the cottage carrying a chair which he set down
+under an olive-tree, the same tree by which Maddalena had stood when
+Maurice first saw her in the dawn.
+
+"Grazie."
+
+Artois sat down. He was very tired, but he scarcely knew it. The
+fisherman stood by him, looking at him with a sort of shifty expectation,
+and Artois, as he noticed the hard Arab type of the man's face, the
+glitter of the small, cunning eyes, the nervous alertness of the thin,
+sensitive hands, understood a great deal about Salvatore. He knew Arabs
+well. He had slept under their tents, had seen them in joy and in anger,
+had witnessed scenes displaying fully their innate carelessness of human
+life. This fisherman was almost as much Arab as Sicilian. The blend
+scarcely made for gentleness. If such a man were wronged, he would be
+quick and subtle in revenge. Nothing would stay him. But had Maurice
+wronged him? Artois meant to assume knowledge and to act upon his
+assumption. His instinct advised him that in doing so he would be doing
+the best thing possible for the protection of Hermione.
+
+"Can you make much money here?" he said, sharply yet carelessly.
+
+The fisherman moved as if startled.
+
+"Signore!"
+
+"They tell me Sicily's a poor land for the poor. Isn't that so?"
+
+Salvatore recovered himself.
+
+"Si, signore, si, signore, one earns nothing. It is a hard life, Per
+Dio!"
+
+He stopped and stared hard at the stranger with his hands on his hips.
+His eyes, his whole expression and attitude said, "What are you up to?"
+
+"America is the country for a sharp-witted man to make his fortune in,"
+said Artois, returning his gaze.
+
+"Si, signore. Many go from here. I know many who are working in America.
+But one must have money to pay the ticket."
+
+"Yes. This terreno belongs to you?"
+
+"Only the bit where the house stands, signore. And it is all rocks. It is
+no use to any one. And in winter the winds come over it. Why, it would
+take years of work to turn it into anything. And I am not a contadino.
+Once I had a wine-shop, but I am a man of the sea."
+
+"But you are a man with sharp wits. I should think you would do well in
+America. Others do, and why not you?"
+
+They looked at each other hard for a full minute. Then Salvatore said,
+slowly:
+
+"Signore, I will tell you the truth. It is the truth. I would swear it
+with sea-water on my lips. If I had the money I would go to America. I
+would take the first ship."
+
+"And your daughter, Maddalena? You couldn't leave her behind you?"
+
+"Signore, if I were ever to go to America you may be sure I should take
+Maddalena with me."
+
+"I think you would," Artois said, still looking at the man full in the
+eyes. "I think it would be wiser to take Maddalena with you."
+
+Salvatore looked away.
+
+"If I had the money, signore, I would buy the tickets to-morrow. Here I
+can make nothing, and it is a hard life, always on the sea. And in
+America you get good pay. A man can earn eight lire a day there, they
+tell me."
+
+"I have not seen your daughter yet," Artois said, abruptly.
+
+"No, signore, she is not well to-day. And the Signor Pretore frightened
+her. She will stay in the house to-day."
+
+"But I should like to see her for a moment."
+
+"Signore, I am very sorry, but--"
+
+Artois turned round in the chair and looked towards the house. The door,
+which had been open, was now shut.
+
+"Maddalena is praying, signore. She is praying to the Madonna for the
+soul of the dead signore."
+
+For the first time Artois noticed in the hard, bird-like face of the
+fisherman a sign of emotion, almost of softness.
+
+"We must not disturb her, signore."
+
+Artois got up and went a few steps nearer to the cottage.
+
+"Can one see the place where the signore's body was found?" he asked.
+
+"Si, signore, from the other side, among the trees."
+
+"I will come back in a moment," said Artois.
+
+He walked away from the fisherman and entered the wood, circling the
+cottage. The fisherman did not come with him. Artois's instinct had told
+him that the man would not care to come on such an errand. As Artois
+passed at the back of the cottage he noticed an open window, and paused
+near it in the long grass. From within there came the sound of a woman's
+voice, murmuring. It was frequently interrupted by sobs. After a moment
+Artois went close to the window, and said, but without showing himself:
+
+"Maddalena!"
+
+The murmuring voice stopped.
+
+"Maddalena!"
+
+There was silence.
+
+"Maddalena!" Artois said. "Are you listening?"
+
+He heard a faint movement as if the woman within came nearer to the
+casement.
+
+"If you loved the dead signore, if you care for his memory, do not talk
+of your grief for him to others. Pray for him, and be silent for him. If
+you are silent the Holy Mother will hear your prayers."
+
+As he said the last words Artois made his deep voice sound mysterious,
+mystical.
+
+Then he went away softly among the thickly growing trees.
+
+When he saw Salvatore again, still standing upon the plateau, he beckoned
+to him without coming into the open.
+
+"Bring the boat round to the inlet," he said. "I will cross from there."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"And as we cross we can speak a little more about America."
+
+The fisherman stared at him, with a faint smile that showed a gleam of
+sharp, white teeth.
+
+"Si, signore--a little more about America."
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+A night and a day had passed, and still Artois had not seen Hermione. The
+autopsy had been finished, and had revealed nothing to change the theory
+of Dr. Marini as to the determining cause of death. The English stranger
+had been crossing the dangerous wall of rock, probably in darkness, had
+fallen, been stunned upon the rocks in the sea beneath, and drowned
+before he recovered consciousness.
+
+Gaspare said nothing. Salvatore held his peace and began his preparations
+for America. And Maddalena, if she wept, wept now in secret; if she
+prayed, prayed in the lonely house of the sirens, near the window which
+had so often given a star to the eyes that looked down from the terrace
+of the Casa del Prete.
+
+There was gossip in Marechiaro, and the Pretore still preserved his air
+of faint suspicion. But that would probably soon vanish under the
+influence of the Cancelliere, with whom Artois had had some private
+conversation. The burial had been allowed, and very early in the morning
+of the day following that of Hermione's arrival at the hotel it took
+place from the hospital.
+
+Few people knew the hour, and most were still asleep when the coffin was
+carried down the street, followed only by Hermione, and by Gaspare in a
+black, ready-made suit that had been bought in the village of Cattaro.
+Hermione would not allow any one else to follow her dead, and as Maurice
+had been a Protestant there was no service. This shocked Gaspare, and
+added to his grief, till Hermione explained that her husband had been of
+a different religion from that of Sicily, a religion with different
+rites.
+
+"But we can pray for him, Gaspare," she said. "He loved us, and perhaps
+he will know what we are doing."
+
+The thought seemed to soothe the boy. He kneeled down by his padrona
+under the wall of the Campo Santo by which Protestants were buried, and
+whispered a petition for the repose of the soul of his padrone. Into the
+gap of earth, where now the coffin lay, he had thrown roses from his
+father's little terreno near the village. His tears fell fast, and his
+prayer was scarcely more than a broken murmur of "Povero
+signorino--povero signorino--Dio ci mandi buon riposo in Paradiso."
+Hermione could not pray although she was in the attitude of supplication;
+but when she heard the words of Gaspare she murmured them too. "Buon
+riposo!" The sweet Sicilian good-night--she said it now in the stillness
+of the lonely dawn. And her tears fell fast with those of the boy who had
+loved and served his master.
+
+When the funeral was over she walked up the mountain with Gaspare to the
+Casa del Prete, and from there, on the following day, she sent a message
+to Artois, asking him if he would come to see her.
+
+     "I don't ask you to forgive me for not seeing you before," she
+     wrote. "We understand each other and do not need explanations. I
+     wanted to see nobody. Come at any hour when you feel that you would
+     like to.
+                                                       HERMIONE."
+
+Artois rode up in the cool of the day, towards evening.
+
+He was met upon the terrace by Gaspare.
+
+"The signora is on the mountain, signore," he said. "If you go up you
+will find her, the povero signora. She is all alone upon the mountain."
+
+"I will go, Gaspare. I have told Maddalena. I think she will be silent."
+
+The boy dropped his eyes. His unreserve of the island had not endured. It
+had been a momentary impulse, and now the impulse had died away.
+
+"Va bene, signore," he muttered.
+
+He had evidently nothing more to say, yet Artois did not leave him
+immediately.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, "the signora will not stay here through the great
+heat, will she?"
+
+"Non lo so, signore."
+
+"She ought to go away. It will be better if she goes away."
+
+"Si, signore. But perhaps she will not like to leave the povero
+signorino."
+
+Tears came into the boy's eyes. He turned away and went to the wall, and
+looked over into the ravine, and thought of many things: of readings
+under the oak-trees, of the tarantella, of how he and the padrone had
+come up from the fishing singing in the sunshine. His heart was full, and
+he felt dazed. He was so accustomed to being always with his padrone that
+he did not know how he was to go on without him. He did not remember his
+former life, before the padrone came. Everything seemed to have begun for
+him on that morning when the train with the padrone and the padrona in it
+ran into the station of Cattaro. And now everything seemed to have
+finished.
+
+Artois did not say any more to him, but walked slowly up the mountain
+leaning on his stick. Close to the top, by a heap of stones that was
+something like a cairn, he saw, presently, a woman sitting. As he came
+nearer she turned her head and saw him. She did not move. The soft rays
+of the evening sun fell on her, and showed him that her square and rugged
+face was pale and grave and, he thought, empty-looking, as if something
+had deprived it of its former possession, the ardent vitality, the
+generous enthusiasm, the look of swiftness he had loved.
+
+When he came up to her he could only say: "Hermione, my friend--"
+
+The loneliness of this mountain summit was a fit setting for her
+loneliness, and these two solitudes, of nature and of this woman's soul,
+took hold of Artois and made him feel as if he were infinitely small, as
+if he could not matter to either. He loved nature, and he loved this
+woman. And of what use were he and his love to them?
+
+She stretched up her hand to him, and he bent down and took it and held
+it.
+
+"You said some day I should leave my Garden of Paradise, Emile."
+
+"Don't hurt me with my own words," he said.
+
+"Sit by me."
+
+He sat down on the warm ground close to the heap of stones.
+
+"You said I should leave the garden, but I don't think you meant like
+this. Did you?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"I think you thought we should be unhappy together. Well, we were never
+that. We were always very happy. I like to think of that. I come up here
+to think of that; of our happiness, and that we were always kind and
+tender to each other. Emile, if we hadn't been, if we had ever had even
+one quarrel, even once said cruel things to each other, I don't think I
+could bear it now. But we never did. God did watch us then, I think. God
+was with me so long as Maurice was with me. But I feel as if God had gone
+away from me with Maurice, as if they had gone together. Do you think any
+other woman has ever felt like that?"
+
+"I don't think I am worthy to know how some women feel," he said, almost
+falteringly.
+
+"I thought perhaps God would have stayed with me to help me, but I feel
+as if He hadn't. I feel as if He had only been able to love me so long as
+Maurice was with me."
+
+"That feeling will pass away."
+
+"Perhaps when my child comes," she said, very simply.
+
+Artois had not known about the coming of the child, but Hermione did not
+remember that now.
+
+"Your child!" he said.
+
+"I am glad I came back in time to tell him about the child," she said. "I
+think at first he was almost frightened. He was such a boy, you see. He
+was the very spirit of youth, wasn't he? And perhaps that--but at the end
+he seemed happy. He kissed me as if he loved not only me. Do you
+understand, Emile? He seemed to kiss me the last time--for us both. Some
+day I shall tell my baby that."
+
+She was silent for a little while. She looked out over the great view,
+now falling into a strange repose. This was the land he had loved, the
+land he had belonged to.
+
+"I should like to hear the 'Pastorale' now," she said, presently. "But
+Sebastiano--" A new thought seemed to strike her. "I wonder how some
+women can bear their sorrows," she said. "Don't you, Emile?"
+
+"What sorrows do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"Such a sorrow as poor Lucrezia has to bear. Maurice always loved me.
+Lucrezia knows that Sebastiano loves some one else. I ought to be trying
+to comfort Lucrezia. I did try. I did go to pray with her. But that was
+before. I can't pray now, because I can't feel sure of almost anything. I
+sometimes think that this happened without God's meaning it to happen."
+
+"God!" Artois said, moved by an irresistible impulse. "And the gods, the
+old pagan gods?"
+
+"Ah!" she said, understanding. "We called him Mercury. Yes, it is as if
+he had gone to them, as if they had recalled their messenger. In the
+spring, before I went to Africa, I often used to think of legends, and
+put him--my Sicilian--"
+
+She did not go on. Yet her voice had not faltered. There was no
+contortion of sorrow in her face. There was a sort of soft calmness about
+her almost akin to the calmness of the evening. It was the more
+remarkable in her because she was not usually a tranquil woman. Artois
+had never known her before in deep grief. But he had known her in joy,
+and then she had been rather enthusiastic than serene. Something of her
+eager humanity had left her now. She made upon him a strange impression,
+almost as of some one he had never previously had any intercourse with.
+And yet she was being wonderfully natural with him, as natural as if she
+were alone.
+
+"What are you going to do, my friend?" he said, after a long silence.
+
+"Nothing. I have no wish to do anything. I shall just wait--for our
+child."
+
+"But where will you wait? You cannot wait here. The heat would weaken
+you. In your condition it would be dangerous."
+
+"He spoke of going. It hurt me for a moment, I remember. I had a wish to
+stay here forever then. It seemed to me that this little bit of earth and
+rock was the happiest place in all the world. Yes, I will go, Emile, but
+I shall come back. I shall bring our child here."
+
+He did not combat this intention then, for he was too thankful to have
+gained her assent to the departure for which he longed. The further
+future must take care of itself.
+
+"I will take you to Italy, to Switzerland, wherever you wish to go."
+
+"I have no wish for any other place. But I will go somewhere in Italy.
+Wherever it is cool and silent will do. But I must be far away from
+people; and when you have taken me there, dear Emile, you must leave me
+there."
+
+"Quite alone?"
+
+"Gaspare will be with me. I shall always keep Gaspare. Maurice and he
+were like two brothers in their happiness. I know they loved each other,
+and I know Gaspare loves me."
+
+Artois only said:
+
+"I trust the boy."
+
+The word "trust" seemed to wake Hermione into a stronger life.
+
+"Ah, Emile," she said, "once you distrusted the south. I remember your
+very words. You said, 'I love the south, but I distrust what I love, and
+I see the south in him.' I want to tell you, I want you to know, how
+perfect he was always to me. He loved joy, but his joy was always
+innocent. There was always something of the child in him. He was
+unconscious of himself. He never understood his own beauty. He never
+realized that he was worthy of worship. His thought was to reverence and
+to worship others. He loved life and the sun--oh, how he loved them! I
+don't think any one can ever have loved life and the sun as he did, ever
+will love them as he did. But he was never selfish. He was just quite
+natural. He was the deathless boy. Emile, have you noticed anything about
+me--since?"
+
+"What, Hermione?"
+
+"How much older I look now. He was like my youth, and my youth has gone
+with him."
+
+"Will it not revive--when--?"
+
+"No, never. I don't wish it to. Gaspare gathered roses, all the best
+roses from his father's little bit of land, to throw into the grave. And
+I want my youth to lie there with my Sicilian under Gaspare's roses. I
+feel as if that would be a tender companionship. I gave everything to him
+when he was alive, and I don't want to keep anything back now. I would
+like the sun to be with him under Gaspare's roses. And yet I know he's
+elsewhere. I can't explain. But two days ago at dawn I heard a child
+playing the tarantella, and it seemed to me as if my Sicilian had been
+taken away by the blue, by the blue of Sicily. I shall often come back to
+the blue. I shall often sit here again. For it was here that I heard the
+beating of the heart of youth. And there's no other music like that. Is
+there, Emile?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+Had the music been wild? He suspected that the harmony she worshipped had
+passed on into the hideous crash of discords. And whose had been the
+fault? Who creates human nature as it is? In what workshop, of what
+brain, are forged the mad impulses of the wild heart of youth, are mixed
+together subtly the divine aspirations which leap like the winged Mercury
+to the heights, and the powerful appetites which lead the body into the
+dark places of the earth? And why is the Giver of the divine the
+permitter of those tremendous passions, which are not without their
+glory, but which wreck so many human lives?
+
+Perhaps a reason may be found in the sacredness of pity. Evil and agony
+are the manure from which spring some of the whitest lilies that have
+ever bloomed beneath that enigmatic blue which roofs the terror and the
+triumph of the world. And while human beings know how to pity, human
+beings will always believe in a merciful God.
+
+A strange thought to come into such a mind as Artois's! Yet it came in
+the twilight, and with it a sense of tears such as he had never felt
+before.
+
+With the twilight had come a little wind from Etna. It made something
+near him flutter, something white, a morsel of paper among the stones by
+which he was sitting. He looked down and saw writing, and bent to pick
+the paper up.
+
+     "Emile may leave at once. But there is no good boat till the 10th.
+     We shall take that...."
+
+Hermione's writing!
+
+Artois understood at once. Maurice had had Hermione's letter. He had
+known they were coming from Africa, and he had gone to the fair despite
+that knowledge. He had gone with the girl who wept and prayed beside the
+sea.
+
+His hand closed over the paper.
+
+"What is it, Emile? What have you picked up?"
+
+"Only a little bit of paper."
+
+He spoke quietly, tore it into tiny fragments and let them go upon the
+wind.
+
+"When will you come with me, Hermione? When shall we go to Italy?"
+
+"I am saying 'a rivederci' now"--she dropped her voice--"and buon
+riposo."
+
+The white fragments blew away into the gathering night, separated from
+one another by the careful wind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days later Hermione and Artois left Sicily, and Gaspare, leaning
+out of the window of the train, looked his last on the Isle of the
+Sirens. A fisherman on the beach by the inlet, not Salvatore, recognized
+the boy and waved a friendly hand. But Gaspare did not see him.
+
+There they had fished! There they had bathed! There they had drunk the
+good red wine of Amato and called for brindisi! There they had lain on
+the warm sand of the caves! There they had raced together to Madre
+Carmela and her frying-pan! There they had shouted "O sole mio!"
+
+There--there they had been young together!
+
+The shining sea was blotted out from the boy's eyes by tears.
+
+"Povero signorino!" he whispered. "Povero signorino!"
+
+And then, as his "Paese" vanished, he added for the last time the words
+which he had whispered in the dawn by the grave of his padrone, "Dio ci
+mandi buon riposo in Paradiso."
+
+
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Call of the Blood, by Robert Smythe Hichens</title>
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Call of the Blood, by Robert Smythe
+Hichens, Illustrated by Orson Lowell</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Call of the Blood</p>
+<p>Author: Robert Smythe Hichens</p>
+<p>Release Date: December 21, 2006  [eBook #20157]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CALL OF THE BLOOD***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><b>Transcriber's Notes:</b></p>
+<p>Some minor changes have been made to correct
+typographical errors and inconsistencies.<br />
+<br />
+The original book has no table of contents.  In this version I have added one to allow the
+reader to jump to a particular chapter.
+</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 267px;">
+<a href="images/cover.jpg">
+<img src="images/cover_th.jpg" width="267" height="400" alt="" title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 228px;">
+<a href="images/gs01.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs01_th.jpg" width="228" height="400" alt="See p. 399
+&quot;HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY PRAYED&quot;"
+title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">See p. 399
+&quot;HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY PRAYED&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>THE CALL</h1>
+<h2>OF THE</h2>
+<h1>BLOOD</h1>
+
+<p><br />
+<br /></p>
+
+<h2>ROBERT HICHENS</h2>
+<h5>AUTHOR OF<br />
+"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" ETC.</h5>
+
+<p><br />
+<br /></p>
+
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED BY<br />
+ORSON LOWELL</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><br />
+<br /></p>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK AND LONDON</h4>
+<h3>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS</h3>
+<h4>MCMVI</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 226px;">
+<a href="images/tp01.jpg">
+<img src="images/tp01_th.jpg" width="226" height="400" alt="Title page."
+title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">Title page.</span>
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<h5>Copyright, 1905, 1906, by <span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span>.
+<br />
+<i>All rights reserved.</i>
+<br />
+Published October, 1906.</h5>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="14" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs01.jpg">"HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY PRAYED"</a></td><td align='right'><i>Frontispiece</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs02.jpg">"'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID"</a></td><td align='right'><i>Facing p.</i> 38</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs03.jpg">"HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN<br />
+THE HOUSE OF THE SIRENS"</a></td><td align='right'>"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;78</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs04.jpg">"HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE<br />
+DRINKING IN THE BREEZE"</a></td><td align='right'>"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;120</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs05.jpg">"'I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,'<br />
+SHE SAID"</a></td><td align='right'>"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;280</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs06.jpg">"HE KEPT HIS HAND ON HERS AND HELD IT ON THE<br />
+WARM GROUND"</a></td><td align='right'>"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;302</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs07.jpg">"'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN&mdash;IN MY<br />
+SICILIAN,' SHE SAID, TENDERLY"</a></td><td align='right'>"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;366</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="images/gs08.jpg">"SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE<br />
+CAVES WHERE THE FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN<br />
+THE DAWN"</a></td><td align='right'>"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;420</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<h1>THE</h1>
+<h1>CALL OF THE BLOOD</h1>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<h5>Go to chapter.</h5>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='right'><a href="#I"><b>Chapter I</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#II"><b>Chapter II</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#III"><b>Chapter III</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#IV"><b>Chapter IV</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#V"><b>Chapter V</b></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><a href="#VI"><b>Chapter VI</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#VII"><b>Chapter VII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#VIII"><b>Chapter VIII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#IX"><b>Chapter IX</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#X"><b>Chapter X</b></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><a href="#XI"><b>Chapter XI</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XII"><b>Chapter XII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XIII"><b>Chapter XIII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XIV"><b>Chapter XIV</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XV"><b>Chapter XV</b></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><a href="#XVI"><b>Chapter XVI</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XVII"><b>Chapter XVII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XVIII"><b>Chapter XVIII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XIX"><b>Chapter XIX</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XX"><b>Chapter XX</b></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'><a href="#XXI"><b>Chapter XXI</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XXII"><b>Chapter XXII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XXIII"><b>Chapter XXIII</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XXIV"><b>Chapter XXIV</b></a></td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#XXV"><b>Chapter XXV</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<h3>THE
+CALL OF THE BLOOD</h3>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<p>On a dreary afternoon of November, when London
+was closely wrapped in a yellow fog, Hermione Lester was
+sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton Place reading
+a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her
+writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from
+the writer of the letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to
+her on the previous day that he was coming over from
+Paris by the night train and boat.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten
+in height, flat, thin, but strongly built, with a large waist
+and limbs which, though vigorous, were rather unwieldy.
+Her face was plain: rather square and harsh in outline,
+with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good complexion,
+clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and
+slightly prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy,
+and brightness, full, too, of eager intelligence and
+of energy, eyes of a woman who was intensely alive both
+in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look most
+attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent
+from her body but was present in her eyes, which showed
+forth the spirit in her with a glorious frankness and a
+keen intensity. Nevertheless, despite these eyes and
+her thickly growing, warm-colored, and wavy brown<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+hair, she was a plain, almost an ugly woman, whose
+attractive force issued from within, inviting inquiry and
+advance, as the flame of a fire does, playing on the
+blurred glass of a window with many flaws in it.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was, in fact, found very attractive by a great
+many people of varying temperaments and abilities, who
+were captured by her spirit and by her intellect, the soul
+of the woman and the brains, and who, while seeing
+clearly and acknowledging frankly the plainness of her
+face and the almost masculine ruggedness of her form,
+said, with a good deal of truth, that "somehow they
+didn't seem to matter in Hermione." Whether Hermione
+herself was of this opinion not many knew. Her
+general popularity, perhaps, made the world incurious
+about the subject.</p>
+
+<p>The room in which Hermione was reading the letters of
+Artois was small and crammed with books. There were
+books in cases uncovered by glass from floor to ceiling,
+some in beautiful bindings, but many in tattered paper
+covers, books that looked as if they had been very much
+read. On several tables, among photographs and vases
+of flowers, were more books and many magazines, both
+English and foreign. A large writing-table was littered
+with notes and letters. An upright grand-piano stood
+open, with a quantity of music upon it. On the thick
+Persian carpet before the fire was stretched a very large
+St. Bernard dog, with his muzzle resting on his paws and
+his eyes blinking drowsily in serene contentment.</p>
+
+<p>As Hermione read the letters one by one her face showed
+a panorama of expressions, almost laughably indicative
+of her swiftly passing thoughts. Sometimes she
+smiled. Once or twice she laughed aloud, startling the
+dog, who lifted his massive head and gazed at her with
+profound inquiry. Then she shook her head, looked
+grave, even sad, or earnest and full of sympathy, which
+seemed longing to express itself in a torrent of comforting
+words. Presently she put the letters together, tied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+them up carelessly with a piece of twine, and put them
+back into the drawer from which she had taken them.
+Just as she had finished doing this the door of the room,
+which was ajar, was pushed softly open, and a dark-eyed,
+Eastern-looking boy dressed in livery appeared.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Selim?" asked Hermione, in French.</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Artois, madame."</p>
+
+<p>"Emile!" cried Hermione, getting up out of her chair
+with a sort of eager slowness. "Where is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is here!" said a loud voice, also speaking French.</p>
+
+<p>Selim stood gracefully aside, and a big man stepped
+into the room and took the two hands which Hermione
+stretched out in his.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let any one else in, Selim," said Hermione to
+the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Especially the little Townly," said Artois, menacingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, Emile! Not even Miss Townly if she calls,
+Selim."</p>
+
+<p>Selim smiled with grave intelligence at the big man,
+said, "I understand, madame," and glided out.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, in Heaven's name, have you&mdash;you, pilgrim
+of the Orient&mdash;insulted the East by putting Selim into
+a coat with buttons and cloth trousers?" exclaimed
+Artois, still holding Hermione's hands.</p>
+
+<p>"It's an outrage, I know. But I had to. He was
+stared at and followed, and he actually minded it. As
+soon as I found out that, I trampled on all my artistic
+prejudices, and behold him&mdash;horrible but happy!
+Thank you for coming&mdash;thank you."</p>
+
+<p>She let his hands go, and they stood for a moment
+looking at each other in the firelight.</p>
+
+<p>Artois was a tall man of about forty-three, with large,
+almost Herculean limbs, a handsome face, with regular
+but rather heavy features, and very big gray eyes, that
+always looked penetrating and often melancholy. His
+forehead was noble and markedly intellectual, and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+well-shaped, massive head was covered with thick, short,
+mouse-colored hair. He wore a mustache and a magnificent
+beard. His barber, who was partly responsible
+for the latter, always said of it that it was the "most
+beautiful fan-shaped beard in Paris," and regarded it
+with a pride which was probably shared by its owner.
+His hands and feet were good, capable-looking, but not
+clumsy, and his whole appearance gave an impression
+of power, both physical and intellectual, and of indomitable
+will combined with subtlety. He was well
+dressed, fashionably not artistically, yet he suggested
+an artist, not necessarily a painter. As he looked at
+Hermione the smile which had played about his lips
+when he entered the little room died away.</p>
+
+<p>"I've come to hear about it all," he said, in his resonant
+voice&mdash;a voice which matched his appearance. "Do
+you know"&mdash;and here his accent was grave, almost reproachful&mdash;"that
+in all your letters to me&mdash;I looked
+them over before I left Paris&mdash;there is no allusion, not
+one, to this Monsieur Delarey."</p>
+
+<p>"Why should there be?" she answered.</p>
+
+<p>She sat down, but Artois continued to stand.</p>
+
+<p>"We seldom wrote of persons, I think. We wrote
+of events, ideas, of work, of conditions of life; of man,
+woman, child&mdash;yes&mdash;but not often of special men,
+women, children. I am almost sure&mdash;in fact, quite
+sure, for I've just been reading them&mdash;that in your
+letters to me there is very little discussion of our mutual
+friends, less of friends who weren't common to us
+both."</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke she stretched out a long, thin arm, and
+pulled open the drawer into which she had put the
+bundle tied with twine.</p>
+
+<p>"They're all in here."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't lock that drawer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her with a sort of severity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I lock the door of the room, or, rather, it locks itself.
+You haven't noticed it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"It's the same as the outer door of a flat. I have a
+latch-key to it."</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing, but smiled. All the sudden grimness
+had gone out of his face.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione withdrew her hand from the drawer holding
+the letters.</p>
+
+<p>"Here they are!"</p>
+
+<p>"My complaints, my egoism, my ambitions, my views&mdash;Mon
+Dieu! Hermione, what a good friend you've been!"</p>
+
+<p>"And some people say you're not modest!"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;modest! What is modesty? I know my own
+value as compared with that of others, and that knowledge
+to others must often seem conceit."</p>
+
+<p>She began to untie the packet, but he stretched out
+his hand and stopped her.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I didn't come from Paris to read my letters, or
+even to hear you read them! I came to hear about this
+Monsieur Delarey."</p>
+
+<p>Selim stole in with tea and stole out silently, shutting
+the door this time. As soon as he had gone, Artois drew
+a case from his pocket, took out of it a pipe, filled it,
+and lit it. Meanwhile, Hermione poured out tea, and,
+putting three lumps of sugar into one of the cups, handed
+it to Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't come to protest. You know we both
+worship individual freedom. How often in those letters
+haven't we written it&mdash;our respect of the right of
+the individual to act for him or herself, without the interference
+of outsiders? No, I've come to hear about
+it all, to hear how you managed to get into the pleasant
+state of mania."</p>
+
+<p>On the last words his deep voice sounded sarcastic,
+almost patronizing.  Hermione fired up at once.</p>
+
+<p>"None of that from you, Emile!" she exclaimed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Artois stirred his tea rather more than was necessary,
+but did not begin to drink it.</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't look down on me from a height," she
+continued. "I won't have it. We're all on a level
+when we're doing certain things, when we're truly living,
+simply, frankly, following our fates, and when we're
+dying. You feel that. Drop the analyst, dear Emile,
+drop the professional point of view. I see right through
+it into your warm old heart. I never was afraid of
+you, although I place you high, higher than your critics,
+higher than your public, higher than you place yourself.
+Every woman ought to be able to love, and every man.
+There's nothing at all absurd in the fact, though there
+may be infinite absurdities in the manifestation of it.
+But those you haven't yet had an opportunity of seeing
+in me, so you've nothing yet to laugh at or label. Now
+drink your tea."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed a loud, roaring laugh, drank some of his
+tea, puffed out a cloud of smoke, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Whom will you ever respect?"</p>
+
+<p>"Every one who is sincere&mdash;myself included."</p>
+
+<p>"Be sincere with me now, and I'll go back to Paris
+to-morrow like a shorn lamb. Be sincere about Monsieur
+Delarey."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione sat quite still for a moment with the bundle
+of letters in her lap.    At last she said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's difficult sometimes to tell the truth about a
+feeling, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you don't know yourself what the truth is."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure that I do. The history of the growth
+of a feeling may be almost more complicated than the
+history of France."</p>
+
+<p>Artois, who was a novelist, nodded his head with the
+air of a man who knew all about that.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice&mdash;Maurice Delarey has cared for me, in that
+way, for a long time. I was very much surprised when
+I first found it out."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why, in the name of Heaven?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he's wonderfully good-looking."</p>
+
+<p>"No explanation of your astonishment."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which
+astonished me, the fact of a very handsome man loving
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, what's your theory?"</p>
+
+<p>He bent down his head a little towards her, and
+fixed his great, gray eyes on her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Theory! Look here, Emile, I dare say it's difficult
+for a man like you, genius, insight, and all, thoroughly
+to understand how an ugly woman regards beauty, an
+ugly woman like me, who's got intellect and passion
+and intense feeling for form, color, every manifestation
+of beauty. When I look at beauty I feel rather like a
+dirty little beggar staring at an angel. My intellect
+doesn't seem to help me at all. In me, perhaps, the
+sensation arises from an inward conviction that humanity
+was meant originally to be beautiful, and that
+the ugly ones among us are&mdash;well, like sins among
+virtues. You remember that book of yours which was
+and deserved to be your one artistic failure, because you
+hadn't put yourself really into it?"</p>
+
+<p>Artois made a wry face.</p>
+
+<p>"Eventually you paid a lot of money to prevent it
+from being published any more. You withdrew it from
+circulation. I sometimes feel that we ugly ones ought
+to be withdrawn from circulation. It's silly, perhaps,
+and I hope I never show it, but there the feeling is. So
+when the handsomest man I had ever seen loved me, I
+was simply amazed. It seemed to me ridiculous and
+impossible. And then, when I was convinced it was
+possible, very wonderful, and, I confess it to you, very
+splendid. It seemed to help to reconcile me with myself
+in a way in which I had never been reconciled before."</p>
+
+<p>"And that was the beginning?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I dare say. There were other things, too. Maurice
+Delarey isn't at all stupid, but he's not nearly so intelligent
+as I am."</p>
+
+<p>"That doesn't surprise me."</p>
+
+<p>"The fact of this physical perfection being humble
+with me, looking up to me, seemed to mean a great deal.
+I think Maurice feels about intellect rather as I do about
+beauty. He made me understand that he must. And
+that seemed to open my heart to him in an extraordinary
+way.    Can you understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes.    Give me some more tea, please."</p>
+
+<p>He held out his cup. She filled it, talking while she
+did so. She had become absorbed in what she was saying,
+and spoke without any self-consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew my gift, such as it is, the gift of brains, could
+do something for him, though his gift of beauty could
+do nothing for me&mdash;in the way of development. And
+that, too, seemed to lead me a step towards him. Finally&mdash;well,
+one day I knew I wanted to marry him. And
+so, Emile, I'm going to marry him.   Here!"</p>
+
+<p>She held out to him his cup full of tea.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no sugar," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;the first time I've forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>The tone of his voice made her look up at him quickly
+and exclaim:</p>
+
+<p>"No, it won't make any difference!"</p>
+
+<p>"But it has. You've forgotten for the first time.
+Cursed be the egotism of man."</p>
+
+<p>He sat down in an arm-chair on the other side of the
+tea-table.</p>
+
+<p>"It ought to make a difference. Maurice Delarey, if
+he is a man&mdash;and if you are going to marry him he
+must be&mdash;will not allow you to be the Egeria of a fellow
+who has shocked even Paris by telling it the naked
+truth."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he will.   I shall drop no friendship for him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+and he knows it. There is not one that is not honest
+and innocent. Thank God I can say that. If you care
+for it, Emile, we can both add to the size of the letter
+bundles."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her meditatively, even rather sadly.</p>
+
+<p>"You are capable of everything in the way of friendship,
+I believe," he said. "Even of making the bundle
+bigger with a husband's consent. A husband's&mdash;I suppose
+the little Townly's upset?    But she always is."</p>
+
+<p>"When you're there. You don't know Evelyn. You
+never will. She's at her worst with you because you
+terrify her. Your talent frightens her, but your appearance
+frightens her even more."</p>
+
+<p>"I am as God made me."</p>
+
+<p>"With the help of the barber. It's your beard as
+much as anything else."</p>
+
+<p>"What does she say of this affair? What do all your
+innumerable adorers say?"</p>
+
+<p>"What should they say? Why should anybody be
+surprised? It's surely the most natural thing in the
+world for a woman, even a very plain woman, to marry.
+I have always heard that marriage is woman's destiny,
+and though I don't altogether believe that, still I see
+no special reason why I should never marry if I wish to.
+And I do wish to."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what will surprise the little Townly and the
+gaping crowd."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall begin to think I've seemed unwomanly all
+these years."</p>
+
+<p>"No. You're an extraordinary woman who astonishes
+because she is going to do a very important thing
+that is very ordinary."</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't seem at all ordinary to me."</p>
+
+<p>Emile Artois began to stroke his beard. He was determined
+not to feel jealous. He had never wished to
+marry Hermione, and did not wish to marry her now, but
+he had come over from Paris secretly a man of wrath.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You needn't tell me that," he said. "Of course it
+is the great event to you. Otherwise you would never
+have thought of doing it."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly.   Are you astonished?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I am.   Yes, I am."</p>
+
+<p>"I should have thought you were far too clever to
+be so."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly what I should have thought. But what
+living man is too clever to be an idiot? I never met
+the gentleman and never hope to."</p>
+
+<p>"You looked upon me as the eternal spinster?"</p>
+
+<p>"I looked upon you as Hermione Lester, a great
+creature, an extraordinary creature, free from the prejudices
+of your sex and from its pettinesses, unconventional,
+big brained, generous hearted, free as the wind
+in a world of monkey slaves, careless of all opinion save
+your own, but humbly obedient to the truth that is in
+you, human as very few human beings are, one who
+ought to have been an artist but who apparently preferred
+to be simply a woman."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione laughed, winking away two tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Emile dear, I'm being very simply a woman
+now, I assure you."</p>
+
+<p>"And why should I be surprised? You're right.
+What is it makes me surprised?"</p>
+
+<p>He sat considering.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it is that you are so unusual, so individual,
+that my imagination refuses to project the man on
+whom your choice could fall. I project the snuffy
+professor&mdash;Impossible! I project the Greek god&mdash;again
+my mind cries, 'Impossible!' Yet, behold, it is
+in very truth the Greek god, the ideal of the ordinary
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>"You know nothing about it. You're shooting arrows
+into the air."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me more then. Hold up a torch in the darkness."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I can't. You pretend to know a woman, and you
+ask her coldly to explain to you the attraction of the
+man she loves, to dissect it.    I won't try to."</p>
+
+<p>"But," he said, with now a sort of joking persistence,
+which was only a mask for an almost irritable curiosity,
+"I want to know."</p>
+
+<p>"And you shall. Maurice and I are dining to-night
+at Caminiti's in Peathill Street, just off Regent Street.
+Come and meet us there, and we'll all three spend the
+evening together. Half-past eight, of course no evening
+dress, and the most delicious Turkish coffee in London."</p>
+
+<p>"Does Monsieur Delarey like Turkish coffee?"</p>
+
+<p>"Loves it."</p>
+
+<p>"Intelligently?"</p>
+
+<p>"How do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Does he love it inherently, or because you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can find that out to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall come."</p>
+
+<p>He got up, put his pipe into a case, and the case into
+his pocket, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione, if the analyst may have a word&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let Monsieur Delarey, whatever his character,
+see now, or in the future, the dirty little beggar staring
+at the angel. I use your own preposterously inflated
+phrase. Men can't stand certain things and remain
+true to the good in their characters. Humble adoration
+from a woman like you would be destructive of blessed
+virtues in Antinous. Think well of yourself, my friend,
+think well of your sphinxlike eyes. Haven't they
+beauty? Doesn't intellect shoot its fires from them?
+Mon Dieu! Don't let me see any prostration to-night,
+or I shall put three grains of something I know&mdash;I always
+call it Turkish delight&mdash;into the Turkish coffee
+of Monsieur Delarey, and send him to sleep with his
+fathers."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Hermione got up and held out her hands to him impulsively.</p>
+
+<p>"Bless you, Emile!" she said.    "You're a&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>There was a gentle tap on the door. Hermione went
+to it and opened it. Selim stood outside with a pencil
+note on a salver.</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! The little Townly has been!" said Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's from her. You told her, Selim, that I was
+with Monsieur Artois?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, madame."</p>
+
+<p>"Did she say anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"She said, 'Very well,' madame, and then she wrote
+this. Then she said again, 'Very well,' and then she
+went away."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Selim."</p>
+
+<p>Selim departed.</p>
+
+<p>"Delicious!" said Artois. "I can hear her speaking and
+see her drifting away consumed by jealousy, in the fog."</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, Emile, don't be so malicious."</p>
+
+<p>"P'f! I must be to-day, for I too am&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense. Be good this evening, be very good."</p>
+
+<p>"I will try."</p>
+
+<p>He kissed her hand, bending his great form down with
+a slightly burlesque air, and strode out without another
+word. Hermione sat down to read Miss Townly's note:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Dearest, never mind. I know that I must now accustom
+myself to be nothing in your life. It is difficult at first, but
+what is existence but a struggle? I feel that I am going to
+have another of my neuralgic seizures. I wonder what it all
+means?&mdash;Your,                              <span class="smcap">Evelyn</span>."</p></div>
+
+<p>Hermione laid the note down, with a sigh and a little
+laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder what it all means? Poor, dear Evelyn!
+Thank God, it sometimes means&mdash;" She did not finish
+the sentence, but knelt down on the carpet and took
+the St. Bernard's great head in her hands.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You don't bother, do you, old boy, as long as you
+have your bone. Ah, I'm a selfish wretch. But I am
+going to have my bone, and I can't help feeling happy&mdash;gloriously,
+supremely happy!"</p>
+
+<p>And she kissed the dog's cold nose and repeated:</p>
+
+<p>"Supremely&mdash;supremely happy!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+
+<p>Miss Townly, gracefully turned away from Hermione's
+door by Selim, did, as Artois had surmised, drift
+away in the fog to the house of her friend Mrs. Creswick,
+who lived in Sloane Street. She felt she must unburden
+herself to somebody, and Mrs. Creswick's tea, a blend of
+China tea with another whose origin was a closely guarded
+secret, was the most delicious in London. There are
+merciful dispensations of Providence even for Miss
+Townlys, and Mrs. Creswick was at home with a blazing
+fire. When she saw Miss Townly coming sideways into
+the room with a slightly drooping head, she said, briskly:</p>
+
+<p>"Comfort me with crumpets, for I am sick with love!
+Cheer up, my dear Evelyn. Fogs will pass and even
+neuralgia has its limits. I don't ask you what is the
+matter, because I know perfectly well."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Townly went into a very large arm-chair and
+waveringly selected a crumpet.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it all mean?" she murmured, looking
+obliquely at her friend's parquet.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask the baker, No. 5 Allitch Street. I always get
+them from there. And he's a remarkably well-informed
+man."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I mean life with its extraordinary changes,
+things you never expected, never dreamed of&mdash;and all
+coming so abruptly. I don't think I'm a stupid person,
+but I certainly never looked for this."</p>
+
+<p>"For what?"</p>
+
+<p>"This most extraordinary engagement of Hermione's."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Creswick, who was a short woman who looked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+tall, with a briskly conceited but not unkind manner,
+and a decisive and very English nose, rejoined:</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know why we should call it extraordinary.
+Everybody gets engaged at some time or other, and
+Hermione's a woman like the rest of us and subject to
+aberration. But I confess I never thought she would
+marry Maurice Delarey. He never seemed to mean more
+to her than any one else, so far as I could see."</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody seems to mean so much to Hermione
+that it makes things difficult to outsiders," replied Miss
+Townly, plaintively. "She is so wide-minded and has
+so many interests that she dwarfs everybody else. I
+always feel quite squeezed when I compare my poor
+little life with hers. But then she has such physical
+endurance. She breaks the ice, you know, in her bath
+in the winter&mdash;of course I mean when there is ice."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't only in her bath that she breaks the ice,"
+said Mrs. Creswick.</p>
+
+<p>"I perfectly understand," Miss Townly said, vaguely.
+"You mean&mdash;yes, you're right. Well, I prefer my bath
+warmed for me, but my circulation was never of the
+best."</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione is extraordinary," said Mrs. Creswick,
+trying to look at her profile in the glass and making her
+face as Roman as she could, "I know all London, but I
+never met another Hermione. She can do things that
+other women can't dream of even, and nobody minds."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now she is going to do a thing we all dream of
+and a great many of us do. Will it answer? He's ten
+years younger than she is. Can it answer?"</p>
+
+<p>"One can never tell whether a union of two human
+mysteries will answer," said Mrs. Creswick, judicially.
+"Maurice Delarey is wonderfully good-looking."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and Hermione isn't."</p>
+
+<p>"That has never mattered in the least."</p>
+
+<p>"I know. I didn't say it had. But will it now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why should it?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Men care so much for looks. Do you think Hermione
+loves Mr. Delarey for his?"</p>
+
+<p>"She dives deep."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, as a rule."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not now? She ought to have dived deeper
+than ever this time."</p>
+
+<p>"She ought, of course. I perfectly understand that.
+But it's very odd, I think we often marry the man we
+understand less than any one else in the world. Mystery
+is so very attractive."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Townly sighed. She was emaciated, dark, and
+always dressed to look mysterious.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice Delarey is scarcely my idea of a mystery,"
+said Mrs. Creswick, taking joyously a marron glac&eacute;. "In
+my opinion he's an ordinarily intelligent but an extraordinarily
+handsome man. Hermione is exactly the reverse,
+extraordinarily intelligent and almost ugly."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, not ugly!" said Miss Townly, with unexpected
+warmth.</p>
+
+<p>Though of a tepid personality, she was a worshipper
+at Hermione's shrine.</p>
+
+<p>"Her eyes are beautiful," she added.</p>
+
+<p>"Good eyes don't make a beauty," said Mrs. Creswick
+again, looking at her three-quarters face in the
+glass. "Hermione is too large, and her face is too
+square, and&mdash;but as I said before, it doesn't matter the
+least. Hermione's got a temperament that carries all
+before it."</p>
+
+<p>"I do wish I had a temperament," said Miss Townly.
+"I try to cultivate one."</p>
+
+<p>"You might as well try to cultivate a mustache,"
+Mrs. Creswick rather brutally rejoined. "If it's there,
+it's there, but if it isn't one prays in vain."</p>
+
+<p>"I used to think Hermione would do something,"
+continued Miss Townly, finishing her second cup of tea
+with thirsty languor.</p>
+
+<p>"Do something?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Something important, great, something that would
+make her famous, but of course now"&mdash;she paused&mdash;"now
+it's too late," she concluded. "Marriage destroys,
+not creates talent. Some celebrated man&mdash;I forget
+which&mdash;has said something like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he'd destroyed his wife's. I think Hermione
+might be a great mother."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Townly blushed faintly. She did nearly everything
+faintly. That was partly why she admired Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"And a great mother is rare," continued Mrs. Creswick.
+"Good mothers are, thank God, quite common
+even in London, whatever those foolish people who
+rail at the society they can't get into may say. But
+great mothers are seldom met with. I don't know
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean by a great mother?" inquired
+Miss Townly.</p>
+
+<p>"A mother who makes seeds grow. Hermione has
+a genius for friendship and a special gift for inspiring
+others. If she ever has a child, I can imagine that she
+will make of that child something wonderful."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean an infant prodigy?" asked Miss Townly,
+innocently.</p>
+
+<p>"No, dear, I don't!" said Mrs. Creswick; "I mean
+nothing of the sort. Never mind!"</p>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Creswick said "Never mind!" Miss Townly
+usually got up to go. She got up to go now, and went
+forth into Sloane Street meditating, as she would have
+expressed it, "profoundly."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Artois went back to the Hans Crescent
+Hotel on foot. He walked slowly along the greasy
+pavement through the yellow November fog, trying to
+combat a sensation of dreariness which had floated
+round his spirit, as the fog floated round his body,
+directly he stepped into the street. He often felt depressed
+without a special cause, but this afternoon there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+was a special cause for his melancholy. Hermione was
+going to be married.</p>
+
+<p>She often came to Paris, where she had many friends,
+and some years ago they had met at a dinner given by
+a brilliant Jewess, who delighted in clever people, not
+because she was stupid, but for the opposite reason.
+Artois was already famous, though not loved, as a
+novelist. He had published two books; works of art,
+cruel, piercing, brutal, true. Hermione had read them.
+Her intellect had revelled in them, but they had set
+ice about her heart, and when Madame Enthoven told
+her who was going to take her in to dinner, she very
+nearly begged to be given another partner. She felt
+that her nature must be in opposition to this man's.</p>
+
+<p>Artois was not eager for the honor of her company.
+He was a careful dissecter of women, and, therefore,
+understood how mysterious women are; but in his intimate
+life they counted for little. He regarded them
+there rather as the European traveller regards the
+Mousm&eacute;s of Japan, as playthings, and insisted on one
+thing only&mdash;that they must be pretty. A Frenchman,
+despite his unusual intellectual power, he was not wholly
+emancipated from the la petite femme tradition, which
+will never be outmoded in Paris while Paris hums with
+life, and, therefore, when he was informed that he was
+to take in to dinner the tall, solidly built, big-waisted,
+rugged-faced woman, whom he had been observing
+from a distance ever since he came into the drawing-room,
+he felt that he was being badly treated by his
+hostess.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he had been observing this woman closely.</p>
+
+<p>Something unusual, something vital in her had
+drawn his attention, fixed it, held it. He knew that,
+but said to himself that it was the attention of the
+novelist that had been grasped by an uncommon human
+specimen, and that the man of the world, the diner-out,
+did not want to eat in company with a specimen,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+but to throw off professional cares with a gay little
+chatterbox of the Mousm&eacute; type. Therefore he came
+over to be presented to Hermione with rather a bad
+grace.</p>
+
+<p>And that introduction was the beginning of the great
+friendship which was now troubling him in the fog.</p>
+
+<p>By the end of that evening Hermione and he had
+entirely rid themselves of their preconceived notions
+of each other. She had ceased from imagining him a
+walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering
+her a possibly interesting specimen, but not
+the type of woman who could be agreeable in a man's
+life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She
+was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable
+not to speak as she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic.
+She always showed keen interest when
+she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once
+began to show to Artois how much interested she was
+in him. By doing so she captivated him at once. He
+would not, perhaps, have been captivated by the heart
+without the brains, but the two in combination took
+possession of him with an ease which, when the evening
+was over, but only then, caused him some astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had a divining-rod to discover the heart in
+another, and she found out at once that Artois had a
+big heart as well as a fine intellect. He was deceptive
+because he was always ready to show the latter, and
+almost always determined to conceal the former. Even
+to himself he was not quite frank about his heart, but
+often strove to minimize its influence upon him, if not
+to ignore totally its promptings and its utterances.
+Why this was so he could not perhaps have explained
+even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of his
+temperament. From the first moment of their intercourse
+Hermione showed to him her conviction that
+he had a warm heart, and that it could be relied upon
+without hesitation. This piqued but presently de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>lighted,
+and also soothed Artois, who was accustomed
+to be misunderstood, and had often thought he liked to
+be misunderstood, but who now found out how pleasant
+a brilliant woman's intuition may be, even at a Parisian
+dinner. Before the evening was over they knew that
+they were friends; and friends they had remained ever
+since.</p>
+
+<p>Artois was a reserved man, but, like many reserved
+people, if once he showed himself as he really was, he
+could continue to be singularly frank. He was singularly
+frank with Hermione. She became his confidante,
+often at a distance. He scarcely ever came to London,
+which he disliked exceedingly, but from Paris or
+from the many lands in which he wandered&mdash;he was
+no pavement lounger, although he loved Paris rather as
+a man may love a very chic cocotte&mdash;he wrote to Hermione
+long letters, into which he put his mind and heart,
+his aspirations, struggles, failures, triumphs. They
+were human documents, and contained much of his
+secret history.</p>
+
+<p>It was of this history that he was now thinking, and
+of Hermione's comments upon it, tied up with a ribbon
+in Paris. The news of her approaching marriage with
+a man whom he had never seen had given him a rude
+shock, had awakened in him a strange feeling of jealousy.
+He had grown accustomed to the thought that Hermione
+was in a certain sense his property. He realized
+thoroughly the egotism, the dog-in-the-manger spirit
+which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish
+it. As a friend he certainly loved Hermione. She
+knew that. But he did not love her as a man loves
+the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know
+that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her,
+and she loved but was not in love with him. Why,
+then, should this marriage make a difference in their
+friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt
+that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+mother. The latter thought made his egotism shudder.
+She would be involved in the happy turmoil of a
+family existence, while he would remain without in that
+loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom.
+Yes, his egotism shuddered, and he was angry
+at the weakness. He chastised the frailties of others,
+but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of helplessness
+came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven.
+How unworthy was his sensation of hostility against
+Delarey, his sensation that Hermione was wronging him
+by entering into this alliance, and how powerless he was
+to rid himself of either sensation! There was good
+cause for his melancholy&mdash;his own folly. He must try
+to conquer it, and, if that were impossible, to rein it in
+before the evening.</p>
+
+<p>When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room
+and worked for an hour and a half, producing a
+short paragraph, which did not please him. Then he
+took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table
+in a corner with her back to him, opposite to one of the
+handsomest men he had ever seen. As Artois came in,
+he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was
+passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he
+had any right to the success he had achieved, any fitness
+for the companionship that was to be his, companionship
+of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual
+spirit.</p>
+
+<p>He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione,
+not tall, athletic in build but also graceful, with
+the grace that is shed through a frame by perfectly
+developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately
+trained limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the
+Hercules type, with thick, low-growing black hair, vivid,
+enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide apart under
+curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small,
+straight features, which were not undecided, yet which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+suggested the features of a boy. In the complexion
+there was a tinge of brown that denoted health and an
+out-door life&mdash;an out-door life in the south, Artois
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the
+doorway of the restaurant, looked at this man, he felt
+for a moment as if he himself were a splendid specimen
+of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of a race-horse.
+The comparison he was making was only one
+of physical endowments, but it pained him. Thinking
+with an extraordinary rapidity, he asked himself why
+it was that this man struck him at once as very much
+handsomer than other men with equally good features
+and figures whom he had seen, and he found at once
+the answer to his question. It was the look of Mercury
+in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant readiness
+for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger
+poised for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished,
+the expression of an intensely vivid activity
+that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an
+extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that,
+for he was fascinated even in this bitter moment that
+he told himself ought not to be bitter. While he gazed
+at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that had sometimes
+come upon him when he had watched Sicilian
+peasant boys dancing the tarantella under the stars
+by the Ionian sea, a feeling that one thing in creation
+ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate, leaping
+flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically
+rapturous, unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey
+seemed to him like a tarantella in repose, if such
+a thing could be.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that
+he was there. When she did so he understood in the
+very depths of him why such a man as Delarey attracted,
+must attract, such a woman as Hermione.
+That which she had in the soul Delarey seemed to ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>press
+in the body&mdash;sympathy, enthusiasm, swiftness,
+courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but a
+statue endowed with life. And the fact that her
+physique was a sort of contradiction of her inner self
+must make more powerful the charm of a Delarey for
+her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her
+tall figure rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up
+his mind that she had been captured by the physique
+of this man. He could not be surprised, but he still
+felt angry.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not
+attempting to hide her anxiety for the two men to
+make friends at once. Her desire was so transparent
+and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched,
+and inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave
+no trace of it. He was also secretly too human to remain
+wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception of him.
+Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was
+a happy, but not foolishly shy, modesty, which made
+him eager to please, and convinced that in order to do
+so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in
+this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of
+a willing horse, a fine racing pace of the nature that
+woke pleasure and admiration in those who watched it.</p>
+
+<p>Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards
+him, but was ready to admire and rejoice in him
+as Hermione's greatest friend. He was met more than
+half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost
+touching him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike
+within Artois increased, and he consciously determined
+not to yield to the charm of this younger man
+who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not
+speak much English, but fortunately Delarey talked
+French fairly well, not with great fluency like Hermione,
+but enough to take a modest share in conversation,
+which was apparently all the share that he desired.
+Artois believed that he was no great talker. His eyes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+were more eager than was his tongue, and seemed to
+betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could not, perhaps,
+show forth in words. The conversation at first was
+mainly between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional
+word from Delarey&mdash;generally interrogative&mdash;and was
+confined to generalities. But this could not continue
+long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom
+discussed banalities. From every circle where she
+found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale
+topics&mdash;the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished
+by them&mdash;were whipped away to limbo, and some
+subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical
+possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By
+chance Artois happened to speak of two people in
+Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who
+had been very intimate, but who had now quarrelled,
+and every one said, irrevocably. The question arose
+whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the facts of the
+case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced,
+said it was the woman's.</p>
+
+<p>"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but
+in this instance it has failed her, it has been warped by
+jealousy; not the jealousy that often accompanies passion,
+for she and Robert Meunier were only great friends,
+linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much
+more subtle form of that mental disease. You know,
+Hermione, that both of them are brilliant critics of
+literature?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes."</p>
+
+<p>"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in
+this walk of letters, each striving to be more unerring
+than the other in dividing the sheep from the goats.
+I am the guilty person who made discord where there
+had been harmony."</p>
+
+<p>"You, Emile!    How was that?"</p>
+
+<p>"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to
+be a critic, so difficult to be a creator. You two, now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> would
+you even dare to try to create?' They were
+nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a magnificent
+subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine,
+a conte. If you like I will give it you, and leave you
+to create&mdash;separately, not together&mdash;what you have so
+often written about, the perfect conte.' They accepted
+my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month
+to work it out. At the end of that time the two contes
+were to be submitted to a jury of competent literary
+men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but
+created great interest in our circle&mdash;you know it, Hermione,
+that dines at R&eacute;neau's on Thursday nights?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Well, what happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but
+Robert Meunier astonished us all. He produced certainly
+one of the best contes that was ever written in the
+French language."</p>
+
+<p>"And Madame Lagrande?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is not too much to say that from that moment
+she has almost hated Robert."</p>
+
+<p>"And you dare to say she has a noble nature?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a noble nature from which, under some apparently
+irresistible impulse, she has lapsed."</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on
+the table and leaning forward to her fianc&eacute;, "you're not
+in literature any more than I am, you're an outsider&mdash;bless
+you! What d'you say to that?"</p>
+
+<p>Delarey hesitated and looked modestly at Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," cried Hermione, "none of that, Maurice!
+You may be a better judge in this than Emile is with
+all his knowledge of the human heart. You're the man
+in the street, and sometimes I'd give a hundred pounds
+for his opinion and not twopence for the big man's
+who's in the profession. Would&mdash;could a noble nature
+yield to such an impulse?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+possible. For a moment, yes, perhaps. But you say,
+Emile, that there's an actual breach between them."</p>
+
+<p>"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study
+of jealousy in its various forms?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't
+understand it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you must be capable of it."</p>
+
+<p>"You think every one is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not.
+And you, I am certain, are."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang
+out wholesomely in the narrow room.</p>
+
+<p>"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For
+instance, if I cared for some one and was cared for&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had
+only a certain, limited faculty of affection and transferred
+his affection elsewhere&mdash;what then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe
+my affection would die. My love subsists on
+sympathy&mdash;take that food from it and it would starve
+and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask.
+If I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And
+without the love there could be no jealousy. But that
+isn't the point, Emile."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"What is?"</p>
+
+<p>"The point is&mdash;can a noble nature lapse like that
+from its nobility?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it can."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it changes, it ceases to  be noble. You would
+not say that a brave man can show cowardice and remain
+a brave man."</p>
+
+<p>"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave,
+might, under certain circumstances, show fear, without
+being what is called a coward. Human nature is full
+of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of extraordinary
+contradictions.  But this point I will concede<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+you, that it is like the boomerang, which flies forward,
+circles, and returns to the point from which it started.
+The inherently noble nature will, because it must, return
+eventually to its nobility. Then comes the really
+tragic moment with the passion of remorse."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke quietly, almost coldly. Hermione looked
+at him with shining eyes. She had quite forgotten
+Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier, had lost the
+sense of the special in her love of the general.</p>
+
+<p>"That's a grand theory," she said. "That we must
+come back to the good that is in us in the end, that
+we must be true to that somehow, almost whether we
+will or no. I shall try to think of that when I am sinning."</p>
+
+<p>"You&mdash;sinning!" exclaimed Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice, dear, you think too well of me."</p>
+
+<p>Delarey flushed like a boy, and glanced quickly at
+Artois, who did not return his gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"But if that's true, Emile," Hermione continued,
+"Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier will be friends
+again."</p>
+
+<p>"Some day I know she will hold out the olive-branch,
+but what if he refuses it?"</p>
+
+<p>"You literary people are dreadfully difficile."</p>
+
+<p>"True. Our jealousies are ferocious, but so are the
+jealousies of thousands who can neither read nor write."</p>
+
+<p>"Jealousy," she said, forgetting to eat in her keen
+interest in the subject. "I told you I didn't believe
+myself capable of it, but I don't know. The jealousy
+that is born of passion I might understand and suffer,
+perhaps, but jealousy of a talent greater than my own,
+or of one that I didn't possess&mdash;that seems to me inexplicable.
+I could never be jealous of a talent."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that you could never hate a person for a
+talent in them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose that some one, by means of a talent which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+you had not, won from you a love which you had?
+Talent is a weapon, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"You think it is a weapon to conquer the affections!
+Ah, Emile, after all you don't know us!"</p>
+
+<p>"You go too fast. I did not say a weapon to conquer
+the affection of a woman."</p>
+
+<p>"You're speaking of men?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," Delarey said, suddenly, forgetting to be
+modest for once, "you mean that a man might be won
+away from one woman by a talent in another. Isn't
+that it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said Hermione, "a man&mdash;I see."</p>
+
+<p>She sat for a moment considering deeply, with her
+luminous eyes fixed on the food in her plate, food which
+she did not see.</p>
+
+<p>"What horrible ideas you sometimes have, Emile,"
+she said, at last.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean what horrible truths exist," he answered,
+quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"Could a man be won so? Yes, I suppose he might
+be if there were a combination."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly," said Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"I see now. Suppose a man had two strains in him,
+say: the adoration of beauty, of the physical; and the
+adoration of talent, of the mental. He might fall in
+love with a merely beautiful woman and transfer his
+affections if he came across an equally beautiful woman
+who had some great talent."</p>
+
+<p>"Or he might fall in love with a plain, talented woman,
+and be taken from her by one in whom talent was
+allied with beauty. But in either case are you sure
+that the woman deserted could never be jealous, bitterly
+jealous, of the talent possessed by the other
+woman? I think talent often creates jealousy in your
+sex."</p>
+
+<p>"But beauty much oftener, oh, much! Every woman,
+I feel sure, could more easily be jealous of physical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+beauty in another woman than of mental gifts. There's
+something so personal in beauty."</p>
+
+<p>"And is genius not equally personal?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it is, but I doubt if it seems so."</p>
+
+<p>"I think you leave out of account the advance of
+civilization, which is greatly changing men and women
+in our day. The tragedies of the mind are increasing."</p>
+
+<p>"And the tragedies of the heart&mdash;are they diminishing
+in consequence? Oh, Emile!" And she laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione&mdash;your food! You are not eating anything!"
+said Delarey, gently, pointing to her plate.
+"And it's all getting cold."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Maurice."</p>
+
+<p>She began to eat at once with an air of happy submission,
+which made Artois understand a good deal
+about her feeling for Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>"The heart will always rule the head, I dare say, in
+this world where the majority will always be thoughtless,"
+said Artois. "But the greatest jealousy, the
+jealousy which is most difficult to resist and to govern,
+is that in which both heart and brain are concerned.
+That is, indeed, a full-fledged monster."</p>
+
+<p>Artois generally spoke with a good deal of authority,
+often without meaning to do so. He thought so clearly,
+knew so exactly what he was thinking and what he
+meant, that he felt very safe in conversation, and from
+this sense of safety sprang his air of masterfulness. It
+was an air that was always impressive, but to-night it
+specially struck Hermione. Now she laid down her
+knife and fork once more, to Delarey's half-amused despair,
+and exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never forget the way you said that. Even
+if it were nonsense one would have to believe it for the
+moment, and of course it's dreadfully true. Intellect
+and heart suffering in combination must be far more
+terrible than the one suffering without the other. No,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+Maurice, I've really finished. I don't want any more.
+Let's have our coffee."</p>
+
+<p>"The  Turkish   coffee," said  Artois, with a smile.
+"Do you like Turkish coffee, Monsieur Delarey?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, monsieur. Hermione has taught me to."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"</p>
+
+<p>"At first it seemed to me too full of grounds," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps a taste for it must be an acquired one
+among Europeans. Do we have it here?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said Hermione, "Caminiti has taken my
+advice, and now there's a charming smoke-room behind
+this. Come along."</p>
+
+<p>She got up and led the way out. The two men followed
+her, Artois coming last. He noticed now more
+definitely the very great contrast between Hermione
+and her future husband. Delarey, when in movement,
+looked more than ever like a Mercury. His footstep
+was light and elastic, and his whole body seemed to
+breathe out a gay activity, a fulness of the joy of life.
+Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the
+tarantella, and when they were in the small smoke-room,
+which Caminiti had fitted up in what he believed
+to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely accurate,
+was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire:</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her
+veins. But I have never been in Sicily or Italy."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Emile," said Hermione, "how clever of you to
+find that out. I notice it, too, sometimes, that touch
+of the blessed South. I shall take him there some day,
+and see if the Southern blood doesn't wake up in his
+veins when he's in the rays of the real sun we never see
+in England."</p>
+
+<p>"She'll take you to Italy, you fortunate, damned dog!"
+thought Artois. "What luck for you to go there with
+such a companion!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They sat down and the two men began to smoke.
+Hermione never smoked because she had tried smoking
+and knew she hated it. They were alone in the room,
+which was warm, but not too warm, and faintly lit by
+shaded lamps. Artois began to feel more genial, he
+scarcely knew why. Perhaps the good dinner had comforted
+him, or perhaps he was beginning to yield to the
+charm of Delarey's gay and boyish modesty, which was
+untainted and unspoiled by any awkward shyness.</p>
+
+<p>Artois did not know or seek to know, but he was
+aware that he was more ready to be happy with the
+flying moment than he had been, or had expected to be
+that evening. Something almost paternal shone in his
+gray eyes as he stretched his large limbs on Caminiti's
+notion of a Turkish divan, and watched the first smoke-wreaths
+rise from his cigar, a light which made his face
+most pleasantly expressive to Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"He likes Maurice," she thought, with a glow of pleasure,
+and with the thought came into her heart an even
+deeper love for Maurice. For it was a triumph, indeed, if
+Artois were captured speedily by any one. It seemed
+to her just then as if she had never known what perfect
+happiness was till now, when she sat between her
+best friend and her lover, and sensitively felt that in
+the room there were not three separate persons but
+a Trinity. For a moment there was a comfortable
+silence. Then an Italian boy brought in the coffee.
+Artois spoke to him in Italian. His eyes lit up as he
+answered with the accent of Naples, lit up still more
+when Artois spoke to him again in his own dialect.
+When he had served the coffee he went out, glowing.</p>
+
+<p>"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I&mdash;it
+doesn't matter to me. Wherever it is will be the
+same to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said
+Artois. "I expect that's profoundly true."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't you&mdash;don't you know?" ventured Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every
+branch of knowledge."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm
+that had in it something more sad than bitterness.
+It struck both Hermione and Delarey as almost monstrous
+that anybody with whom they were connected
+should be feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life
+presented itself to them in a glorious radiance of sunshine,
+in a passionate light, in a torrent of color. Their
+knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by
+their dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as
+if every one ought to be as happy as they were, almost
+as if every one could be as happy as they were.</p>
+
+<p>"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you
+can't mean to say that you have never known the happiness
+that makes of every place&mdash;Clapham, Lippe-Detmold,
+a West African swamp, a Siberian convict
+settlement&mdash;an Italy? You have had a wonderful life.
+You have worked, you have wandered, had your ambition
+and your freedom&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted,
+"wide open on life watching the manifestations of life."</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a
+minute to everything but your own happiness? Oh,
+it's selfish, I know, but it does one good, Emile, any
+amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then.
+It reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a
+spring cleaning of the soul. And then, I think, when one
+opens one's eyes again one sees&mdash;one must see&mdash;everything
+more rightly, not dressed up in frippery, not horribly
+naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking
+graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand
+what I mean? Perhaps I don't put it well, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what
+you say."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense
+eagerness of admiration and love.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes
+felt when he saw children playing with frantic happiness
+at mud-pies or snowballing. A desire, which his
+true self condemned, came to him to use his intellectual
+powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign
+spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and
+vanished almost ere it had arrived.</p>
+
+<p>"There's truth in what you say. But there's another
+truth, too, which you bring to my mind at this
+moment."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that, Emile?"</p>
+
+<p>"The payment that is exacted from great happiness.
+These intense joys of which you speak&mdash;what are they
+followed by? Haven't you observed that any violence
+in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably,
+followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity
+is treading a beaten track, the crowd of humanity,
+and keeps, as a crowd, to this highway. But
+individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need
+the great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous.
+On one side of the track is a garden of paradise;
+on the other a deadly swamp. The man or woman
+who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise
+is almost certain in the fulness of time to be struggling
+in the deadly swamp."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly
+burst in with the vehement exclamation:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track?
+Where's the courage in avoiding the garden for fear of
+the swamp?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent
+to avoid the joy life throws at your feet?"</p>
+
+<p>Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry,
+too, with his erratic mental departure from the realm
+of reason into the realm of fantasy&mdash;for so he called the
+debatable land over which intuition held sway&mdash;Artois
+hounded out his mood and turned upon himself.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;enter into the
+garden of paradise and never mind what comes after."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"And I," said Artois, lightly, "am always trying to
+peer round the corner to see what is coming. And you,
+Monsieur Delarey?"</p>
+
+<p>"I!" said Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>He had not expected to be addressed just then, and
+for a moment looked confused.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"That's one of the best philosophies I ever heard,"
+said Hermione, "and after my own heart. Long live
+the philosophy of Maurice Delarey!"</p>
+
+<p>Delarey blushed with pleasure like a boy. Just then
+three men came in smoking cigars. Hermione looked
+at her watch.</p>
+
+<p>"Past eleven," she said. "I think I'd better go.
+Emile, will you drive with me home?"</p>
+
+<p>"I!" he said, with an unusual diffidence. "May I?"</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to have a talk with you. Maurice quite
+understands. He knows you go back to Paris to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>They all got up, and Delarey at once held out his
+hand to Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>He wrung Artois's hand warmly.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, monsieur," replied Artois.</p>
+
+<p>He strove hard to speak as cordially as Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three minutes later Hermione and he were in
+a hansom driving down Regent Street. The fog had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+lifted, and it was possible to see to right and left of the
+greasy thoroughfare.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;one of the few
+fine things in dreary old London. And I want to have
+a last talk with you, Emile."</p>
+
+<p>Artois pushed up the little door in the roof with his
+stick.</p>
+
+<p>"The Embankment&mdash;Thames," he said to the cabman,
+with a strong foreign accent.</p>
+
+<p>"Right, sir," replied the man, in the purest cockney.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the trap was shut down above her head
+Hermione exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Emile, I'm so happy, so&mdash;so happy! I think you
+must understand why now. You don't wonder any
+more, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't wonder. But did I ever express any
+wonder?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"If that is the case he shows very little insight."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't abuse yourself to me to-night. There's nothing
+the matter now, is there?"</p>
+
+<p>Her intonation demanded a negative, but Artois did
+not hasten to give it. Instead he turned the conversation
+once more to Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me something more about him," he said.
+"What sort of family does he come from?"</p>
+
+<p>"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 very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+handsome, not at all intellectual, but fascinating. The
+Southern blood comes from her side."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;how?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her mother was a Sicilian."</p>
+
+<p>"Of the aristocracy, or of the people?"</p>
+
+<p>"She was a lovely contadina. But what does it matter?
+I am not marrying Maurice's grandmother."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm quite sure you would."</p>
+
+<p>"Besides, probably the grandmother was a delicious
+old dear. But didn't you like Maurice, Emile? I felt
+so sure you did."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"And he's good, too."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? He does not look evil. I thought of
+him as a Mercury."</p>
+
+<p>"The messenger of the gods&mdash;yes, he is like that."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"A bearer of good tidings&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading
+down from the Strand to the Thames Embankment&mdash;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 hand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+and 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."</p>
+
+<p>"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have
+been good to me&mdash;you for one, you most of all my friends.
+Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"What does he do?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 230px;">
+<a href="images/gs02.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs02_th.jpg" width="230" height="400"
+alt="&quot;&#39;SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,&#39; SHE SAID&quot;"
+title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,&#39; SHE SAID&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>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 accus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>tomed
+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?</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my
+brain. That happens in many."</p>
+
+<p>"You trust too much to your brain and too little to
+your heart."</p>
+
+<p>"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too
+easily carried away by your impulses."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly&mdash;don't
+be afraid now. What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to
+me in your little red-and-yellow room, the morocco
+slipper of a room."</p>
+
+<p>"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"</p>
+
+<p>He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh
+with her at himself if she began to laugh.</p>
+
+<p>But she said, gravely:</p>
+
+<p>"Go on."</p>
+
+<p>"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness
+of yours misery will be born."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?    What sort of misery?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"</p>
+
+<p>"To you."</p>
+
+<p>"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise
+and the deadly swamp?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it must have been."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust
+what I love, and I see the South in him."</p>
+
+<p>"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."</p>
+
+<p>"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence.
+Probably he has, but has he faithfulness?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Emile!"</p>
+
+<p>"You told me to be frank."</p>
+
+<p>"And I wish you to be.    Go on, say everything."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"He is, through and through."</p>
+
+<p>"I think so&mdash;now. But does he know his own blood?
+Our blood governs us when the time comes.    He is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+modest about his intellect. I think it quick, but I
+doubt its being strong enough to prove a good restraining
+influence."</p>
+
+<p>"Against what?"</p>
+
+<p>"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"You speak almost as if he were a child," Hermione
+said. "He's much younger than I am, but he's twenty-four."</p>
+
+<p>"He is very young looking, and you are at least twenty
+years ahead of him in all essentials.    Don't you feel it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose&mdash;yes, I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercury&mdash;he should be mercurial."</p>
+
+<p>"He is. That's partly why I love him, perhaps. He
+is full of swiftness."</p>
+
+<p>"So is the butterfly when it comes out into the sun."</p>
+
+<p>"Emile, forgive me, but sometimes you seem to me
+deliberately to lie down and roll in pessimism rather
+as a horse&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not say an ass?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"London&mdash;by-the-way, where are you going for your
+honeymoon? I am sure you know, though Monsieur
+Delarey may not."</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your face to-night when I asked if it was to be
+Italian."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You're right; I've decided."</p>
+
+<p>"Italy&mdash;and hotels?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, a thousand times no!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Where then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sicily, and my peasant's cottage."</p>
+
+<p>"The cottage on Monte Amato where you spent a
+summer four or five years ago contemplating Etna?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I've not said a word to Maurice, but I've taken
+it again. All the little furniture I had&mdash;beds, straw
+chairs, folding-tables&mdash;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&mdash;his dear old grandmother
+takes the heaviest things, arm-chairs and so on&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped with a break in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Put away your pessimism, dear Emile," she continued,
+after a moment. "Tell me you think we shall
+be happy in our garden of paradise&mdash;tell me that!"</p>
+
+<p>But he only said, even more gravely:</p>
+
+<p>"So you're taking him to the real South?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing. No spark of her enthusiasm called
+forth a spark from him. And now she saw that, and
+said again:</p>
+
+<p>"London is making you horrible to-night. You are
+doing London and yourself an injustice, and Maurice,
+too."</p>
+
+<p>"It's very possible," he replied. "But&mdash;I can say
+it to you&mdash;I have a certain gift of&mdash;shall I call it divina<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>tion?&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I see nothing," he said, abruptly. "I know nothing.
+It may be London. It may be my own egoism."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I am the dog in the manger," he concluded. "Don't
+let my growling distress you. Your happiness has
+made me envious."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes I think it must be a curse to be an artist,
+and yet I have often longed to be one."</p>
+
+<p>"Why have you never tried to be one?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;how
+it would shock your critical mind! I could never select<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+and prune and blend and graft. I should have to
+throw my mind and heart down on the paper and just
+leave them there."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never write that book, but I dare say I shall
+live it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said. "You will live it, perhaps with
+Monsieur Delarey."</p>
+
+<p>And he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"When is the wedding to be?"</p>
+
+<p>"In January, I think."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! When you are in your garden of paradise I
+shall not be very far off&mdash;just across your blue sea on
+the African shore."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, where are you going, Emile?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall spend the spring at the sacred city of Kairouan,
+among the pilgrims and the mosques, making
+some studies, taking some notes."</p>
+
+<p>"For a book? Come over to Sicily and see us."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you will want me there."</p>
+
+<p>The trap in the roof was opened, and a beery eye,
+with a luscious smile in it, peered down upon them.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ad enough of the river, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"Comment?" said Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"We'd better go home, I suppose," Hermione said.</p>
+
+<p>She gave her address to the cabman, and they drove
+in silence to Eaton Place.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lucrezia Gabbi</span> came 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>"Che tempo fa oggi! Santa Madonna, che bel tempo!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+slight 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>amined
+her new home once more. Already she knew it
+by heart, yet the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+That was why Hermione loved it, because it was near
+the sky and very far away.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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
+porti&egrave;re. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 opened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+wider, 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&mdash;it was marvellous,
+it was&mdash;she sighed again. What must it be like to be
+gentlefolk, to have the money to buy calm and cleanliness?</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+man'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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the
+window under the awning&mdash;"Sebastiano!"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Sebastiano!"</p>
+
+<p>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 manly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+chin. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio!" he ejaculated.    "Per Dio!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Lucrezia, folded his brawny arms on the
+window-sill, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"They've got plenty of soldi."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia nodded, not without personal pride.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare says&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Why was that?" asked Lucrezia, with reverence.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Gaspare&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Does Gaspare know every grotto on Etna? Has
+Gaspare lived eight years with the briganti? And the
+Mafia&mdash;has Gaspare&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He paused, laughed, pulled his mustache, and added:</p>
+
+<p>"If the signora had not been assured of my protection
+she would never have come up here."</p>
+
+<p>"But now she has a husband."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>He glanced again round the room.</p>
+
+<p>"One can see that. Per Dio, it is like the snow on
+the top of Etna."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia got up actively from the floor and came
+close to Sebastiano.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the padrona like, Sebastiano?" she asked.
+"I have seen her, but I have never spoken to her."</p>
+
+<p>"She is simpatica&mdash;she will do you no harm."</p>
+
+<p>"And is she generous?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ready to give soldi to every one who is in trouble.
+But if you once deceive her she will never look at you
+again."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I will not deceive her," said Lucrezia, knitting
+her brows.</p>
+
+<p>"Better not. She is not like us. She thinks to tell
+a lie is a sin against the Madonna, I believe."</p>
+
+<p>"But then what will the padrone do?" asked Lucrezia,
+innocently.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Macch&egrave;!"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed loudly, with an incredulity quite free
+from bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What, Lucrezia?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked into his twinkling eyes and reddened
+slightly, sticking out her under lip.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not going to tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"You have no business to know."</p>
+
+<p>"And how can I help&mdash;they're coming!"</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano's dog had barked again on the terrace.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>"Are they there, Sebastiano? Are they there?"</p>
+
+<p>He stood by the terrace wall, shading his eyes with
+his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!" he said, pointing across the ravine.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"One," counted Sebastiano, "two, three, four&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;don't forget that&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a><b>IV</b></h2>
+
+
+<p>"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona
+loves Zampaglione, and you must be sure to&mdash;'"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard&mdash;Yes, it is, it
+is! Hush! Maurice&mdash;listen!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The
+'Pastorale'!"</p>
+
+<p>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 passionately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+tender 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.</p>
+
+<p>And Maurice was in it, too, and Hermione and her love
+for him and his for her.</p>
+
+<p>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 was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+a 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.</p>
+
+<p>And Hermione for a moment gave herself entirely to
+her dream.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"I feel&mdash;I feel almost as if I belonged here," he whispered
+to Hermione, at last.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She turned her head and looked down on him from
+her donkey. The tears were still in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I always knew you belonged to the blessed, blessed
+south," she said, in a low voice. "Do you care for
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>She pointed towards the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>"That music?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Tremendously, but I don't know why. Is it very
+beautiful?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;well, you can guess
+if I love it now."</p>
+
+<p>She dropped one hand against the donkey's warm
+shoulder. Maurice took it in his warm hand.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>She broke off. A tear had fallen down upon her
+cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"Avanti Gaspare!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Everything seems very strange to me to-day. Can
+you guess why?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Tell me," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"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 per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>son
+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&mdash;isn't that rare? Long ago, when I was
+a girl, I always used to think&mdash;'If I could ever be with
+the one I loved in the south&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You've been yourself," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"A letter already!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Who can have written?"</p>
+
+<p>She took it up and felt contrition.</p>
+
+<p>"It's from Emile!" she exclaimed. "How good of
+him to remember!   This must be his welcome."</p>
+
+<p>"Read it, Hermione," said Maurice. "I'll look after
+Gaspare."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"This is a word&mdash;perhaps unwelcome, for I think I understand,
+dear friend, something of what you are feeling and of
+what you desire just now&mdash;a word of welcome to your garden
+of paradise. May there never be an angel with a flaming sword
+to keep the gate against you. Listen to the shepherds fluting,
+dream, or, better, live, as you are grandly capable of living,
+under the old olives of Sicily. Take your golden time boldly
+with both hands. Life may seem to most of us who think in
+the main a melancholy, even a tortured thing, but when it is
+not so for a while to one who can think as you can think, the
+power of thought, of deep thought, intensifies its glory. You
+will never enjoy as might a pagan, perhaps never as might a
+saint. But you will enjoy as a generous-blooded woman with
+a heart that only your friends&mdash;I should like to dare to say
+only one friend&mdash;know in its rare entirety. There is an egoist
+here, in the shadow of the mosques, who turns his face towards
+Mecca, and prays that you may never leave your garden.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;E. A."</p>
+
+<p>"Does the Sicilian grandmother respond to the magic of the
+south?"</p></div>
+
+<p>When she drew near to the end of this letter Hermione
+hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"He&mdash;there's something," she said, "that is too
+kind to me. I don't think I'll read it."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't," said Delarey. "But it can't be too kind."</p>
+
+<p>She saw the postscript and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"And quite at the end there's an allusion to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Is there?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I must read that."</p>
+
+<p>And she read it.</p>
+
+<p>"He needn't be afraid of the grandmother's not responding,
+need he, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, smiling too. "But is that it, do you
+think? Why should it be? Who wouldn't love this
+place?"</p>
+
+<p>And he went to the open door and looked out towards
+the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Who wouldn't?" he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I have met an Englishman who was angry with
+Etna for being the shape it is."</p>
+
+<p>"What an ass!"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so, too. But, seriously, I expect the
+grandmother has something to say in that matter of
+your feeling already, as if you belonged here."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps."</p>
+
+<p>He was still looking towards the distant sea far down
+below them.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that an island?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Where?" said Hermione, getting up and coming
+towards him. "Oh, that&mdash;no, it is a promontory, but
+it's almost surrounded by the sea. There is only a
+narrow ledge of rock, like a wall, connecting it with the
+main-land, and in the rock there's a sort of natural
+tunnel through which the sea flows. I've sometimes
+been to picnic there. On the plateau hidden among
+the trees there's a ruined house. I have spent many
+hours reading and writing in it. They call it, in Marechiaro,
+Casa delle Sirene&mdash;the house of the sirens."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Questo vino &egrave; bello e fino,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>cried Gaspare's voice outside.</p>
+
+<p>"A Brindisi!" said Hermione. "Gaspare's treating
+the boys. Questo vino&mdash;oh, how glorious to be here
+in Sicily!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She put her arm through Delarey's, and drew him
+out onto the terrace. Gaspare, Lucrezia, Sebastiano,
+and the three boys stood there with glasses of red wine
+in their hands raised high above their heads.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Questo vino &egrave; bello e fino,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&Egrave; portato da Castel Perini,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Faccio brindisi alla Signora Ermini,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>continued Gaspare, joyously, and with an obvious pride
+in his poetical powers.</p>
+
+<p>They all drank simultaneously, Lucrezia spluttering
+a little out of shyness.</p>
+
+<p>"Monte Amato, Gaspare, not Castel Perini. But that
+doesn't rhyme, eh? Bravo! But we must drink, too."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare hastened to fill two more glasses.</p>
+
+<p>"Now it's our turn," cried Hermione.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Questo vino &egrave; bello e fino,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&Egrave; portato da Castello a mare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Faccio brindisi al Signor Gaspare."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The boys burst into a hearty laugh, and Gaspare's
+eyes gleamed with pleasure while Hermione and Maurice
+drank. Then Sebastiano drew from the inner pocket
+of his old jacket a little flute, smiling with an air of intense
+and comic slyness which contorted his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said Hermione, "I know&mdash;it's the tarantella!"</p>
+
+<p>She clapped her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"It only wanted that," she said to Maurice. "Only
+that&mdash;the tarantella!"</p>
+
+<p>"Guai Lucrezia!" cried Gaspare, tyrannically.</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia bounded to one side, bent her body inward,
+and giggled with all her heart. Sebastiano leaned his
+back against a column and put the flute to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, Maurice, here!" said Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>She made him sit down on one of the seats under the
+parlor window, facing the view, while the four boys took
+their places, one couple opposite to the other. Then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+Sebastiano began to twitter the tune familiar to the
+Sicilians of Marechiaro, in which all the careless pagan
+joy of life in the sun seems caught and flung out upon
+a laughing, dancing world. Delarey laid his hands on
+the warm tiles of the seat, leaned forward, and watched
+with eager eyes. He had never seen the tarantella,
+yet now with his sensation of expectation there was
+blended another feeling. It seemed to him as if he
+were going to see something he had known once, perhaps
+very long ago, something that he had forgotten
+and that was now going to be recalled to his memory.
+Some nerve in his body responded to Sebastiano's lively
+tune. A desire of movement came to him as he
+saw the gay boys waiting on the terrace, their eyes
+already dancing, although their bodies were still.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare bent forward, lifted his hands above his
+head, and began to snap his fingers in time to the music.
+A look of joyous invitation had come into his eyes&mdash;an
+expression that was almost coquettish, like the expression
+of a child who has conceived some lively, innocent
+design of which he thinks that no one knows
+except himself. His young figure surely quivered with
+a passion of merry mischief which was communicated
+to his companions. In it there began to flame a spirit
+that suggested undying youth. Even before they began
+to dance the boys were transformed. If they had
+ever known cares those cares had fled, for in the breasts
+of those who can really dance the tarantella there is
+no room for the smallest sorrow, in their hearts no
+place for the most minute regret, anxiety, or wonder,
+when the rapture of the measure is upon them. Away
+goes everything but the pagan joy of life, the pagan
+ecstasy of swift movement, and the leaping blood that
+is quick as the motes in a sunray falling from a southern
+sky. Delarey began to smile as he watched them,
+and their expression was reflected in his eyes. Hermione
+glanced at him and thought what a boy he looked.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+His eyes made her feel almost as if she were sitting with
+a child.</p>
+
+<p>The mischief, the coquettish joy of the boys increased.
+They snapped their fingers more loudly,
+swayed their bodies, poised themselves first on one
+foot, then on the other, then abruptly, and with a wildness
+that was like the sudden crash of all the instruments
+in an orchestra breaking in upon the melody of
+a solitary flute, burst into the full frenzy of the dance.
+And in the dance each seemed to be sportively creative,
+ruled by his own sweet will.</p>
+
+<p>"That's why I love the tarantella more than any
+other dance," Hermione murmured to her husband,
+"because it seems to be the invention of the moment,
+as if they were wild with joy and had to show it somehow,
+and showed it beautifully by dancing. Look at
+Gaspare now."</p>
+
+<p>With his hands held high above his head, and linked
+together, Gaspare was springing into the air, as if propelled
+by one of those boards which are used by acrobats
+in circuses for leaping over horses. He had thrown
+off his hat, and his low-growing hair, which was rather
+long on the forehead, moved as he sprang upward, as
+if his excitement, penetrating through every nerve in
+his body, had filled it with electricity. While Hermione
+watched him she almost expected to see its
+golden tufts give off sparks in response to the sparkling
+radiance that flashed from his laughing eyes. For in
+all the wild activity of his changing movements Gaspare
+never lost his coquettish expression, the look of
+seductive mischief that seemed to invite the whole
+world to be merry and mad as he was. His ever-smiling
+lips and ever-smiling eyes defied fatigue, and his
+young body&mdash;grace made a living, pulsing, aspiring
+reality&mdash;suggested the tireless intensity of a flame. The
+other boys danced well, but Gaspare outdid them all,
+for they only looked gay while he looked mad with joy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+And to-day, at this moment, he felt exultant. He
+had a padrona to whom he was devoted with that peculiar
+sensitive devotion of the Sicilian which, once
+it is fully aroused, is tremendous in its strength and
+jealous in its doggedness. He was in command of
+Lucrezia, and was respectfully looked up to by all his
+boy friends of Marechiaro as one who could dispense
+patronage, being a sort of purse-bearer and conductor
+of rich forestieri in a strange land. Even Sebastiano,
+a personage rather apt to be a little haughty in his
+physical strength, and, though no longer a brigand,
+no great respecter of others, showed him to-day a certain
+deference which elated his boyish spirit. And all
+his elation, all his joy in the present and hopes for the
+future, he let out in the dance. To dance the tarantella
+almost intoxicated him, even when he only danced
+it in the village among the contadini, but to-day the
+admiring eyes of his padrona were upon him. He knew
+how she loved the tarantella. He knew, too, that she
+wanted the padrone, her husband, to love it as she did.
+Gaspare was very shrewd to read a woman's thoughts
+so long as her love ran in them. Though but eighteen,
+he was a man in certain knowledge. He understood,
+almost unconsciously, a good deal of what Hermione
+was feeling as she watched, and he put his whole soul
+into the effort to shine, to dazzle, to rouse gayety and
+wonder in the padrone, who saw him dance for the first
+time. He was untiring in his variety and his invention.
+Sometimes, light-footed in his mountain boots, with an
+almost incredible swiftness and vim, he rushed from end
+to end of the terrace. His feet twinkled in steps so
+complicated and various that he made the eyes that
+watched him wink as at a play of sparks in a furnace,
+and his arms and hands were never still, yet never, even
+for a second, fell into a curve that was ungraceful.
+Sometimes his head was bent whimsically forward as if
+in invitation. Sometimes he threw his whole body<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+backward, exposing his brown throat, and staring up at
+the sun like a sun worshipper dancing to his divinity.
+Sometimes he crouched on his haunches, clapping his
+hands together rhythmically, and, with bent knees,
+shooting out his legs like some jovially grotesque dwarf
+promenading among a crowd of Follies. And always the
+spirit of the dance seemed to increase within him, and
+the intoxication of it to take more hold upon him, and
+his eyes grew brighter and his face more radiant, and
+his body more active, more utterly untiring, till he was
+the living embodiment surely of all the youth and all
+the gladness of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had kept Artois's letter in her hand, and
+now, as she danced in spirit with Gaspare, and rejoiced
+not only in her own joy, but in his, she thought suddenly
+of that sentence in it&mdash;"Life may seem to most
+of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured,
+thing." Life a tortured thing! She was thinking
+now, exultantly thinking. Her thoughts were leaping,
+spinning, crouching, whirling, rushing with Gaspare
+in the sunshine. But life was a happy, a radiant
+reality. No dream, it was more beautiful than any
+dream, as the clear, when lovely, is more lovely than
+even that which is exquisite and vague. She had, of
+course, always known that in the world there is much
+joy. Now she felt it, she felt all the joy of the world.
+She felt the joy of sunshine and of blue, the joy of love
+and of sympathy, the joy of health and of activity, the
+joy of sane passion that fights not against any law of
+God or man, the joy of liberty in a joyous land where
+the climate is kindly, and, despite poverty and toil,
+there are songs upon the lips of men, there are tarantellas
+in their sun-browned bodies, there are the fires of
+gayety in their bold, dark eyes. Joy, joy twittered in the
+reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the boys were joys made
+manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of
+joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+drone of the "Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy
+that was different, less subtly sweet, perhaps, but more
+buoyant, more fearless, more careless. The glory of
+the pagan world was round about her, and for a moment
+her heart was like the heart of a nymph scattering
+roses in a Bacchic triumph.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice moved beside her, and she heard him breathing
+quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Maurice?" she asked.   "You&mdash;do you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he answered, understanding the question she
+had not fully asked. "It drives me almost mad to sit
+still and see those boys. Gaspare's like a merry devil
+tempting one."</p>
+
+<p>As if Gaspare had understood what Maurice said, he
+suddenly spun round from his companions, and began to
+dance in front of Maurice and Hermione, provocatively,
+invitingly, bending his head towards them, and laughing
+almost in their faces, but without a trace of impertinence.
+He did not speak, though his lips were
+parted, showing two rows of even, tiny teeth, but his
+radiant eyes called to them, scolded them for their inactivity,
+chaffed them for it, wondered how long it
+would last, and seemed to deny that it could last forever.</p>
+
+<p>"What eyes!" said Hermione. "Did you ever see
+anything so expressive?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice did not answer. He was watching Gaspare,
+fascinated, completely under the spell of the dance.
+The blood was beginning to boil in his veins, warm
+blood of the south that he had never before felt in his
+body. Artois had spoken to Hermione of "the call of
+the blood." Maurice began to hear it now, to long to
+obey it.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare clapped his hands alternately in front of
+him and behind him, leaping from side to side, with a
+step in which one foot crossed over the other, and holding
+his body slightly curved inward. And all the time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+he kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation
+grew stronger in them.</p>
+
+<p>"Venga!" he whispered, always dancing. "Venga,
+signorino, venga&mdash;venga!"</p>
+
+<p>He spun round, clapped his hands furiously, snapped
+his fingers, and jumped back. Then he held out his
+hands to Delarey, with a gay authority that was irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>"Venga, venga, signorino! Venga, venga!"</p>
+
+<p>All the blood in Delarey responded, chasing away
+something&mdash;was it a shyness, a self-consciousness of
+love&mdash;that till now had held him back from the gratification
+of his desire? He sprang up and he danced the
+tarantella, danced it almost as if he had danced it all
+his life, with a natural grace, a frolicsome abandon that
+no pure-blooded Englishman could ever achieve, danced
+it as perhaps once the Sicilian grandmother had danced
+it under the shadow of Etna. Whatever Gaspare did
+he imitated, with a swiftness and a certainty that were
+amazing, and Gaspare, intoxicated by having such a
+pupil, outdid himself in countless changing activities.
+It was like a game and like a duel, for Gaspare presently
+began almost to fight for supremacy as he watched
+Delarey's startling aptitude in the tarantella, which, till
+this moment, he had considered the possession of those
+born in Sicily and of Sicilian blood. He seemed to feel
+that this pupil might in time become the master, and
+to be put upon his mettle, and he put forth all his cunning
+to be too much for Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>And Hermione was left alone, watching, for Lucrezia
+had disappeared, suddenly mindful of some household
+duty.</p>
+
+<p>When Delarey sprang up she felt a thrill of responsive
+excitement, and when she watched his first steps,
+and noted the look of youth in him, the supple southern
+grace that rivalled the boyish grace of Gaspare, she was
+filled with that warm, that almost yearning admiration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+which is the child of love. But another feeling followed&mdash;a
+feeling of melancholy. As she watched him
+dancing with the four boys, a gulf seemed to yawn between
+her and them. She was alone on her side of this
+gulf, quite alone. They were remote from her. She
+suddenly realized that Delarey belonged to the south,
+and that she did not. Despite all her understanding of
+the beauty of the south, all her sympathy for the spirit
+of the south, all her passionate love of the south, she
+was not of it. She came to it as a guest. But Delarey
+was of it. She had never realized that absolutely till
+this moment. Despite his English parentage and upbringing,
+the southern strain in his ancestry had been
+revived in him. The drop of southern blood in his
+veins was his master. She had not married an Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>Once again, and in all the glowing sunshine, with
+Etna and the sea before her, and the sound of Sebastiano's
+flute in her ears, she was on the Thames Embankment
+in the night with Artois, and heard his deep
+voice speaking to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Does he know his own blood?" said the voice. "Our
+blood governs us when the time comes."</p>
+
+<p>And again the voice said:</p>
+
+<p>"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"The call of the blood." There was now something
+almost terrible to Hermione in that phrase, something
+menacing and irresistible. Were men, then, governed
+irrevocably, dominated by the blood that was in them?
+Artois had certainly seemed to imply that they were,
+and he knew men as few knew them. His powerful
+intellect, like a search-light, illumined the hidden places,
+discovering the concealed things of the souls of men.
+But Artois was not a religious man, and Hermione had
+a strong sense of religion, though she did not cling, as
+many do, to any one creed. If the call of the blood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+were irresistible in a man, then man was only a slave.
+The criminal must not be condemned, nor the saint
+exalted. Conduct was but obedience in one who had
+no choice but to obey. Could she believe that?</p>
+
+<p>The dance grew wilder, swifter. Sebastiano quickened
+the time till he was playing it prestissimo. One
+of the boys, Giulio, dropped out exhausted. Then another,
+Alfio, fell against the terrace wall, laughing and
+wiping his streaming face. Finally Giuseppe gave in,
+too, obviously against his will. But Gaspare and Maurice
+still kept on. The game was certainly a duel now&mdash;a
+duel which would not cease till Sebastiano put an end
+to it by laying down his flute. But he, too, was on his
+mettle and would not own fatigue. Suddenly Hermione
+felt that she could not bear the dance any more.
+It was, perhaps, absurd of her. Her brain, fatigued by
+travel, was perhaps playing her tricks. But she felt as
+if Maurice were escaping from her in this wild tarantella,
+like a man escaping through a fantastic grotto from
+some one who called to him near its entrance. A faint
+sensation of something that was surely jealousy, the
+first she had ever known, stirred in her heart&mdash;jealousy
+of a tarantella.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>He did not hear her.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she called. "Sebastiano&mdash;Gaspare&mdash;stop!
+You'll kill yourselves!"</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano caught her eye, finished the tune, and
+took the flute from his lips. In truth he was not sorry
+to be commanded to do the thing his pride of music
+forbade him to do of his own will. Gaspare gave a wild,
+boyish shout, and flung himself down on Giuseppe's
+knees, clasping him round the neck jokingly. And
+Maurice&mdash;he stood still on the terrace for a moment looking
+dazed. Then the hot blood surged up to his head,
+making it tingle under his hair, and he came over slowly,
+almost shamefacedly, and sat down by Hermione.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"This sun's made me mad, I think," he said, looking
+at her. "Why, how pale you are, Hermione!"</p>
+
+<p>"Am I? No, it must be the shadow of the awning
+makes me look so. Oh, Maurice, you are indeed a southerner!
+Do you know, I feel&mdash;I feel as if I had never
+really seen you till now, here on this terrace, as if I had
+never known you as you are till now, now that I've
+watched you dance the tarantella."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't dance it, of course. It was absurd of me to
+try."</p>
+
+<p>"Ask Gaspare! No, I'll ask him. Gaspare, can the
+padrone dance the tarantella?"</p>
+
+<p>"Eh&mdash;altro!" said Gaspare, with admiring conviction.</p>
+
+<p>He got off Giuseppe's knee, where he had been curled
+up almost like a big kitten, came and stood by Hermione,
+and added:</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio, signora, but the padrone is like one of us!"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione laughed. Now that the dance was over
+and the twittering flute was silent, her sense of loneliness
+and melancholy was departing. Soon, no doubt,
+she would be able to look back upon it and laugh at it
+as one laughs at moods that have passed away.</p>
+
+<p>"This is his first day in Sicily, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>"There are forestieri who come here every year, and
+who stay for months, and who can talk our language&mdash;yes,
+and can even swear in dialetto as we can&mdash;but they
+are not like the padrone. Not one of them could dance
+the tarantella like that. Per Dio!"</p>
+
+<p>A radiant look of pleasure came into Maurice's face.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad you've brought me here," he said. "Ah,
+when you chose this place for our honeymoon you understood
+me better than I understand myself, Hermione."</p>
+
+<p>"Did I?" she said, slowly. "But no, Maurice, I think
+I chose a little selfishly. I was thinking of what I
+wanted. Oh, the boys are going, and Sebastiano."</p>
+
+<p>That evening, when they had finished supper&mdash;they
+did not wish to test Lucrezia's powers too severely by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+dining the first day&mdash;they came out onto the terrace.
+Lucrezia and Gaspare were busily talking in the kitchen.
+Tito, the donkey, was munching his hay under the low-pitched
+roof of the out-house. Now and then they
+could faintly hear the sound of his moving jaws, Lucrezia's
+laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These
+fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence
+that lay about them, the night hush of the mountains
+and the sea. Hermione sat down on the seat in the
+terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless
+night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars.
+There was a cool breeze blowing from Etna. Here and
+there upon the mountains shone solitary lights, and one
+was moving slowly through the darkness along the crest
+of a hill opposite to them, a torch carried by some peasant
+going to his hidden cottage among the olive-trees.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice lit his cigar and stood by Hermione, who was
+sitting sideways and leaning her arms on the wall, and
+looking out into the wide dimness in which, somewhere,
+lay the ravine. He did not want to talk just then, and
+she kept silence. This was really their wedding night,
+and both of them were unusually conscious, but in different
+ways, of the mystery that lay about them, and
+that lay, too, within them. It was strange to be together
+up here, far up in the mountains, isolated in their
+love. Below the wall, on the side of the ravine, the
+leaves of the olives rustled faintly as the wind passed
+by. And this whisper of the leaves seemed to be meant
+for them, to be addressed to them. They were surely
+being told something by the little voices of the night.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," Hermione said, at last, "does this silence
+of the mountains make you wish for anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wish?" he said. "I don't know&mdash;no, I think not.
+I have got what I wanted. I have got you. Why
+should I wish for anything more? And I feel at home
+here. It's extraordinary how I feel at home."</p>
+
+<p>"You! No, it isn't extraordinary at all."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She looked up at him, still keeping her arms on the
+terrace wall. His physical beauty, which had always
+fascinated her, moved her more than ever in the south,
+seemed to her to become greater, to have more meaning
+in this setting of beauty and romance. She thought
+of the old pagan gods. He was, indeed, suited to be
+their happy messenger. At that moment something
+within her more than loved him, worshipped him, felt
+for him an idolatry that had something in it of pain.
+A number of thoughts ran through her mind swiftly.
+One was this: "Can it be possible that he will die some
+day, that he will be dead?" And the awfulness, the
+unspeakable horror of the death of the body gripped her
+and shook her in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Maurice!" she said. "Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>She held out her hands to him. He took them and
+sat down by her.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Hermione?" he said again.</p>
+
+<p>"If beauty were only deathless!"</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but all this is, for us. It was here for the old
+Greeks to see, and I suppose it will be here&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean that."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been stupid," he said, humbly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, my dearest&mdash;my dearest one. Oh, how did you
+ever love me?"</p>
+
+<p>She had forgotten the warning of Artois. The dirty
+little beggar was staring at the angel and wanted the
+angel to know it.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione! What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her, and there was genuine surprise in
+his face and in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"How can you love me? I'm so ugly. Oh, I feel it
+here, I feel it horribly in the midst of&mdash;of all this loveliness,
+with you."</p>
+
+<p>She hid her face against his shoulder almost like one
+afraid.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But you are not ugly! What nonsense! Hermione!"</p>
+
+<p>He put his hand under her face and raised it, and the
+touch of his hand against her cheek made her tremble.
+To-night she more than loved, she worshipped him.
+Her intellect did not speak any more. Its voice was
+silenced by the voice of the heart, by the voices of the
+senses. She felt as if she would like to go down on her
+knees to him and thank him for having loved her, for
+loving her. Abasement would have been a joy to her
+just then, was almost a necessity, and yet there was
+pride in her, the decent pride of a pure-natured woman
+who has never let herself be soiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione," he said, looking into her face. "Don't
+speak to me like that. It's all wrong. It puts me in
+the wrong place, I a fool and you&mdash;what you are. If
+that friend of yours could hear you&mdash;by Jove!"</p>
+
+<p>There was something so boyish, so simple in his
+voice that Hermione suddenly threw her arms round
+his neck and kissed him, as she might have kissed a
+delightful child. She began to laugh through tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank God you're not conceited!" she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"What about?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>But she did not answer. Presently they heard Gaspare's
+step on the terrace. He came to them bareheaded,
+with shining eyes, to ask if they were satisfied
+with Lucrezia. About himself he did not ask. He felt
+that he had done all things for his padrona as he alone
+could have done them, knowing her so well.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," Hermione said, "everything is perfect.
+Tell Lucrezia."</p>
+
+<p>"Better not, signora. I will say you are fairly satisfied,
+as it is only the first day. Then she will try to
+do better to-morrow. I know Lucrezia."</p>
+
+<p>And he gazed at them calmly with his enormous
+liquid eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not say too much, signora. It makes people
+proud."</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 230px;">
+<a href="images/gs03.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs03_th.jpg" width="230" height="400" alt="&quot;HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN THE HOUSE
+OF THE SIRENS&quot;" title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN THE HOUSE
+OF THE SIRENS&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>She thought that she heard an odd Sicilian echo of
+Artois. The peasant lad's mind reflected the mind of
+the subtle novelist for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, Gaspare," she said, submissively.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her with satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand girls," he said. "You must keep
+them down or they will keep you down. Every girl in
+Marechiaro is like that. We keep them down therefore."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke calmly, evidently quite without thought
+that he was speaking to a woman.</p>
+
+<p>"May I go to bed, signora?" he added. "I got up at
+four this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"At four!"</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure all was ready for you and the signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! Go at once. We will go to bed, too.
+Shall we, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I'm ready."</p>
+
+<p>Just as they were going up the steps into the house,
+he turned to take a last look at the night. Far down
+below him over the terrace wall he saw a bright, steady
+light.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that on the sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing
+to it. "Do they fish there at night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."</p>
+
+<p>"But no one lives there."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista
+lives there with Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora.
+Buon riposo, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Buon riposo, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>And Maurice echoed it:</p>
+
+<p>"Buon riposo."</p>
+
+<p>As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage
+to his room near Tito's stable, Maurice added:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying
+good-night. I feel as if I'd said it before, somehow."</p>
+
+<p>"Your blood has said it without your knowing it,
+perhaps many times. Are you coming, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned once more, looked down at the light shining
+in the house of the sirens, then followed Hermione
+in through the open door.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+
+<p>That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione
+touched with a glamour such as the imaginative dreamer
+connects with an earlier world&mdash;a world that never
+existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues
+of gold to hide naked realities, and call down the stars
+to sparkle upon the dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione
+at first tried to make her husband see it with
+her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least
+seem to enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her?
+But he did more; he looked up to her with reverence.
+In her love for him there was a yearning of worship,
+such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious
+of when he stands before one of the masterpieces
+of art, a perfect bronze or a supreme creation in marble.
+Something of what Hermione had felt in past
+years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury,"
+or at the statue of a youth from Hadrian's Villa in the
+Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt when she looked at
+Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased, instead
+of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this
+sometimes surprised her. For she had thought till now
+that the dead sculptors of Greece and Rome had in
+their works succeeded in transcending humanity, had
+shown what God might have created instead of what
+He had created, and had never expected, scarcely ever
+even desired, to be moved by a living being as she was
+moved by certain representations of life in a material.
+Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in
+her husband's beauty  something  strange, something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if he had been
+before this age in which she loved him, had had an
+existence in the fabled world that the modern pagan
+loves to recall when he walks in a land where legend
+trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the trees, and
+is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives
+again in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of
+him listening in a green glade to the piping of Pan, or
+feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like Endymion,
+and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or
+she imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness,
+and fleeing, light-footed, before the coming of the
+dawn. He seemed to her ardent spirit to have stepped
+into her life from some Attic frieze out of a "fairy
+legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship
+did not destroy in her the curious, almost
+mystical sensation roused in her by the peculiar, and
+essentially youthful charm which even Artois had been
+struck by in a London restaurant.</p>
+
+<p>This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice
+Delarey had seemed a handsome youth, with a delightfully
+fresh and almost woodland aspect that set him
+apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded.
+In Sicily he seemed at once to be in his
+right setting. He had said when he arrived that he
+felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and
+he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other,
+more suited to each other. With a loving woman's fondness,
+which breeds fancies deliciously absurd, laughably
+touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted
+this son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking
+into a golden calm of satisfaction now that he was there,
+hearing her "Pastorale," wandering upon her mountain-sides,
+filling his nostrils with the scent of her orange
+blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her
+cherishing seas.</p>
+
+<p>"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+said to him on one morning of peculiar radiance, when
+there was a freshness as of the world's first day in the
+air, and the shining on the sea was as the shining that
+came in answer to the words&mdash;"Let there be light!"</p>
+
+<p>In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly
+blind. Because of the wakefulness of her powerful
+heart her powerful mind did not cease to be busy, but
+its work was supplementary to the work of her heart.
+She had realized in London that the man she loved was
+not a clever man, that there was nothing remarkable
+in his intellect. In Sicily she did not cease from realizing
+this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily
+she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental
+shortcomings because they seemed to make for freshness,
+for boyishness, to link him more closely with the
+spring in their Eden. She adored in him something
+that was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on
+her from a dancing, playful, light-hearted world. And
+here in Sicily she presently grew to know that she
+would be a little saddened were her husband to change,
+to grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had
+spoken to Artois of possible development in Maurice, of
+what she might do for him, and at first, just at first,
+she had instinctively exerted her influence over him to
+bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And
+he had eagerly striven to respond, stirred by his love
+for her, and his reverence&mdash;not a very clever, but certainly
+a very affectionate reverence&mdash;for her brilliant
+qualities of brain. In those very first days together,
+isolated in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had
+let herself go&mdash;as she herself would have said. In her
+perfect happiness she felt that her mind was on fire
+because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not
+anxious, love woke imagination. The stirring of spring
+in this delicious land stirred all her eager faculties, and
+almost as naturally as a bird pours forth its treasure
+of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of love<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love
+prompts thought, not stifles it. In their long mountain
+walks, in their rides on muleback to distant villages,
+hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests of
+the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when
+the noon wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on
+the terrace when the stars came out, and the shepherds
+led their flocks down to the valleys with little happy
+tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts,
+desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that
+beauty and solitude and nearness to nature in this isle
+of the south woke in her. She did not fear to be subtle,
+she did not fear to be trivial. Everything she
+noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she
+noticed suggested to her, she related. The sound of
+the morning breeze in the olive-trees seemed to her different
+from the sound of the breeze of evening. She
+tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of
+the music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every
+sound, not only with the ears but with the imagination.
+The flush of the almond blossoms upon the lower slopes
+of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy against
+gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of
+the spring as her first lover alone looks into the soul
+of a maiden. She asked Maurice to look with her into
+that place of dreams, and to ponder with her over the
+mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight
+of the sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought.
+Far down below, seen over rocks and tree-tops and
+downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away towards
+Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to
+a horizon-line immensely distant. Often it was empty
+of ships, but when a sail came, like a feather on the
+blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then fading
+until taken softly by eternity&mdash;that was Hermione's
+feeling&mdash;that sail was to her like a voice from the worlds
+we never know, but can imagine, some of us, worlds of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+mystery that is not sad, and of joys elusive but ineffable,
+sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight,
+when the first shadows clasp each other by the
+hand, and the horn of the little moon floats with a shy
+radiance out of its hiding-place in the bosom of the
+sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the
+sail came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it
+was, but also as she was. She felt the spring in Sicily,
+but not only as that spring, spring of one year, but as
+all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and
+laughed with green growing things about their feet.
+Her passionate imagination now threw gossamers before,
+now drew gossamers away from a holy of holies that
+no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that
+holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was
+a tender, glorious attempt to compass the impossible.</p>
+
+<p>All this was at first. But Hermione was generally
+too clear-brained to be long tricked even by her own enthusiasms.
+She soon began to understand that though
+Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she
+saw and felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant
+attempt of love in a man who thought he had married
+his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and the
+spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She
+watched in a rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion
+of gratitude. But Gaspare was in and was of all that
+she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of
+the phenomenon, a dancer in the exquisite tarantella.
+And Maurice, too, on that first day had he not obeyed
+Sebastiano's call? Soon she knew that when she had
+sat alone on the terrace seat, and seen the dancers losing
+all thought of time and the hour in the joy of their
+moving bodies, while hers was still, the scene had been
+prophetic. In that moment Maurice had instinctively
+taken his place in the mask of the spring and she hers.
+Their bodies had uttered their minds. She was the
+passionate watcher, but he was the passionate per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>former.
+Therefore she was his audience. She had
+travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it,
+had travelled out to be Sicily.</p>
+
+<p>There was a great difference between them, but, having
+realized it thoroughly, Hermione was able not to
+regret but to delight in it. She did not wish to change
+her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice
+to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand
+with her heart, he would be completely changed,
+and into something not natural, like a performing dog
+or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps amazement,
+combined too often with a faint disgust. And
+ceasing to desire she ceased to endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering
+her conversation with Artois. "And, thank God,
+I don't want to now."</p>
+
+<p>And then she set herself to watch her Sicilian, as she
+loved to call him, enjoying the spring in Sicily in his
+own way, dancing the tarantella with surely the spirit
+of eternal youth. He had, she thought, heard the call
+of the blood and responded to it fully and openly, fearless
+and unashamed. Day by day, seeing his boyish
+happiness in this life of the mountains and the sea, she
+laughed at the creeping, momentary sense of apprehension
+that had been roused in her during her conversation
+with Artois upon the Thames Embankment.
+Artois had said that he distrusted what he loved. That
+was the flaw in an over-intellectual man. The mind
+was too alert, too restless, dogging the steps of the
+heart like a spy, troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness.
+But she could trust where she loved. Maurice
+was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of
+paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched
+him, then threw himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.</p>
+
+<p>The strain of Sicilian blood that was in him worked
+in him curiously, making her sometimes marvel at the
+mysterious power of race, at the stubborn and almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+tyrannical domination some dead have over some living,
+those who are dust over those who are quick with
+animation and passion. Everything that was connected
+with Sicily and with Sicilian life not only reached
+his senses and sank easily into his heart, but seemed
+also to rouse his mind to an activity that astonished
+her. In connection with Sicily he showed a swiftness,
+almost a cleverness, she never noted in him when things
+Sicilian were not in question.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, like most Englishmen, Maurice had no
+great talent for languages. He spoke French fairly
+well, having had a French nurse when he was a child,
+and his mother had taught him a little Italian. But
+till now he had never had any desire to be proficient in
+any language except his own. Hermione, on the other
+hand, was gifted as a linguist, loving languages and
+learning them easily. Yet Maurice picked up&mdash;in his
+case the expression, usually ridiculous, was absolutely
+applicable&mdash;Sicilian with a readiness that seemed to
+Hermione almost miraculous. He showed no delight
+in the musical beauty of Italian. What he wanted,
+and what his mind&mdash;or was it rather what his ears and
+his tongue and his lips?&mdash;took, and held and revelled
+in, was the Sicilian dialect spoken by Lucrezia and Gaspare
+when they were together, spoken by the peasants
+of Marechiaro and of the mountains. To Hermione
+Gaspare had always talked Italian, incorrect, but still
+Italian, and she spoke no dialect, although she could
+often guess at what the Sicilians meant when they addressed
+her in their vigorous but uncouth jargon, different
+from Italian almost as Gaelic is from English.
+But Maurice very soon began to speak a few words of
+Sicilian. Hermione laughed at him and discouraged
+him jokingly, telling him that he must learn Italian
+thoroughly, the language of love, the most melodious
+language in the world.</p>
+
+<p>"Italian!" he said. "What's the use of it? I want<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+to talk to the people. A grammar! I won't open it.
+Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare came rushing bareheaded to them in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>"The signora says I'm to learn Italian, but I say
+that I've Sicilian blood in my veins and must talk as
+you do."</p>
+
+<p>"But I, signore, can speak Italian!" said Gaspare,
+with twinkling pride.</p>
+
+<p>"As a bear dances. No, professor, you and I, we'll
+be good patriots. We'll speak in our mother-tongue.
+You rascal, you know we've begun already."</p>
+
+<p>And looking mischievously at Hermione, he began
+to sing in a loud, warm voice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Cu Gabbi e Jochi e Parti e Mascarati,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Si fa lu giubileu universali.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tiripi-t&ugrave;mpiti, t&ugrave;mpiti, t&ugrave;mpiti,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Milli card&ugrave;buli 'n culu ti p&ugrave;ncinu!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Gaspare burst into a roar of delighted laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the tarantella over again," Hermione said.
+"You're a hopeless Sicilian. I give you up."</p>
+
+<p>That same day she said to him:</p>
+
+<p>"You love the peasants, don't you, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Are you surprised?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; at least I'm not surprised at your loving them."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, Hermione?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps a little at the way you love them."</p>
+
+<p>"What way's that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Almost as they love each other&mdash;that's to say, when
+they love each other at all. Gaspare now! I believe
+you feel more as if he were a young brother of yours
+than as if he were your servant."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna
+<a href = "#FNanchor__1" name = "Footnote__1"><sup>1</sup></a>
+of a boy in spite of all his mischief and fun. You should
+hear him talk of you. He'd die for his padrona."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p><p>"I believe he would. In love, the love that means
+being in love, I think Sicilians, though tremendously
+jealous, are very fickle, but if they take a devotion to
+any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a
+splendid quality."</p>
+
+<p>"If they've got faults, I love their faults," he said.
+"They're a lovable race."</p>
+
+<p>"Praising yourself!" she said, laughing at him, but
+with tender eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Myself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind. What is it, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes shining
+with happiness and a box under his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"The signore knows."</p>
+
+<p>"Revolver practice," said Maurice. "I promised him
+he should have a try to-day. We're going to a place
+close by on the mountain. He's warned off Ciccio and
+his goats. Got the paper, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare pointed to a bulging pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Enough to write a novel on. Well&mdash;will you come,
+Hermione?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's too hot in the sun, and I know you're going
+into the eye of the sun."</p>
+
+<p>"You see, it's the best place up at the top. There's
+that stone wall, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll stay here and listen to your music."</p>
+
+<p>They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into
+the heart of the gold, and singing as they went:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ciao, ciao, ciao,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Morettina bella, ciao&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise
+of stones falling downward from their feet on the sunbaked
+mountain-side. Hermione sat still on the seat
+by the ravine.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ciao, ciao, ciao!"<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>She thought of the young peasants going off to be
+soldiers, and singing that song to keep their hearts up.
+Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have to go. He was
+the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang
+that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began
+to think, that even the timbre of his voice was Sicilian.
+There was the warm, and yet plaintive, sometimes almost
+whining sound in it that she had often heard
+coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves.
+Why was she always comparing him with the peasants?
+He was not of their rank. She had met many Sicilians
+of the nobility in Palermo&mdash;princes, senators, young
+men of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in
+the Giardino Inglese. Maurice did not remind her at all
+of them. No, it was of the Sicilian peasants that he
+reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered
+what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She
+was long since dead. Maurice had never seen her. Yet
+how alive she, and perhaps brothers of hers, and their
+children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive!
+Things that had doubtless stirred in them&mdash;instincts,
+desires, repugnances, joys&mdash;were stirring in him, dominating
+his English inheritance. It was like a new birth
+in the sun of Sicily, and she was assisting at it. Very,
+very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to be so
+near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him
+by the greatest of all links, the link that is forged by
+the free will of a man and a woman. Again, in thought,
+she went back to her comparison of things in him with
+things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that
+she had once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say
+of them, "With all their faults, and they are many, every
+Sicilian, even though he wear the long cap and live in
+a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if
+there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never
+offend her. And she loved the primitive man in him
+and in all men who had it. There was a good deal that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat,
+socialist, radical, never christened herself with any
+name to describe her mental leanings, but she knew that,
+for a well-born woman&mdash;and she was that, child of an
+old English family of pure blood and high traditions&mdash;she
+was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its
+pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would
+have said, that all men and women are just human
+beings, brothers and sisters of a great family. In judging
+of individuals she could never be influenced by anything
+except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart
+and mind, qualities that might belong to any man. She
+was affected by habits, manners&mdash;what woman of breeding
+is not?&mdash;but even these could scarcely warp her judgment
+if they covered anything fine. She could find gold
+beneath mud and forget the mud.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was like the peasants, not like the Palermitan
+aristocracy. He was near to the breast of Sicily, of
+that mother of many nations, who had come to conquer,
+and had fought, and bled, and died, or been expelled,
+but had left indefaceable traces behind them,
+traces of Norman of Greek of Arab. He was no cosmopolitan
+with characteristics blurred; he was of the
+soil. Well, she loved the soil dearly. The almond
+blossomed from it. The olive gave its fruit, and the
+vine its generous blood, and the orange its gold, at the
+word of the soil, the dear, warm earth of Sicily. She
+thought of Maurice's warm hands, brown now as Gaspare's.
+How she loved his hands, and his eyes that
+shone with the lustre of the south! Had not this soil,
+in very truth, given those hands and those eyes to her?
+She felt that it had. She loved it more for the gift. She
+had reaped and garnered in her blessed Sicilian harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia came to her round the angle of the cottage,
+knowing she was alone. Lucrezia was mending a hole
+in a sock for Gaspare. Now she sat down on the seat
+under the window, divided from Hermione by the ter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>race,
+but able to see her, to feel companionship. Had
+the padrone been there Lucrezia would not have ventured
+to come. Gaspare had often explained to her her
+very humble position in the household. But Gaspare
+and the padrone were away on the mountain-top, and
+she could not resist being near to her padrona, for whom
+she already felt a very real affection and admiration.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a big hole, Lucrezia?" said Hermione, smiling
+at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia put her thumb through it, holding it up on
+her fist.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare's holes are always big."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke as if in praise.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare is strong," she added. "But Sebastiano
+is stronger."</p>
+
+<p>As she said the last words a dreamy look came into
+her round face, and she dropped the hand that held the
+stocking into her lap.</p>
+
+<p>"Sebastiano is hard like the rocks, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Hard-hearted, Lucrezia."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"You like Sebastiano, Lucrezia?"</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia reddened under her brown skin.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"So do I. He's always been a good friend of mine."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia shifted along the seat until she was nearly
+opposite to where Hermione was sitting.</p>
+
+<p>"How old is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty-five, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose he will be marrying soon, won't he? The
+men all marry young round about Marechiaro."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia began to darn.</p>
+
+<p>"His father, Chinetti Urbano, wishes him to marry
+at once. It is better for a man."</p>
+
+<p>"You understand men, Lucrezia?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora. They are all alike."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And what are they like?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signora, you know as well as I do. They must
+have their own way and we must not think to have ours.
+They must roam where they like, love where they
+choose, day or night, and we must sit in the doorway
+and get to bed at dark, and not bother where they've
+been or what they've done. They say we've no right,
+except one or two. There's Francesco, to be sure.
+He's a lamb with Maria. She can sit with her face to
+the street. But she wouldn't sit any other way, and
+he knows it. But the rest! Eh, gi&agrave;!"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't think much of men, Lucrezia!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signora, they're just as God made them. They
+can't help it any more than we can help&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped and pursed her lips suddenly, as if checking
+some words that were almost on them.</p>
+
+<p>"Lucrezia, come here and sit by me."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia looked up with a sort of doubtful pleasure
+and surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come here."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia got up and came slowly to the seat by the
+ravine. Hermione took her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"You like Sebastiano very much, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia hung her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora," she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think he'd be good to a woman if she loved
+him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't care. Bad or good, I'd&mdash;I'd&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, with a sort of childish violence, she put
+her two hands on Hermione's arms.</p>
+
+<p>"I want Sebastiano, signora; I want him!" she cried.
+"I've prayed to the Madonna della Rocca to give him
+to me; all last year I've prayed, and this. D'you think
+the Madonna's going to do it? Do you? Do you?"</p>
+
+<p>Heat came out of her two hands, and heat flashed in
+her eyes. Her broad bosom heaved, and her lips, still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+parted when she had done speaking, seemed to interrogate
+Hermione fiercely in the silence. Before Hermione
+could reply two sounds came to them: from below
+in the ravine the distant drone of the ceramella,
+from above on the mountain-top the dry crack of a
+pistol-shot.</p>
+
+<p>Swiftly Lucrezia turned and looked downward, but
+Hermione looked upward towards the bare flank that
+rose behind the cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"It's Sebastiano, signora."</p>
+
+<p>The ceramella droned on, moving slowly with its
+player on the hidden path beneath the olive-trees.</p>
+
+<p>A second pistol-shot rang out sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Go down and meet him, Lucrezia."</p>
+
+<p>"May I&mdash;may I, really, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; go quickly."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia bent down and kissed her padrona's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Bacio la mano, bacio la mano a Lei!"</p>
+
+<p>Then, bareheaded, she went out from the awning into
+the glare of the sunshine, passed through the ruined
+archway, and disappeared among the rocks. She had
+gone to her music. Hermione stayed to listen to hers,
+the crack of the pistol up there near the blue sky.</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano was playing the tune she loved, the "Pastorale,"
+but to-day she did not heed it. Indeed, now
+that she was left alone she was not conscious that she
+heard it.    Her heart was on the hill-top near the blue.</p>
+
+<p>Again and again the shots rang out. It seemed to Hermione
+that she knew which were fired by Maurice and
+which by Gaspare, and she whispered to herself "That's
+Maurice!" when she fancied one was his. Presently she
+was aware of some slight change and wondered what it
+was. Something had ceased, and its cessation recalled
+her mind to her surroundings. She looked round her,
+then down to the ravine, and then at once she understood.
+There was no more music from the ceramella.
+Lucrezia had met Sebastiano under the olives. That<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+was certain. Hermione smiled. Her woman's imagination
+pictured easily enough why the player had
+stopped. She hoped Lucrezia was happy. Her first
+words, still more her manner, had shown Hermione the
+depth of her heart. There was fire there, fire that
+burned before a shrine when she prayed to the Madonna
+della Rocca. She was ready even to be badly
+treated if only she might have Sebastiano. It seemed
+to be all one to her. She had no illusions, but her heart
+knew what it needed.</p>
+
+<p>Crack went the pistol up on the mountain-top.</p>
+
+<p>"That's not Maurice!" Hermione thought.</p>
+
+<p>There was another report, then another.</p>
+
+<p>"That last one was Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia did not seem even to expect a man to be
+true and faithful. Perhaps she knew the Sicilian character
+too well. Hermione lifted her face up and looked
+towards the mountain. Her mind had gone once more
+to the Thames Embankment. As once she had mentally
+put Gaspare beside Artois, so now she mentally
+put Lucrezia. Lucrezia distrusted the south, and she
+was of it. Men must be as God had made them, she
+said, and evidently she thought that God had made
+them to run wild, careless of woman's feelings, careless
+of everything save their own vagrant desires. The
+tarantella&mdash;that was the dance of the soil here, the
+dance of the blood. And in the tarantella each of the
+dancers seemed governed by his own sweet will, possessed
+by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he
+followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence,
+giving himself up joyously, eagerly, utterly&mdash;to what?
+To his whim. Was the tarantella an allegory of life
+here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that
+first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of
+separation which brought with it a faint and creeping
+melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>"Crack! Crack!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly
+the sound of the firing was distressing to her, almost
+sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music better. For it
+suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith,
+and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian.
+But the reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death,
+ugly things.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing
+up towards the mountain-top. "Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>The pistol made reply. They had not heard her.
+They were too far or were too intent upon their sport
+to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost
+as a person calls for help. Another pistol-shot answered
+her, mocking at her in the sun. Then she heard
+a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be
+either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the
+laughter of something she could not personify, of some
+jeering spirit of the mountain. It died away at last,
+and she stood there, shivering in the sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora! Signora!"</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below.
+She turned and saw him standing with Lucrezia on the
+terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's waist. He
+took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm
+round Lucrezia.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the
+mountain-top. But something within her held her
+back from climbing up to the distant laughter, a feeling,
+an idiotic feeling she called it to herself afterwards.
+She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling
+of fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I wanted up there?"</p>
+
+<p>That was what something within her said. And the
+answer was made by her body. She turned and began
+to descend towards the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>And at that moment, for the first time in her life, she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+was conscious of a little stab of pain such as she had
+never known before. It was pain of the mind and of
+the heart, and yet it was like bodily pain, too. It made
+her angry with herself. It was like a betrayal, a betrayal
+of herself by her own intellect, she thought.</p>
+
+<p>She stopped once more on the mountain-side.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I going to be ridiculous?" she said to herself.
+"Am I going to be one of the women I despise?"</p>
+
+<p>Just then she realized that love may become a tyrant,
+ministering to the soul with persecutions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class = "footnote">
+<a href="#Footnote__1" name = "FNanchor__1" ><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The Sicilians use the word "donna" to express the meaning
+we convey by the word "trump."</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Sebastiano took his arm from Lucrezia's waist as
+Hermione came down to the terrace, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Buona sera, signora. Is the signore coming down
+yet?"</p>
+
+<p>He flung out his arm towards the mountain.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, Sebastiano.    Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've come with a message for him."</p>
+
+<p>"Not for Lucrezia?"</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano laughed boldly, but Lucrezia, blushing
+red, disappeared into the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't play with her, Sebastiano," said Hermione.
+"She's a good girl."</p>
+
+<p>"I know that, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"She deserves to be well treated."</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano went over to the terrace wall, looked into
+the ravine, turned round, and came back.</p>
+
+<p>"Who's treating Lucrezia badly, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did not say anybody was."</p>
+
+<p>"The girls in Marechiaro can take care of themselves,
+signora. You don't know them as I do."</p>
+
+<p>"D'you think any woman can take care of herself,
+Sebastiano?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked into her face and laughed, but said nothing.
+Hermione sat down. She had a desire to-day,
+after Lucrezia's conversation with her, to get at the
+Sicilian man's point of view in regard to women.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think women want to be protected?" she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"What from, signora?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was still laughter in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Not from us, anyway," he added. "Lucrezia there&mdash;she
+wants me for her husband. All Marechiaro knows
+it."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione felt that under the circumstances it was
+useless to blush for Lucrezia, useless to meet blatant
+frankness with sensitive delicacy.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want Lucrezia for your wife?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, signora, I'm strong. A stick or a knife in
+my hand and no man can touch me. You've never
+seen me do the scherma con coltello? One day I'll
+show you with Gaspare. And I can play better even
+than the men from Bronte on the ceramella. You've
+heard me.  Lucrezia knows I can have any girl I like."</p>
+
+<p>There was a simplicity in his immense superiority to
+women that robbed it of offensiveness and almost made
+Hermione laugh. In it, too, she felt the touch of the
+East. Arabs had been in Sicily and left their traces
+there, not only in the buildings of Sicily, but in its people's
+songs, and in the treatment of the women by the
+men.</p>
+
+<p>"And are you going to choose Lucrezia?" she asked,
+gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, I wasn't sure. But yesterday, I had a
+letter from Messina. They want me there. I've got
+a job that'll pay me well to go to the Lipari Islands
+with a cargo."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you a sailor, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, I can do anything."</p>
+
+<p>"And will you be long away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who knows, signora? But I told Lucrezia to-day,
+and when she cried I told her something else. We are
+'promised.'"</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad," Hermione said, holding out her hand
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>He took it in an iron grip.</p>
+
+<p>"Be very good to her when you're married, won't you?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she'll be all right with me," he answered, carelessly.
+"And I won't give her the slap in the face on
+the wedding-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Hi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a shrill cry from the mountain and Maurice
+and Gaspare came leaping down, scattering the stones,
+the revolvers still in their hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Look, signora, look!" cried Gaspare, pulling a sheet
+of paper from his pocket and holding it proudly up.
+"Do you see the holes? One, two, three&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He began to count.</p>
+
+<p>"And I made five. Didn't I, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're a dead shot, Gasparino. Did you hear us,
+Hermione?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said. "But you didn't hear me."</p>
+
+<p>"You? Did you call?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sebastiano's got a message for you," Hermione said.</p>
+
+<p>She could not tell him now the absurd impulse that
+had made her call him.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the message, Sebastiano?" asked Maurice, in
+his stumbling Sicilian-Italian that was very imperfect,
+but that nevertheless had already the true accent of
+the peasants about Marechiaro.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, there will be a moon to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Gi&agrave;. Lo so."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sleepy, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>He touched his eyes with his sinewy hands and made
+his face look drowsy. Maurice laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you afraid of being naked in the sea at night?
+But you need not enter it. Are you afraid of sleeping
+at dawn in a cave upon the sands?"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it all?" asked Maurice. "Gaspare, I understand
+you best."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Gaspare, joyously. "It's the fish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>ing.
+Nito has sent. I told him to. Is it Nito, Sebastiano?"</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano nodded. Gaspare turned eagerly to Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore, you must come, you will come!"</p>
+
+<p>"Where? In a boat?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. We go down to the shore, to Isola Bella. We
+take food, wine, red wine, and a net. Between twenty-two
+and twenty-three o'clock is the time to begin. And
+the sea must be calm. Is the sea calm to-day, Sebastiano?"</p>
+
+<p>"Like that."</p>
+
+<p>Sebastiano moved his hand to and fro in the air,
+keeping it absolutely level. Gaspare continued to explain
+with gathering excitement and persuasiveness, talking
+to his master as much by gesture as by the words
+that Maurice could only partially understand.</p>
+
+<p>"The sea is calm. Nito has the net, but he will not
+go into the sea. Per Dio, he is birbante. He will say
+he has the rheumatism, I know, and walk like that."
+(Gaspare hobbled to and fro before them, making a
+face of acute suffering.) "He has asked for me. Hasn't
+Nito asked for me, Sebastiano?"</p>
+
+<p>Here Gaspare made a grimace at Sebastiano, who
+answered, calmly:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he has asked for you to come with the padrone."</p>
+
+<p>"I knew it. Then I shall undress. I shall take one
+end of the net while Nito holds the other, and I shall
+go out into the sea. I shall go up to here." (He put
+his hands up to his chin, stretching his neck like one
+avoiding a rising wave.) "And I shall wade, you'll
+see!&mdash;and if I come to a hole I shall swim. I can swim
+for hours, all day if I choose."</p>
+
+<p>"And all night too?" said Hermione, smiling at his
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Davvero! But at night I must drink wine to keep
+out the cold. I come out like this." (He shivered
+violently, making his teeth chatter.) "Then I drink<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+a glass and I am warm, and when they have taken the
+fish I go in again. We fish all along the shore from
+Isola Bella round by the point there, where there's the
+Casa delle Sirene, and to the caves beyond the Caff&egrave;
+Berardi. And when we've got enough&mdash;many fish&mdash;at
+dawn we sleep on the sand. And when the sun is up
+Carmela will take the fish and make a frittura, and we
+all eat it and drink more wine, and then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And then&mdash;you're ready for the Campo Santo?"
+said Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signora. Then we will dance the tarantella,
+and come home up the mountain singing, 'O sole mio!'
+and 'A mezzanotte a punto,' and the song of the Mafioso,
+and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione began to laugh unrestrainedly. Gaspare,
+by his voice, his face, his gestures, had made them
+assist at a veritable orgie of labor, feasting, sleep, and
+mirth, all mingled together and chasing one another like
+performers in a revel. Even his suggestion of slumber
+on the sands was violent, as if they were to sleep with
+a kind of fury of excitement and determination.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!" he cried, staring as if ready to be offended.</p>
+
+<p>Then he looked at Maurice, who was laughing, too,
+threw himself back against the wall, opened his mouth,
+and joined in with all his heart. But suddenly he stopped.
+His face changed, became very serious.</p>
+
+<p>"I may go, signora?" he asked. "No one can fish
+as I can. The others will not go in far, and they soon
+get cold and want to put on their clothes. And the
+padrone! I must take care of the padrone! Guglielmo,
+the contadino, will sleep in the house, I know. Shall I
+call him? Guglielmo! Guglielmo!"</p>
+
+<p>He vanished like a flash, they scarcely knew in what
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>"He's alive!" exclaimed Maurice. "By Jove, he's alive,
+that boy! Glorious, glorious life! Oh, there's something
+here that&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He broke off, looked down at the broad sea shimmering
+in the sun, then said:</p>
+
+<p>"The sun, the sea, the music, the people, the liberty&mdash;it
+goes to my head, it intoxicates me."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll go to-night?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"D'you mind if I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mind? No. I want you to go. I want you to
+revel in this happy time, this splendid, innocent, golden
+time. And to-morrow we'll watch for you, Lucrezia
+and I, watch for you down there on the path. But&mdash;you'll
+bring us some of the fish, Maurice? You won't
+forget us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Forget you!" he said.    "You shall have all&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. Only the little fish, the babies that Carmela
+rejects from the frittura."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go into the sea with Gaspare," said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure you will, and farther out even than he does."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, he'll never allow that. He'd swim to Africa first!"</p>
+
+<p>That night, at twenty-one o'clock, Hermione and Lucrezia
+stood under the arch, and watched Maurice and
+Gaspare springing down the mountain-side as if in seven-leagued
+boots. Soon they disappeared into the darkness
+of the ravine, but for some time their loud voices
+could be heard singing lustily:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ciao, ciao, ciao,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Morettina bella ciao,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prima di partire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Un bacio ti voglio da';<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Un bacio al pap&agrave;,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Un bacio alla mamm&agrave;,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cinquanta alla mia fidanzata,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Che vado a far solda'."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"I wish I were a man, Lucrezia," said Hermione,
+when the voices at length died away towards the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, we were made for the men. They weren't
+made for us. But I like being a girl."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"To-night. I know why, Lucrezia."</p>
+
+<p>And then the padrona and the cameriera sat down
+together on the terrace under the stars, and talked
+together about the man the cameriera loved, and his
+exceeding glory.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Maurice and Gaspare were giving themselves
+joyously to the glory of the night. The glamour of
+the moon, which lay full upon the terrace where the two
+women sat, was softened, changed to a shadowy magic,
+in the ravine where the trees grew thickly, but the pilgrims
+did not lower their voices in obedience to the
+message of the twilight of the night. The joy of life
+which was leaping within them defied the subtle suggestions
+of mystery, was careless because it was triumphant,
+and all the way down to the sea they sang, Gaspare
+changing the song when it suited his mood to do
+so; and Maurice, as in the tarantella, imitating him with
+the swiftness that is born of sympathy. For to-night,
+despite their different ages, ranks, ways of life, their
+gayety linked them together, ruled out the differences,
+and made them closely akin, as they had been in Hermione's
+eyes when they danced upon the terrace. They
+did not watch the night. They were living too strongly
+to be watchful. The spirit of the dancing faun was
+upon them, and guided them down among the rocks
+and the olive-trees, across the Messina road, white
+under the moon, to the stony beach of Isola Bella,
+where Nito was waiting for them with the net.</p>
+
+<p>Nito was not alone. He had brought friends of his
+and of Gaspare's, and a boy who staggered proudly
+beneath a pannier filled with bread and cheese, oranges
+and apples, and dark blocks of a mysterious dolce.
+The wine-bottles were not intrusted to him, but were
+in the care of Giulio, one of the donkey-boys who had
+carried up the luggage from the station. Gaspare and
+his padrone were welcomed with a lifting of hats, and
+for a moment there was a silence, while the little group<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+regarded the "Inglese" searchingly. Had Maurice felt
+any strangeness, any aloofness, the sharp and sensitive
+Sicilians would have at once been conscious of it, and
+light-hearted gayety might have given way to gravity,
+though not to awkwardness. But he felt, and therefore
+showed, none. His soft hat cocked at an impudent
+angle over his sparkling, dark eyes, his laughing lips, his
+easy, eager manner, and his pleasant familiarity with
+Gaspare at once reassured everybody, and when he
+cried out, "Ciao, amici, ciao!" and waved a pair of
+bathing drawers towards the sea, indicating that he
+was prepared to be the first to go in with the net,
+there was a general laugh, and a babel of talk broke
+forth&mdash;talk which he did not fully understand, yet
+which did not make him feel even for a moment a
+stranger.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare at once took charge of the proceedings as
+one born to be a leader of fishermen. He began by
+ordering wine to be poured into the one glass provided,
+placed it in Maurice's hand, and smiled proudly at his
+pupil's quick "Alla vostra salute!" before tossing it
+off. Then each one in turn, with an "Alla sua salute!"
+to Maurice, took a drink from the great, leather bottle;
+and Nito, shaking out his long coil of net, declared that
+it was time to get to work.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare cast a sly glance at Maurice, warning him to
+be prepared for a comedy, and Maurice at once remembered
+the scene on the terrace when Gaspare had described
+Nito's "birbante" character, and looked out
+for rheumatics.</p>
+
+<p>"Who goes into the sea, Nito?" asked Gaspare, very
+seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Nito's wrinkled and weather-beaten face assumed
+an expression of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Who goes into the sea!" he ejaculated. "Why,
+don't we all know who likes wading, and can always
+tell the best places for the fish?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He paused, then as Gaspare said nothing, and the
+others, who had received a warning sign from him,
+stood round with deliberately vacant faces, he added,
+clapping Gaspare on the shoulder, and holding out one
+end of the net:</p>
+
+<p>"Off with your clothes, compare, and we will soon
+have a fine frittura for Carmela."</p>
+
+<p>But Gaspare shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"In summer I don't mind. But this is early in the
+year, and, besides&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Early in the year! Who told me the signore distinto
+would&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And besides, compare, I've got the stomach-ache."</p>
+
+<p>He deftly doubled himself up and writhed, while the
+lips of the others twitched with suppressed amusement.</p>
+
+<p>"Comparedro, I don't believe it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't I, signorino?" cried Gaspare, undoubling
+himself, pointing to his middleman, and staring hard
+at Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, si! &Egrave; vero, &egrave; vero!" cried Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been eating Zampaglione, and I am full. If I
+go into the sea to-night I shall die."</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Nito, throwing up his
+hands towards the stars.</p>
+
+<p>He dared not give the lie to the "signore distinto,"
+yet he had no trust in Gaspare's word, and had gained
+no sort of conviction from his eloquent writhings.</p>
+
+<p>"You must go in, Nito," said Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" cried Nito, in a plaintive whine that
+was almost feminine. "I go into the sea with my
+rheumatism!"</p>
+
+<p>Abruptly one of his legs gave way, and he stood before
+them in a crooked attitude.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore," he said to Maurice. "I would go into the
+sea, I would stay there all night, for I love it, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+Dr. Marini has forbidden me to enter it. See how I
+walk!"</p>
+
+<p>And he began to hobble up and down exactly as Gaspare
+had on the terrace, looking over his shoulder at
+Maurice all the time to see whether his deception was
+working well. Gaspare, seeing that Nito's attention
+was for the moment concentrated, slipped away behind
+a boat that was drawn up on the beach; and Maurice,
+guessing what he was doing, endeavored to make Nito
+understand his sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"Molto forte&mdash;molto dolore?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>And Nito burst forth into a vehement account of his
+sufferings, accompanied by pantomime.</p>
+
+<p>"It takes me in the night, signore! Madonna, it is
+like rats gnawing at my legs, and nothing will stop it.
+Pancrazia&mdash;she is my wife, signore&mdash;Pancrazia, she
+gets out of bed and she heats oil to rub it on, but she
+might as well put it on the top of Etna for all the good
+it does me.    And there I lie like a&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi!"</p>
+
+<p>A wild shriek rent the air, and Gaspare, clad in a
+pair of bathing drawers, bounded out from behind the
+boat, gave Nito a cuff on the cheek, executed some steps
+of the tarantella, whirled round, snatched up one end
+of the net, and cried:</p>
+
+<p>"Al mare, al mare!"</p>
+
+<p>Nito's rheumatism was no more. His bent leg
+straightened itself as if by magic, and he returned Gaspare's
+cuff by an affectionate slap on his bare shoulder,
+exclaiming to Maurice:</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't he terribile, signore? Isn't he terribile?"</p>
+
+<p>Nito lifted up the other end of the net and they all
+went down to the shore.</p>
+
+<p>That night it seemed to Delarey as if Sicily drew him
+closer to her breast. He did not know why he had
+now for the first time the sensation that at last he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+really in his natural place, was really one with the soil
+from which an ancestor of his had sprung, and with the
+people who had been her people. That Hermione's
+absence had anything to do with his almost wild sense
+of freedom did not occur to him. All he knew was this,
+that alone among these Sicilian fishermen in the night,
+not understanding much of what they said, guessing
+at their jokes, and sharing in their laughter, without
+always knowing what had provoked it, he was perfectly
+at home, perfectly happy.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare went into the sea, wading carefully through
+the silver waters, and Maurice, from the shore, watched
+his slowly moving form, taking a lesson which would be
+useful to him later. The coast-line looked enchanted in
+the glory of the moon, in the warm silence of the night,
+but the little group of men upon the shore scarcely
+thought of its enchantment. They felt it, perhaps,
+sometimes faintly in their gayety, but they did not
+savor its wonder and its mystery as Hermione would
+have savored them had she been there.</p>
+
+<p>The naked form of Gaspare, as he waded far out in
+the shallow sea, was like the form of a dream creature
+rising out of waves of a dream. When he called to
+them across the silver surely something of the magic
+of the night was caught and echoed in his voice. When
+he lifted the net, and its black and dripping meshes
+slipped down from his ghostly hands into the ghostly
+movement that was flickering about him, and the circles
+tipped with light widened towards sea and shore, there
+was a miracle of delicate and fantastic beauty delivered
+up tenderly like a marvellous gift to the wanderers of
+the dark hours. But Sicily scarcely wonders at Sicily.
+Gaspare was intent only on the catching of fish, and
+his companions smote the night with their jokes and
+their merry, almost riotous laughter.</p>
+
+<p>The night wore on. Presently they left Isola Bella,
+crossed a stony spit of land, and came into a second and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+narrower bay, divided by a turmoil of jagged rocks and
+a bold promontory covered with stunted olive-trees,
+cactus, and seed-sown earth plots, from the wide sweep
+of coast that melted into the dimness towards Messina.
+Gathered together on the little stones of the beach, in
+the shadow of some drawn-up fishing-boats, they took
+stock of the fish that lay shining in the basket, and
+broke their fast on bread and cheese and more draughts
+from the generous wine-bottle.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare was dripping, and his thin body shook as he
+gulped down the wine.</p>
+
+<p>"Basta Gaspare!" Maurice said to him. "You mustn't
+go in any more."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, signore, non basta! I can fish all night.
+Once the wine has warmed me, I can&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But I want to try it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore, what would the signora say? You are
+a stranger. You will take cold, and then the signora
+will blame me and say I did not take proper care of my
+padrone."</p>
+
+<p>But Delarey was determined. He stripped off his
+clothes, put on his bathing drawers, took up the net,
+and, carefully directed by the admiring though protesting
+Gaspare, he waded into the sea.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he shuddered as the calm water rose
+round him. Then, English fashion, he dipped under, with a
+splash that brought a roar of laughter to him from the shore.</p>
+
+<p>"Meglio cos&igrave;!" he cried, coming up again in the moonlight.
+"Adesso sto bene!"</p>
+
+<p>The plunge had made him suddenly feel tremendously
+young and triumphant, reckless with a happiness that
+thrilled with audacity. As he waded out he began to sing
+in a loud voice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ciao, ciao, ciao,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Morettina bella ciao,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prima di partire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Un bacio ti voglio da'."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Gaspare, who was hastily dressing by the boats, called
+out to him that his singing would frighten away the
+fish, and he was obediently silent. He imprisoned the
+song in his heart, but that went on singing bravely. As
+he waded farther he felt splendid, as if he were a lord of
+life and of the sea. The water, now warm to him, seemed
+to be embracing him as it crept upward towards his throat.
+Nature was clasping him with amorous arms. Nature
+was taking him for her own.</p>
+
+<p>"Nature, nature!" he said to himself. "That's why
+I'm so gloriously happy here, because I'm being right
+down natural."</p>
+
+<p>His mind made an abrupt turn, like a coursed hare,
+and he suddenly found himself thinking of the night in
+London, when he had sat in the restaurant with Hermione
+and Artois and listened to their talk, reverently
+listened. Now, as the net tugged at his hand, influenced
+by the resisting sea, that talk, as he remembered it,
+struck him as unnatural, as useless, and the thoughts
+which he had then admired and wondered at, as complicated
+and extraordinary. Something in him said,
+"That's all unnatural." The touch of the water about
+his body, the light of the moon upon him, the breath of
+the air in his wet face drove out his reverence for what
+he called "intellectuality," and something savage got
+hold of his soul and shook it, as if to wake up the sleeping
+self within him, the self that was Sicilian.</p>
+
+<p>As he waded in the water, coming ever nearer to the
+jagged rocks that shut out from his sight the wide sea
+and something else, he felt as if thinking and living were
+in opposition, as if the one were destructive of the
+other; and the desire to be clever, to be talented, which
+had often assailed him since he had known, and especially
+since he had loved, Hermione, died out of him,
+and he found himself vaguely pitying Artois, and almost
+despising the career and the fame of a writer. What
+did thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+live with your body, out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat
+as the savages live. When he waded to shore for
+the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the
+fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he
+could have shouted like a boy.</p>
+
+<p>He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now
+clothed, took hold of him by the arm with a familiarity
+that had in it nothing disrespectful.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, basta, basta! Giulio will go in now."</p>
+
+<p>"Si! si!" cried Giulio, beginning to tug at his waistcoat
+buttons.</p>
+
+<p>"Once more, Gaspare!" said Maurice. "Only once!"</p>
+
+<p>"But if you take cold, signorino, the signora&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I sha'n't catch cold. Only once!"</p>
+
+<p>He broke away, laughing, from Gaspare, and was
+swiftly in the sea. The Sicilians looked at him with
+admiration.</p>
+
+<p>"E' veramente pi&ugrave; Siciliano di noi!" exclaimed Nito.</p>
+
+<p>The others murmured their assent. Gaspare glowed
+with pride in his pupil.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall make the signore one of us," he said, as he
+deftly let out the coils of the net.</p>
+
+<p>"But how long is he going to stay?" asked Nito.
+"Will he not soon be going back to his own country?"</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Gaspare's countenance fell.</p>
+
+<p>"When the heat comes," he began, doubtfully. Then
+he cheered up.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he will take me with him to England," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>This time Maurice waded with the net into the shadow
+of the rocks out of the light of the moon. The night
+was waning, and a slight chill began to creep into the
+air. A little breeze, too, sighed over the sea, ruffling its
+surface, died away, then softly came again. As he
+moved into the darkness Maurice was conscious that the
+buoyancy of his spirits received a slight check. The
+night seemed suddenly to have changed, to have be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>come
+more mysterious. He began to feel its mystery
+now, to be aware of the strangeness of being out in the
+sea alone at such an hour. Upon the shore he saw the
+forms of his companions, but they looked remote and
+phantom-like. He did not hear their voices. Perhaps
+the slow approach of dawn was beginning to affect them,
+and the little wind that was springing up chilled their
+merriment and struck them to silence. Before him the
+dense blackness of the rocks rose like a grotesque wall
+carved in diabolic shapes, and as he stared at these
+shapes he had an odd fancy that they were living things,
+and that they were watching him at his labor. He could
+not get this idea, that he was being watched, out of his
+head, and for a moment he forgot about the fish, and
+stood still, staring at the monsters, whose bulky forms
+reared themselves up into the moonlight from which
+they banished him.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>There came to him a cry of protest from the shore.
+He started, moved forward with the net, and went
+under water. He had stepped into a deep hole. Still
+holding fast to the net, he came up to the surface, shook
+his head, and struck out. As he did so he heard another
+cry, sharp yet musical. But this cry did not come
+from the beach where his companions were gathered.
+It rose from the blackness of the rocks close to him, and
+it sounded like the cry of a woman. He winked his eyes
+to get the water out of them, and swam for the rocks,
+heedless of his duty as a fisherman. But the net impeded
+him, and again there was a shout from the shore:</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino! E' pazzo Lei?"</p>
+
+<p>Reluctantly he turned and swam back to the shallow
+water. But when his feet touched bottom he stood
+still. That cry of a woman from the mystery of the
+rocks had startled, had fascinated his ears. Suddenly
+he remembered that he must be near to that Casa delle
+Sirene, whose little light he had seen from the terrace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+of the priest's house on his first evening in Sicily. He
+longed to hear that woman's voice again. For a moment
+he thought of it as the voice of a siren, of one of
+those beings of enchantment who lure men on to their
+destruction, and he listened eagerly, almost passionately,
+while the ruffled water eddied softly about his
+breast. But no music stole to him from the blackness
+of the rocks, and at last he turned slowly and waded to
+the shore.</p>
+
+<p>He was met with merry protests. Nito declared that
+the net had nearly been torn out of his hands. Gaspare,
+half undressed to go to his rescue, anxiously inquired
+if he had come to any harm. The rocks were
+sharp as razors near the point, and he might have cut
+himself to pieces upon them. He apologized to Nito
+and showed Gaspare that he was uninjured. Then,
+while the others began to count the fish, he went to the
+boats to put on his clothes, accompanied by Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you swim towards the rocks, signorino?"
+asked the boy, looking at him with a sharp curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>Delarey hesitated for a moment. He was inclined,
+he scarcely knew why, to keep silence about the cry he
+had heard. Yet he wanted to ask Gaspare something.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," he said, at last, as they reached the boats,
+"was any one of you on the rocks over there just
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>He had forgotten to number his companions when he
+reached the shore.    Perhaps one was missing, and had
+wandered towards the point to watch him fishing.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore. Why do you ask?"</p>
+
+<p>Again Delarey hesitated. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"I heard some one call out to me there."</p>
+
+<p>He began to rub his wet body with a towel.</p>
+
+<p>"Call! What did they call?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing; no words. Some one cried out."</p>
+
+<p>"At this hour! Who should be there, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>The action of the rough towel upon his body brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+a glow of warmth to Delarey, and the sense of mystery
+began to depart from his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it was a fisherman," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"They do not fish from there, signore. It must have
+been me you heard. When you went under the water
+I cried out. Drink some wine, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>He held a glass full of wine to Delarey's lips. Delarey
+drank.</p>
+
+<p>"But you've got a man's voice, Gaspare!" he said, putting
+down the glass and beginning to get into his clothes.</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio! Would you have me squeak like a woman,
+signore?"</p>
+
+<p>Delarey laughed and said no more. But he knew it
+was not Gaspare's voice he had heard.</p>
+
+<p>The net was drawn up now for the last time, and as
+soon as Delarey had dressed they set out to walk to the
+caves on the farther side of the rocks, where they meant
+to sleep till Carmela was about and ready to make the
+frittura. To reach them they had to clamber up from
+the beach to the Messina road, mount a hill, and descend
+to the Caff&egrave; Berardi, a small, isolated shanty
+which stood close to the sea, and was used in summer-time
+by bathers who wanted refreshment. Nito and
+the rest walked on in front, and Delarey followed a few
+paces behind with Gaspare. When they reached the summit
+of the hill a great sweep of open sea was disclosed
+to their view, stretching away to the Straits of Messina,
+and bounded in the far distance by the vague outlines
+of the Calabrian Mountains. Here the wind met them
+more sharply, and below them on the pebbles by the
+caff&egrave; they could see the foam of breaking waves. But
+to the right, and nearer to them, the sea was still as an
+inland pool, guarded by the tree-covered hump of land
+on which stood the house of the sirens. This hump,
+which would have been an islet but for the narrow wall
+of sheer rock which joined it to the main-land, ran out
+into the sea parallel to the road.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On the height, Delarey paused for a moment, as if to
+look at the wide view, dim and ethereal, under the
+dying moon.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that Calabria?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. And there is the caff&egrave;. The caves are
+beyond it. You cannot see them from here. But you
+are not looking, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy's quick eyes had noticed that Delarey was
+glancing towards the tangle of trees, among which was
+visible a small section of the gray wall of the house of
+the sirens.</p>
+
+<p>"How calm the sea is there!" Delarey said, swiftly.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. That is where you can see the light in
+the window from our terrace."</p>
+
+<p>"There's no light now."</p>
+
+<p>"How should there be? They are asleep. Andiamo?"</p>
+
+<p>They followed the others, who were now out of sight.
+When they reached the caves, Nito and the boys had already
+flung themselves down upon the sand and were
+sleeping. Gaspare scooped out a hollow for Delarey,
+rolled up his jacket as a pillow for his padrone's head,
+murmured a "Buon riposo!" lay down near him, buried
+his face in his arms, and almost directly began to
+breathe with a regularity that told its tale of youthful,
+happy slumber.</p>
+
+<p>It was dark in the cave and quite warm. The sand
+made a comfortable bed, and Delarey was luxuriously
+tired after the long walk and the wading in the sea.
+When he lay down he thought that he, too, would be
+asleep in a moment, but sleep did not come to him,
+though he closed his eyes in anticipation of it. His
+mind was busy in his weary body, and that little cry
+of a woman still rang in his ears. He heard it like a song
+sung by a mysterious voice in a place of mystery by
+the sea. Soon he opened his eyes. Turning a little in
+the sand, away from his companions, he looked out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+from the cave, across the sloping beach and the foam
+of the waves, to the darkness of trees on the island.
+(So he called the place of the siren's house to himself
+now, and always hereafter.) From the cave he could
+not see the house, but only the trees, a formless, dim
+mass that grew about it. The monotonous sound of
+wave after wave did not still the cry in his ears, but
+mingled with it, as must have mingled with the song of
+the sirens to Ulysses the murmur of breaking seas ever so
+long ago. And he thought of a siren in the night stealing
+to a hidden place in the rocks to watch him as he drew
+the net, breast high in the water. There was romance
+in his mind to-night, new-born and strange. Sicily had
+put it there with the wild sense of youth and freedom
+that still possessed him. Something seemed to call
+him away from this cave of sleep, to bid his tired body
+bestir itself once more. He looked at the dark forms
+of his comrades, stretched in various attitudes of repose,
+and suddenly he knew he could not sleep. He
+did not want to sleep. He wanted&mdash;what? He raised
+himself to a sitting posture, then softly stood up, and
+with infinite precaution stole out of the cave.</p>
+
+<p>The coldness of the coming dawn took hold on him
+on the shore, and he saw in the east a mysterious pallor
+that was not of the moon, and upon the foam of the
+waves a light that was ghastly and that suggested infinite
+weariness and sickness. But he did not say this
+to himself. He merely felt that the night was quickly
+departing, and that he must hasten on his errand before
+the day came.</p>
+
+<p>He was going to search for the woman who had cried
+out to him in the sea. And he felt as if she were a
+creature of the night, of the moon and of the shadows,
+and as if he could never hope to find her in the glory of
+the day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Delarey stole along the beach, walking lightly despite
+his fatigue. He felt curiously excited, as if he
+were on the heels of some adventure. He passed the
+Caff&egrave; Berardi almost like a thief in the night, and came
+to the narrow strip of pebbles that edged the still and
+lakelike water, protected by the sirens' isle. There
+he paused. He meant to gain that lonely land, but how?
+By the water lay two or three boats, but they were large
+and clumsy, impossible to move without aid. Should
+he climb up to the Messina road, traverse the spit of
+ground that led to the rocky wall, and try to make his
+way across it? The feat would be a difficult one, he
+thought. But it was not that which deterred him. He
+was impatient of delay, and the d&eacute;tour would take time.
+Between him and the islet was the waterway. Already
+he had been in the sea. Why not go in again? He
+stripped, packed his clothes into a bundle, tied roughly
+with a rope made of his handkerchief and bootlaces, and
+waded in. For a long way the water was shallow.
+Only when he was near to the island did it rise to his
+breast, to his throat, higher at last. Holding the bundle
+on his head with one hand, he struck out strongly and
+soon touched bottom again. He scrambled out, dressed
+on a flat rock, then looked for a path leading upward.</p>
+
+<p>The ground was very steep, almost precipitous, and
+thickly covered with trees and with undergrowth. This
+undergrowth concealed innumerable rocks and stones
+which shifted under his feet and rolled down as he began
+to ascend, grasping the bushes and the branches. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+could find no path. What did it matter? All sense of
+fatigue had left him. With the activity of a cat he
+mounted. A tree struck him across the face. Another
+swept off his hat. He felt that he had antagonists who
+wished to beat him back to the sea, and his blood rose
+against them. He tore down a branch that impeded him,
+broke it with his strong hands, and flung it away viciously.
+His teeth were set and his nerves tingled, and he
+was conscious of the almost angry joy of keen bodily
+exertion. The body&mdash;that was his God to-night. How
+he loved it, its health and strength, its willingness, its
+capacities! How he gloried in it! It had bounded down
+the mountain. It had gone into the sea and revelled
+there. It had fished and swum. Now it mounted upward
+to discovery, defying the weapons that nature
+launched against it. Splendid, splendid body!</p>
+
+<p>He fought with the trees and conquered them. His
+trampling feet sent the stones leaping downward to be
+drowned in the sea. His swift eyes found the likely
+places for a foothold. His sinewy hands forced his
+enemies to assist him in the enterprise they hated. He
+came out on to the plateau at the summit of the island
+and stood still, panting, beside the house that hid
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Its blind, gray wall confronted him coldly in the dimness,
+one shuttered window, like a shut eye, concealing
+the interior, the soul of the house that lay inside its
+body. In this window must have been set the light
+he had seen from the terrace. He wished there were a
+light burning now. Had he swum across the inlet and
+fought his way up through the wood only to see a gray
+wall, a shuttered window? That cry had come from the
+rocks, yet he had been driven by something within him
+to this house, connecting&mdash;he knew not why&mdash;the cry
+with it and with the far-off light that had been like a
+star caught in the sea. Now he said to himself that he
+should have gone back to the rocks and sought the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+siren there.  Should he go now? He hesitated for a
+moment, leaning against the wall of the house.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Maju torna, maju veni<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cu li belli soi ciureri;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh chi pompa chi nni fa;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Maju torna, maju &egrave; cc&agrave;!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Maju torna, maju vinni,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Duna isca a li disinni;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vinni riccu e ricchi fa,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Maju viva! Maju &egrave; cc&agrave;!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He heard a girl's voice singing near him, whether inside
+the house or among the trees he could not at first
+tell. It sang softly yet gayly, as if the sun were up and
+the world were awake, and when it died away Delarey
+felt as if the singer must be in the dawn, though he stood
+still in the night. He put his ear to the shuttered window
+and listened.</p>
+
+<p>"L'haju; nun l'haju?"</p>
+
+<p>The voice was speaking now with a sort of whimsical
+and half-pathetic merriment, as if inclined to break into
+laughter at its own childish wistfulness.</p>
+
+<p>"M'ama; nun m'ama?"</p>
+
+<p>It broke off. He heard a little laugh. Then the
+song began again:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Maju viju, e maju c&ograve;gghiu,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bona sorti di Di&ugrave; v&ograve;gghiu;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ciuri di maju c&ograve;gghiu a la camp&iacute;a,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Di&ugrave;, pinz&agrave;ticci vu a la sorti mia!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The voice was not in the house. Delarey was sure of
+that now. He was almost sure, too, that it was the
+same voice which had cried out to him from the rocks.
+Moving with precaution, he stole round the house to the
+farther side, which looked out upon the open sea, keeping
+among the trees, which grew thickly about the house<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+on three sides, but which left it unprotected to the sea-winds
+on the fourth.</p>
+
+<p>A girl was standing in this open space, alone, looking
+seaward, with one arm out-stretched, one hand laid
+lightly, almost caressingly, upon the gnarled trunk of
+a solitary old olive-tree, the other arm hanging at her
+side. She was dressed in some dark, coarse stuff, with
+a short skirt, and a red handkerchief tied round her
+head, and seemed in the pale and almost ghastly light
+in which night and day were drawing near to each
+other to be tall and slim of waist. Her head was thrown
+back, as if she were drinking in the breeze that heralded
+the dawn&mdash;drinking it in like a voluptuary.</p>
+
+<p>Delarey stood and watched her. He could not see
+her face.</p>
+
+<p>She spoke some words in dialect in a clear voice.
+There was no one else visible. Evidently she was talking
+to herself. Presently she laughed again, and began
+to sing once more:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Maju viju, e maju c&ograve;gghiu,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A la me'casa guaj nu' nni v&ograve;gghiu;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ciuri di maju c&ograve;gghiu a la camp&iacute;a,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oru ed argentu a la sacchetta mia!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There was an African sound in the girl's voice&mdash;a sound
+of mystery that suggested heat and a force that could be
+languorous and stretch itself at ease. She was singing
+the song the Sicilian peasant girls join in on the first of
+May, when the ciuri di maju is in blossom, and the young
+countrywomen go forth in merry bands to pick the flower
+of May, and, turning their eyes to the wayside shrine, or,
+if there be none near, to the east and the rising sun, lift
+their hands full of the flowers above their heads, and,
+making the sign of the cross, murmur devoutly:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Divina Pruvidenza, pruvvid&igrave;timi;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Divina Pruvidenza, cunsul&agrave;timi;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Divina Pruvidenza &egrave; granni assai;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cu' teni fidi a Di&ugrave;, 'un pirisci mai!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 240px;">
+<a href="images/gs04.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs04_th.jpg" width="240" height="400" alt="&quot;HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE DRINKING IN
+THE BREEZE&quot;" title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">&quot;HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE DRINKING IN
+THE BREEZE&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>Delarey knew neither song nor custom, but his ears
+were fascinated by the voice and the melody. Both
+sounded remote and yet familiar to him, as if once, in
+some distant land&mdash;perhaps of dreams&mdash;he had heard
+them before. He wished the girl to go on singing, to
+sing on and on into the dawn while he listened in his
+hiding-place, but she suddenly turned round and stood
+looking towards him, as if something had told her that
+she was not alone.  He kept quite still.  He knew she
+could not see him, yet he felt as if she was aware that
+he was there, and instinctively he held his breath and
+leaned backward into deeper shadow. After a minute
+the girl took a step forward, and, still staring in his
+direction, called out:</p>
+
+<p>"Padre?"</p>
+
+<p>Then Delarey knew that it was her voice that he had
+heard when he was in the sea, and he suddenly changed
+his desire. Now he no longer wished to remain unseen,
+and without hesitation he came out from the trees. The
+girl stood where she was, watching him as he came.
+Her attitude showed neither surprise nor alarm, and
+when he was close to her, and could at last see her face,
+he found that its expression was one of simple, bold
+questioning. It seemed to be saying to him quietly,
+"Well, what do you want of me?"</p>
+
+<p>Delarey was not acquainted with the Arab type of face.
+Had he been he would have at once been struck by the
+Eastern look in the girl's long, black eyes, by the Eastern
+cast of her regular, slightly aquiline features. Above
+her eyes were thin, jet-black eyebrows that looked almost
+as if they were painted. Her chin was full and her
+face oval in shape. She had hair like Gaspare's, black-brown,
+immensely thick and wavy, with tiny feathers
+of gold about the temples. She was tall, and had the
+contours of a strong though graceful girl just blooming
+into womanhood. Her hands were as brown as Delarey's,
+well shaped, but the hands of a worker. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and brimful of lusty
+life.</p>
+
+<p>After a minute of silence Delarey's memory recalled
+some words of Gaspare's, till then forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>"You are Maddalena!" he said, in Italian.</p>
+
+<p>The girl nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>She uttered the words softly, then fell into silence
+again, staring at him with her lustrous eyes, that were
+like black jewels.</p>
+
+<p>"You live here with Salvatore?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded once more and began to smile, as if with
+pleasure at his knowledge of her.</p>
+
+<p>Delarey smiled too, and made with his arms the motion
+of swimming. At that she laughed outright and
+broke into quick speech. She spoke vivaciously, moving
+her hands and her whole body. Delarey could not understand
+much of what she said, but he caught the words
+mare and pescatore, and by her gestures knew that she
+was telling him she had been on the rocks and had seen
+his mishap. Suddenly in the midst of her talk she
+uttered the little cry of surprise or alarm which he had
+heard as he came up above water, pointed to her lips to
+indicate that she had given vent to it, and laughed again
+with all her heart. Delarey laughed too. He felt happy
+and at ease with his siren, and was secretly amused at his
+thought in the sea of the magical being full of enchantment
+who sang to lure men to their destruction. This
+girl was simply a pretty, but not specially uncommon,
+type of the Sicilian contadina&mdash;young, gay, quite free
+from timidity, though gentle, full of the joy of life and
+of the nascent passion of womanhood, blossoming out
+carelessly in the sunshine of the season of flowers. She
+could sing, this island siren, but probably she could not
+read or write. She could dance, could perhaps innocently
+give and receive love. But there was in her face, in her
+manner, nothing deliberately provocative. Indeed, she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+looked warmly pure, like a bright, eager young animal of
+the woods, full of a blithe readiness to enjoy, full of hope
+and of unself-conscious animation.</p>
+
+<p>Delarey wondered why she was not sleeping, and
+strove to ask her, speaking carefully his best Sicilian,
+and using eloquent gestures, which set her smiling, then
+laughing again. In reply to him she pointed towards
+the sea, then towards the house, then towards the sea
+once more. He guessed that some fisherman had risen
+early to go to his work, and that she had got up to see
+him off, and had been too wakeful to return to bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Niente pi&ugrave; sonno!" he said, opening wide his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Niente! Niente!"</p>
+
+<p>He feigned fatigue. She took his travesty seriously,
+and pointed to the house, inviting him by gesture to go
+in and rest there. Evidently she believed that, being a
+stranger, he could not speak or understand much of her
+language. He did not even try to undeceive her. It
+amused him to watch her dumb show, for her face spoke
+eloquently and her pretty, brown hands knew a language
+that was delicious. He had no longer any thought of
+sleep, but he felt curious to see the interior of the cottage,
+and he nodded his head in response to her invitation.
+At once she became the hospitable peasant hostess. Her
+eyes sparkled with eagerness and pleasure, and she went
+quickly by him to the door, which stood half open,
+pushed it back, and beckoned to him to enter.</p>
+
+<p>He obeyed her, went in, and found himself almost in
+darkness, for the big windows on either side of the door
+were shuttered, and only a tiny flame, like a spark, burned
+somewhere among the dense shadows of the interior
+at some distance from him. Pretending to be alarmed
+at the obscurity, he put out his hand gropingly, and let
+it light on her arm, then slip down to her warm, strong
+young hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>He heard her merry laugh and felt her trying to pull<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+her hand away, but he held it fast, prolonging a joke that
+he found a pleasant one. In that moment he was almost
+as simple as she was, obeying his impulses carelessly,
+gayly, without a thought of wrong&mdash;indeed, almost without
+thought at all. His body was still tingling and damp
+with the sea-water. Her face was fresh with the sea-wind.
+He had never felt more wholesome or as if life
+were a saner thing.</p>
+
+<p>She dragged her hand out of his at last; he heard a
+grating noise, and a faint light sputtered up, then grew
+steady as she moved away and set a match to a candle,
+shielding it from the breeze that entered through the
+open door with her body.</p>
+
+<p>"What a beautiful house!" he cried, looking curiously
+around.</p>
+
+<p>He saw such a dwelling as one may see in any part of
+Sicily where the inhabitants are not sunk in the direst
+poverty and squalor, a modest home consisting of two
+fair-sized rooms, one opening into the other. In each
+room was a mighty bed, high and white, with fat pillows,
+and a counterpane of many colors. At the head of each
+was pinned a crucifix and a little picture of the Virgin,
+Maria Addolorata, with a palm branch that had been
+blessed, and beneath the picture in the inner room a tiny
+light, rather like an English night-light near its end, was
+burning. It was this that Delarey had seen like a spark
+in the distance. At the foot of each bed stood a big box
+of walnut wood, carved into arabesques and grotesque
+faces. There were a few straw chairs and kitchen utensils.
+An old gun stood in a corner with a bundle of wood.
+Not far off was a pan of charcoal. There were also two
+or three common deal-tables, on one of which stood the
+remains of a meal, a big jar containing wine, a flat loaf
+of coarse brown bread, with a knife lying beside it, some
+green stuff in a plate, and a slab of hard, yellow cheese.</p>
+
+<p>Delarey was less interested in these things than in the
+display of photographs, picture-cards, and figures of saints<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+that adorned the walls, carefully arranged in patterns
+to show to the best advantage. Here were colored reproductions
+of actresses in languid attitudes, of peasants
+dancing, of babies smiling, of elaborate young people
+with carefully dressed hair making love with "Molti
+Saluti!" "Una stretta di Mano!" "Mando un bacio!"
+"Amicizia eterna!" and other expressions of friendship
+and affection, scribbled in awkward handwritings across
+and around them. And mingled with them were representations
+of saints, such as are sold at the fairs and
+festivals of Sicily, and are reverently treasured by the
+pious and superstitious contadine; San Pancrazio, Santa
+Leocanda, the protector of child-bearing women; Sant
+Aloe, the patron saint of the beasts of burden; San Biagio,
+Santo Vito, the patron saint of dogs; and many others,
+with the Bambino, the Immacolata, the Madonna di
+Loreto, the Madonna della Rocca.</p>
+
+<p>In the faint light cast by the flickering candle, the faces
+of saints and actresses, of smiling babies, of lovers and
+Madonnas peered at Delarey as if curious to know why
+at such an hour he ventured to intrude among them, why
+he thus dared to examine them when all the world was
+sleeping. He drew back from them at length and looked
+again at the great bed with its fat pillows that stood in
+the farther room secluded from the sea-breeze. Suddenly
+he felt a longing to throw himself down and rest.</p>
+
+<p>The girl smiled at him with sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"That is my bed," she said, simply. "Lie down and
+sleep, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>Delarey hesitated for a moment. He thought of his
+companions. If they should wake in the cave and miss
+him what would they think, what would they do? Then
+he looked again at the bed. The longing to lie down on
+it was irresistible. He pointed to the open door.</p>
+
+<p>"When the sun comes will you wake me?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>He took hold of his arm with one hand, and made the
+motion of shaking himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Sole," he said.    "Quando c'&egrave; il sole."</p>
+
+<p>The girl laughed and nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore&mdash;non dubiti!"</p>
+
+<p>Delarey climbed up on to the mountainous bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Buona notte, Maddalena!" he said, smiling at her
+from the pillow like a boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Buon riposo, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>That was the last thing he heard. The last thing he
+saw was the dark, eager face of the girl lit up by the
+candle-flame watching him from the farther room. Her
+slight figure was framed by the doorway, through which
+a faint, sad light was stealing with the soft wind from the
+sea. Her lustrous eyes were looking towards him curiously,
+as if he were something of a phenomenon, as if
+she longed to understand his mystery.</p>
+
+<p>Soon, very soon, he saw those eyes no more. He was
+asleep in the midst of the Madonnas and the saints, with
+the blessed palm branch and the crucifix and Maria
+Addolorata above his head.</p>
+
+<p>The girl sat down on a chair just outside the door, and
+began to sing to herself once more in a low voice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Divina Pruvidenza, pruvvid&igrave;timi;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Divina Pruvidenza, consul&agrave;timi;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Divina Pruvidenza &egrave; granni assai;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cu' teni fidi a Di&ugrave;, 'un pirisci mai!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Once, in his sleep, Delarey must surely have heard her
+song, for he began to dream that he was Ulysses sailing
+across the purple seas along the shores of an enchanted
+coast, and that he heard far off the sirens singing, and
+saw their shadowy forms sitting among the rocks and reclining
+upon the yellow sands. Then he bade his mariners
+steer the bark towards the shore. But when he
+drew near the sirens changed into devout peasant women,
+and their alluring songs into prayers uttered to the
+Bambino and the Virgin. But one watched him with
+eyes that gleamed like black jewels, and her lips smiled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+while they uttered prayers, as if they could murmur love
+words and kiss the lips of men.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>Delarey stirred on the great, white bed. A hand
+grasped him firmly, shook him ruthlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! C'&egrave; il sole!"</p>
+
+<p>He opened his eyes reluctantly. Maddalena was
+leaning over him. He saw her bright face and curious
+young eyes, then the faces of the saints and the actresses
+upon the wall, and he wondered where he was and
+where Hermione was.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Cosa?" said Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>She shook him again gently. He stretched himself,
+yawned, and began to smile. She smiled back at him.</p>
+
+<p>"C'&egrave; il sole!"</p>
+
+<p>Now he remembered, lifted himself up, and looked
+towards the doorway. The first rays of the sun were
+filtering in and sparkling in the distance upon the sea.
+The east was barred with red.</p>
+
+<p>He slipped down from the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"The frittura!" he said, in English. "I must make
+haste!"</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena laughed. She had never heard English
+before.</p>
+
+<p>"Ditelo ancora!" she cried, eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>They went but together on to the plateau and stood
+looking seaward.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;must&mdash;make&mdash;haste!" he said, speaking slowly
+and dividing the words.</p>
+
+<p>"Hi&mdash;maust&mdash;maiki&mdash;'ai&mdash;isti!" she repeated, trying
+to imitate his accent.</p>
+
+<p>He burst out laughing. She pouted. Then she
+laughed, too, peal upon peal, while the sunlight grew
+stronger about them. How fresh the wind was! It
+played with her hair, from which she had now removed
+the handkerchief, and ruffled the little feathers of gold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+upon her brow. It blew about her smooth, young face
+as if it loved to touch the soft cheeks, the innocent lips,
+the candid, unlined brow. The leaves of the olive-trees
+rustled and the brambles and the grasses swayed.
+Everything was in movement, stirring gayly into life to
+greet the coming day. Maurice opened his mouth and
+drew in the air to his lungs, expanding his chest. He
+felt inclined to dance, to sing, and very much inclined
+to eat.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Maddalena!" he said, holding out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>He looked into her eyes and added:</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Maddalena mia!"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled and looked down, then up at him again.</p>
+
+<p>"A rivederci, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>She took his hand warmly in hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's better. A rivederci!"</p>
+
+<p>He held her hand for a moment, looking into her long
+and laughing eyes, and thinking how like a young animal's
+they were in their unwinking candor. And yet
+they were not like an animal's. For now, when he
+gazed into them, they did not look away from him, but
+continued to regard him, and always with an eager
+shining of curiosity. That curiosity stirred his manhood,
+fired him. He longed to reply to it, to give a
+quick answer to its eager question, its "what are you?"
+He glanced round, saw only the trees, the sea all alight
+with sun-rays, the red east now changing slowly into
+gold. Then he bent down, kissed the lips of Maddalena
+with a laugh, turned and descended through the trees
+by the way he had come. He had no feeling that he
+had done any wrong to Hermione, any wrong to Maddalena.
+His spirits were high, and he sang as he leaped
+down, agile as a goat, to the sea. He meant to return
+as he had come, and at the water's edge he stripped off
+his clothes once more, tied them into a bundle, plunged
+into the sea, and struck out for the beach opposite. As
+he did so, as the cold, bracing water seized him, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+heard far above him the musical cry of the siren of the
+night.    He answered it with a loud, exultant call.</p>
+
+<p>That was her farewell and his&mdash;this rustic Hero's
+good-bye to her Leander.</p>
+
+<p>When he reached the Caff&egrave; Berardi its door stood open,
+and a middle-aged woman was looking out seaward.
+Beyond, by the caves, he saw figures moving. His companions
+were awake. He hastened towards them. His
+morning plunge in the sea had given him a wild appetite.</p>
+
+<p>"Frittura! Frittura!" he shouted, taking off his hat
+and waving it.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare came running towards him.</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you been, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"For a walk along the shore."</p>
+
+<p>He still kept his hat in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, your face is all wet, and so is your hair."</p>
+
+<p>"I washed them in the sea. Mangiamo! Mangiamo!"</p>
+
+<p>"You did not sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare spoke curiously, regarded him with inquisitive,
+searching eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't. I'll sleep up there when we get home."</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to the mountain. His eyes were dancing
+with gayety.</p>
+
+<p>"The frittura, Gasparino, the frittura! And then the
+tarantella, and then 'O sole mio'!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked towards the rising sun, and began to sing
+at the top of his voice:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O sole, o sole mio,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sta 'n fronte a te,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sta 'n fronte a te!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Gaspare joined in lustily, and Carmela in the doorway
+of the Caff&egrave; Berardi waved a frying-pan at them
+in time to the music.</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio, Gaspare!" exclaimed Maurice, as they raced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+towards the house, each striving to be first there&mdash;"Per
+Dio, I never knew what life was till I came to Sicily!
+I never knew what happiness was till this morning!"</p>
+
+<p>"The frittura! The frittura!" shouted Gaspare.
+"I'll be first!"</p>
+
+<p>Neck and neck they reached the caff&egrave; as Nito poured
+the shining fish into Madre Carmela's frying-pan.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"They are coming, signora, they are coming! Don't
+you hear them?"</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia was by the terrace wall looking over into
+the ravine. She could not see any moving figures, but
+she heard far down among the olives and the fruit
+trees Gaspare's voice singing "O sole mio!" and while
+she listened another voice joined in, the voice of the
+padrone:</p>
+
+<p>"Dio mio, but they are merry!" she added, as the
+song was broken by a distant peal of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione came out upon the steps. She had been
+in the sitting-room writing a letter to Miss Townly, who
+sent her long and tearful effusions from London almost
+every day.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you got the frying-pan ready, Lucrezia?"
+she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"The frying-pan, signora!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, for the fish they are bringing us."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia looked knowing.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signora, they will bring no fish."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? They promised last night. Didn't you
+hear?"</p>
+
+<p>"They promised, yes, but they won't remember.
+Men promise at night and forget in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione laughed. She had been feeling a little
+dull, but now the sound of the lusty voices and the
+laughter from the ravine filled her with a sudden cheerfulness,
+and sent a glow of anticipation into her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Lucrezia, you are a cynic."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What is a cinico, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"A Lucrezia. But you don't know your padrone.
+He won't forget us."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia reddened. She feared she had perhaps said
+something that seemed disrespectful.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signora, there is not another like the padrone.
+Every one says so. Ask Gaspare and Sebastiano. I
+only meant that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know. Well, to-day you will understand that
+all men are not forgetful, when you eat your fish."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia still looked very doubtful, but she said nothing
+more.</p>
+
+<p>"There they are!" exclaimed Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>She waved her hand and cried out. Life suddenly
+seemed quite different to her. These moving figures
+peopled gloriously the desert waste, these ringing voices
+filled with music the brooding silence of it. She murmured
+to herself a verse of scripture, "Sorrow may endure
+for a night, but joy cometh with the morning,"
+and she realized for the first time how absurdly sad and
+deserted she had been feeling, how unreasonably forlorn.
+By her present joy she measured her past&mdash;not
+sorrow exactly; she could not call it that&mdash;her past
+dreariness, and she said to herself with a little shock
+almost of fear, "How terribly dependent I am!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!" cried Lucrezia, as another shout of
+laughter came up from the ravine, "how merry and
+mad they are! They have had a good night's fishing."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione heard the laughter, but now it sounded a
+little harsh in her ears.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder," she thought, as she leaned upon the
+terrace wall&mdash;"I wonder if he has missed me at all? I
+wonder if men ever miss us as we miss them?"</p>
+
+<p>Her call, it seemed, had not been heard, nor her gesture
+of welcome seen, but now Maurice looked up, waved
+his cap, and shouted. Gaspare, too, took off his linen
+hat with a stentorian cry of "Buon giorno, signora."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Signora!" said Lucrezia.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Look! Was not I right? Are they carrying anything?"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione looked eagerly, almost passionately, at the
+two figures now drawing near to the last ascent up the
+bare mountain flank. Maurice had a stick in one hand,
+the other hung empty at his side. Gaspare still waved
+his hat wildly, holding it with both hands as a sailor
+holds the signalling-flag.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," she said&mdash;"perhaps it wasn't a good night,
+and they've caught nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signora, the sea was calm. They must have
+taken&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps their pockets are full of fish. I am sure
+they are."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with a cheerful assurance.</p>
+
+<p>"If they have caught any fish, I know your frying-pan
+will be wanted," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?" said Lucrezia, with rather perfunctory
+politeness.</p>
+
+<p>Secretly she thought that the padrona had only one
+fault. She was a little obstinate sometimes, and disinclined
+to be told the truth. And certainly she did not
+know very much about men, although she had a husband.</p>
+
+<p>Through the old Norman arch came Delarey and Gaspare,
+with hot faces and gay, shining eyes, splendidly
+tired with their exertions and happy in the thought of
+rest. Delarey took Hermione's hand in his. He would
+have kissed her before Lucrezia and Gaspare, quite
+naturally, but he felt that her hand stiffened slightly in
+his as he leaned forward, and he forbore. She longed
+for his kiss, but to receive it there would have spoiled a
+joy. And kind and familiar though she was with those
+beneath her, she could not bear to show the deeps of
+her heart before them. To her his kiss after her lonely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+night would be an event. Did he know that? She
+wondered.</p>
+
+<p>He still kept her hand in his as he began to tell her
+about their expedition.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you enjoy it?" she asked, thinking what a boy
+he looked in his eager, physical happiness.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I need. Your eyes tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"I never enjoyed any night so much before, out there
+under the moon. Why don't we always sleep out-of-doors?"</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we try some night on the terrace?"</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove, we will! What a lark!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you go into the sea?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should think so! Ask Gaspare if I didn't beat
+them all. I had to swim, too."</p>
+
+<p>"And the fish?" she said, trying to speak, carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>"They were stunning. We caught an awful lot, and
+Mother Carmela cooked them to a T. I had an appetite,
+I can tell you, Hermione, after being in the
+sea."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent for a moment. Her hand had dropped
+out of his. When she spoke again, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"And you slept in the caves?"</p>
+
+<p>"The others did."</p>
+
+<p>"And you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't sleep, so I went out on to the beach. But
+I'll tell you all that presently. You won't be shocked,
+Hermione, if I take a siesta now? I'm pretty well done&mdash;grandly
+tired, don't you know. I think I could get
+a lovely nap before collazione."</p>
+
+<p>"Come in, my dearest," she said. "Collazione a little
+late, Lucrezia, not till half-past one."</p>
+
+<p>"And the fish, signora?" asked Lucrezia.</p>
+
+<p>"We've got quite enough without fish," said Hermione,
+turning away.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, by Jove!" Delarey said, as they went into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+cottage, putting his hand into his jacket-pocket, "I've
+got something for you, Hermione."</p>
+
+<p>"Fish!" she cried, eagerly, her whole face brightening.
+"Lucre&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Fish in my coat!" he interrupted, still not remembering.
+"No, a letter. They gave it me from the village as
+we came up. Here it is."</p>
+
+<p>He drew out a letter, gave it to her, and went into the
+bedroom, while Hermione stood in the sitting-room by
+the dining-table with the letter in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>It was from Artois, with the Kairouan postmark.</p>
+
+<p>"It's from Emile," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was closing the shutters, to make the bedroom
+dark.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he still in Africa?" he asked, letting down the bar
+with a clatter.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, opening the envelope. "Go to bed
+like a good boy while I read it."</p>
+
+<p>She wanted his kiss so much that she did not go near
+to him, and spoke with a lightness that was almost like
+a feigned indifference. He thrust his gay face through
+the doorway into the sunshine, and she saw the beads
+of perspiration on his smooth brow above his laughing,
+yet half-sleepy eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Come and tuck me up afterwards!" he said, and
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione made a little movement as if to follow him,
+but checked it and unfolded the letter.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+"4, <span class="smcap">Rue d'Abdul Kader, Kairouan.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Friend</span>,&mdash;This will be one of my dreary notes, but
+you must forgive me. Do you ever feel a heavy cloud of apprehension
+lowering over you, a sensation of approaching calamity,
+as if you heard the footsteps of a deadly enemy stealthily approaching
+you? Do you know what it is to lose courage, to
+fear yourself, life, the future, to long to hear a word of sympathy
+from a friendly voice, to long to lay hold of a friendly
+hand? Are you ever like a child in the dark, your intellect no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+weapon against the dread of formless things?  The African sun
+is shining here as I sit under a palm-tree writing, with my servant,
+Zerzour, squatting beside me.  It is so clear that I can
+almost count the veins in the leaves of the palms, so warm that
+Zerzour has thrown off his burnous and kept on only his linen
+shirt.  And yet I am cold and seem to be in blackness.  I write
+to you to gain some courage if I can.  But I have gained none
+yet.  I believe there must be a physical cause for my malaise,
+and that I am going to have some dreadful illness, and perhaps
+lay my bones here in the shadow of the mosques among the
+sons of Islam.  Write to me.  Is the garden of paradise blooming
+with flowers?  Is the tree of knowledge of good weighed
+down with fruit, and do you pluck the fruit boldly and eat it
+every day?  You told me in London to come over and see you.
+I am not coming.  Do not fear.  But how I wish that I could
+now, at this instant, see your strong face, touch your courageous
+hand!  There is a sensation of doom upon me.  Laugh
+at me as much as you like, but write to me. I feel cold&mdash;cold
+in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Emile</span>."<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When she had finished reading this letter, Hermione
+stood quite still with it in her hand, gazing at the white
+paper on which this cry from Africa was traced.  It
+seemed to her that&mdash;a cry from across the sea for help
+against some impending fate.  She had often had
+melancholy letters from Artois in the past, expressing
+pessimistic views about life and literature, anxiety about
+some book which he was writing and which he thought
+was going to be a failure, anger against the follies of men,
+the turn of French politics, or the degeneration of the
+arts in modern times.  Diatribes she was accustomed to,
+and a definite melancholy from one who had not a gay
+temperament.  But this letter was different from all
+the others.  She sat down and read it again.  For the
+moment she had forgotten Maurice, and did not hear his
+movements in the adjoining room.  She was in Africa
+under a palm-tree, looking into the face of a friend with
+keen anxiety, trying to read the immediate future for
+him there.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she called, presently, without getting up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+from her seat, "I've had such a strange letter from
+Emile. I'm afraid&mdash;I feel as if he were going to be
+dreadfully ill or have an accident."</p>
+
+<p>There was no reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she called again.</p>
+
+<p>Then she got up and looked into the bedroom. It
+was nearly dark, but she could see her husband's black
+head on the pillow and hear a sound of regular breathing.
+He was asleep already; she had not received his
+kiss or tucked him up. She felt absurdly unhappy,
+as if she had missed a pleasure that could never come to
+her again. That, she thought, is one of the penalties of
+a great love, the passionate regret it spends on the tiny
+things it has failed of. At this moment she fancied&mdash;no,
+she felt sure&mdash;that there would always be a shadow in
+her life. She had lost Maurice's kiss after his return from
+his first absence since their marriage. And a kiss from
+his lips still seemed to her a wonderful, almost a sacred
+thing, not only a physical act, but an emblem of that
+which was mysterious and lay behind the physical.
+Why had she not let him kiss her on the terrace? Her
+sensitive reserve had made her loss. For a moment she
+thought she wished she had the careless mind of a
+peasant. Lucrezia loved Sebastiano with passion, but
+she would have let him kiss her in public and been proud
+of it. What was the use of delicacy, of sensitiveness, in
+the great, coarse thing called life? Even Maurice had not
+shared her feeling. He was open as a boy, almost as a
+peasant boy.</p>
+
+<p>She began to wonder about him. She often wondered
+about him now in Sicily. In England she never had.
+She had thought there that she knew him as he, perhaps,
+could never know her. It seemed to her that she had
+been almost arrogant, filled with a pride of intellect. She
+was beginning to be humbler here, face to face with Etna.</p>
+
+<p>Let him sleep, mystery wrapped in the mystery of
+slumber!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She sat down in the twilight, waiting till he should
+wake, watching the darkness of his hair upon the pillow.</p>
+
+<p>Some time passed, and presently she heard a noise
+upon the terrace. She got up softly, went into the
+sitting-room, and looked out. Lucrezia was laying the
+table for collazione.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it half-past one already?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"But the padrone is still asleep!"</p>
+
+<p>"So is Gaspare in the hay. Come and see, signora."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia took Hermione by the hand and led her
+round the angle of the cottage. There, under the low
+roof of the out-house, dressed only in his shirt and trousers
+with his brown arms bare and his hair tumbled over his
+damp forehead, lay Gaspare on a heap of hay close to
+Tito, the donkey. Some hens were tripping and pecking
+by his legs, and a black cat was curled up in the hollow
+of his left armpit. He looked infinitely young, healthy,
+and comfortable, like an embodied carelessness that had
+flung itself down to its need.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could sleep like that," said Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!" said Lucrezia, shocked. "You in the
+stable with that white dress! Mamma mia! And the
+hens!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hens, donkey, cat, hay, and all&mdash;I should love it.
+But I'm too old ever to sleep like that. Don't wake
+him!"</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia was stepping over to Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"And I won't wake the padrone. Let them both
+sleep. They've been up all night. I'll eat alone. When
+they wake we'll manage something for them. Perhaps
+they'll sleep till evening, till dinner-time."</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare will, signora. He can sleep the clock round
+when he's tired."</p>
+
+<p>"And the padrone too, I dare say. All the better."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke cheerfully, then went to sit down to her
+solitary meal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The letter of Artois was her only company. She read
+it again as she ate, and again felt as if it had been written
+by a man over whom some real misfortune was impending.
+The thought of his isolation in that remote African
+city pained her warm heart. She compared it with her
+own momentary solitude, and chided herself for minding&mdash;and
+she did mind&mdash;the lonely meal. How much she
+had&mdash;everything almost! And Artois, with his genius,
+his fame, his liberty&mdash;how little he had! An Arab servant
+for his companion, while she for hers had Maurice!
+Her heart glowed with thankfulness, and, feeling how
+rich she was, she felt a longing to give to others&mdash;a longing
+to make every one happy, a longing specially to make
+Emile happy. His letter was horribly sad. Each time
+she looked at it she was made sad by it, even apprehensive.
+She remembered their long and close friendship,
+how she had sympathized with all his struggles, how she
+had been proud of possessing his confidence and of being
+asked to advise him on points connected with his work.
+The past returned to her, kindling fires in her heart, till
+she longed to be near him and to shed their warmth on
+him. The African sun shone upon him and left him cold,
+numb. How wonderful it was, she thought, that the
+touch of a true friend's hand, the smile of the eyes of a
+friend, could succeed where the sun failed. Sometimes
+she thought of herself, of all human beings, as pygmies.
+Now she felt that she came of a race of giants, whose
+powers were illimitable. If only she could be under that
+palm-tree for a moment beside Emile, she would be able
+to test the power she knew was within her, the glorious
+power that the sun lacked, to shed light and heat through
+a human soul. With an instinctive gesture she stretched
+out her hand as if to give Artois the touch he longed for.
+It encountered only the air and dropped to her side.
+She got up with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor old Emile!" she said to herself.   "If only I
+could do something for him!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The thought of Maurice sleeping calmly close to her
+made her long to say "Thank you" for her great happiness
+by performing some action of usefulness, some action
+that would help another&mdash;Emile for choice&mdash;to happiness,
+or, at least, to calm.</p>
+
+<p>This longing was for a moment so keen in her that it
+was almost like an unconscious petition, like an unuttered
+prayer in the heart, "Give me an opportunity to show
+my gratitude."</p>
+
+<p>She stood by the wall for a moment, looking over into
+the ravine and at the mountain flank opposite. Etna
+was startlingly clear to-day. She fancied that if a fly
+were to settle upon the snow on its summit she would be
+able to see it. The sea was like a mirror in which lay
+the reflection of the unclouded sky. It was not far to
+Africa. She watched a bird pass towards the sea.
+Perhaps it was flying to Kairouan, and would settle at
+last on one of the white cupolas of the great mosque
+there, the Mosque of Djama Kebir.</p>
+
+<p>What could she do for Emile? She could at least
+write to him. She could renew her invitation to him to
+come to Sicily.</p>
+
+<p>"Lucrezia!" she called, softly, lest she might waken
+Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora?" said Lucrezia, appearing round the corner
+of the cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"Please bring me out a pen and ink and writing-paper,
+will you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia was standing beside Hermione. Now she
+turned to go into the house. As she did so she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, Antonino from the post-office!"</p>
+
+<p>"Where?" asked Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia pointed to a little figure that was moving
+quickly along the mountain-path towards the cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"There, signora. But why should he come? It is
+not the hour for the post yet."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No. Perhaps it is a telegram. Yes, it must be a
+telegram."</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at the letter in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a telegram from Africa," she said, as if she knew.</p>
+
+<p>And at that moment she felt that she did know.</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia regarded her with round-eyed amazement.</p>
+
+<p>"But, signora, how can you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There, Antonino has disappeared under the trees!
+We shall see him in a minute among the rocks. I'll go to
+meet him."</p>
+
+<p>And she went quickly to the archway, and looked
+down the path where the lizards were darting to and fro
+in the sunshine. Almost directly Antonino reappeared,
+a small boy climbing steadily up the steep pathway, with
+a leather bag slung over his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Antonino!" she called to him. "Is it a telegram?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora!" he cried out.</p>
+
+<p>He came up to her, panting, opened the bag, and gave
+her the folded paper.</p>
+
+<p>"Go and get something to drink," she said. "To eat,
+too, if you're hungry."</p>
+
+<p>Antonino ran off eagerly, while Hermione tore open
+the paper and read these words in French:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Monsieur Artois dangerously ill; fear may not recover; he
+wished you to know.<br />
+<span class="smcap">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Max Berton</span>, Docteur M&eacute;decin, Kairouan."</p></div>
+
+<p>Hermione dropped the telegram. She did not feel at
+all surprised. Indeed, she felt that she had been expecting
+almost these very words, telling her of a tragedy
+at which the letter she still held in her hand had hinted.
+For a moment she stood there without being conscious of
+any special sensation. Then she stooped, picked up the
+telegram, and read it again. This time it seemed like an
+answer to that unuttered prayer in her heart: "Give me
+an opportunity to show my gratitude." She did not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+hesitate for a moment as to what she would do. She
+would go to Kairouan, to close the eyes of her friend if
+he must die, if not to nurse him back to life.</p>
+
+<p>Antonino was munching some bread and cheese and
+had one hand round a glass full of red wine.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to write an answer," she said to him, "and
+you must run with it."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it from Africa, signora?" asked Lucrezia.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia's jaw fell, and she stared in superstitious
+amazement.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder," Hermione thought, "if Maurice&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She went gently to the bedroom. He was still sleeping
+calmly. His attitude of luxurious repose, the sound
+of his quiet breathing, seemed strange to her eyes and
+ears at this moment, strange and almost horrible. For
+an instant she thought of waking him in order to tell
+him her news and consult with him about the journey.
+It never occurred to her to ask him whether there
+should be a journey. But something held her back, as
+one is held back from disturbing the slumber of a tired
+child, and she returned to the sitting-room, wrote out
+the following telegram:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Shall start for Kairouan at once; wire me Tunisia Palace
+Hotel, Tunis,</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Madame Delarey</span>."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, reaching<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+Africa 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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 the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+midst of her now growing sorrow&mdash;for at first she had
+hardly felt sorry, had hardly felt anything but that
+intense restlessness which still possessed her&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And Maurice&mdash;what would he say? What would he&mdash;do?</p>
+
+<p>If only he would wake! There was something terrible
+to her in the contrast between his condition and
+hers at this moment.</p>
+
+<p>And what ought she to do if Maurice&mdash;?</p>
+
+<p>She broke off short in her mental arrangement of
+possible happenings when Maurice should wake.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a life that had been ideal&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"If this should be our last day together in Sicily!"
+she thought, as she watched the light softening among<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+the hills and the shadows of the olive-trees lengthening
+upon the ground.</p>
+
+<p>"If this should be our last night together in the house
+of the priest!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow!" she thought. "Only a few hours and
+this will all be over!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A few hours and it would all be over&mdash;and through
+those hours Maurice slept.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione!" he said, softly.</p>
+
+<p>Then he lay still for a moment and remembered.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! it must be long past time for d&eacute;jeuner!"
+he thought.</p>
+
+<p>He sprang up and put his head into the sitting-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione!" he called.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered, from the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nearly dinner-time."</p>
+
+<p>He burst out laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you think I was going to sleep forever?" he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"Almost," her voice said.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered a little why she did not come to him,
+but only answered him from a distance.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll dress and be out in a moment," he called.</p>
+
+<p>"All right!"</p>
+
+<p>Now that Maurice was awake at last, Hermione's grief
+at the lost afternoon became much more acute, but she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+was 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," she said, "while you've been sleeping I've
+been living very fast and travelling very far."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Something's happened to-day that's&mdash;that's going
+to alter everything."</p>
+
+<p>He looked astonished.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, how grave you are! But what? What could
+happen here?"</p>
+
+<p>"This came."</p>
+
+<p>She gave him the doctor's telegram. He read it
+slowly aloud.</p>
+
+<p>"Artois!" he said. "Poor fellow! And out there in
+Africa all alone!"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped speaking, looked at her, then leaned forward,
+put his arm round her shoulder, and kissed her
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm awfully sorry for you, Hermione," he said.
+"Awfully sorry, I know how you must be feeling.
+When did it come?"</p>
+
+<p>"Some hours ago."</p>
+
+<p>"And I've been sleeping! I feel a brute."</p>
+
+<p>He kissed her again.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't you wake me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just to share a grief? That would have been horrid
+of me, Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked again at the telegram.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you wire?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," she said. "I want to tell you something."</p>
+
+<p>"What, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"I feel I must&mdash;I can't wait here for news."</p>
+
+<p>"But then&mdash;what will you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"While you've been sleeping I've been looking out
+trains."</p>
+
+<p>"Trains! You don't mean&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I must start for Kairouan to-morrow morning.
+Read this, too."</p>
+
+<p>And she gave him Emile's letter.</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't that make you feel his loneliness?" she
+said, when he had finished it. "And think of it now&mdash;now
+when perhaps he knows that he is dying."</p>
+
+<p>"You are going away," he said&mdash;"going away from
+here!"</p>
+
+<p>His voice sounded as if he could not believe it.</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow morning!" he added, more incredulously.</p>
+
+<p>"If I waited I might be too late."</p>
+
+<p>She was watching him with intent eyes, in which
+there seemed to flame a great anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>"You know what friends we've been," she continued.
+"Don't you think I ought to go?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;perhaps&mdash;yes, I see how you feel. Yes, I see.
+But"&mdash;he got up&mdash;"to leave here to-morrow! I felt
+as if&mdash;almost as if we'd been here always and should
+live here for the rest of our lives."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish to Heaven we could!" she exclaimed, her voice
+changing. "Oh, Maurice, if you knew how dreadful it is
+to me to go!"</p>
+
+<p>"How far is Kairouan?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I catch the train at Tunis I can be there the day
+after to-morrow."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And you are going to nurse him, of course?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if&mdash;if I'm in time. Now I ought to pack before
+dinner."</p>
+
+<p>"How beastly!" he said, just like a boy. "How utterly
+beastly! I don't feel as if I could believe it all.
+But you&mdash;what a trump you are, Hermione! To leave
+this and travel all that way&mdash;not one woman in a hundred
+would do it."</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't you for a friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"How Sicilian!" she thought.</p>
+
+<p>She had heard Gaspare speak of his boy friends in
+much the same way.</p>
+
+<p>"Emile is more to me than any one in the world but
+you," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Her voice changed, faltered on the last word, and she
+walked along the terrace to the sitting-room window.</p>
+
+<p>"I must pack now," she said. "Then we can have
+one more quiet time together after dinner."</p>
+
+<p>Her last words seemed to strike him, for he followed
+her, and as she was going into the bedroom, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps&mdash;why shouldn't I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But then he stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Maurice!" she said, quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Who knows?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! Gaspare!" he called.</p>
+
+<p>"Che vuole?" answered a sleepy voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here."</p>
+
+<p>In a moment a languid figure appeared round the
+corner. Maurice explained matters. Instantly Gaspare
+became a thing of quicksilver. He darted to help<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+Hermione. Every nerve seemed quivering to be useful.</p>
+
+<p>"And the signore?" he said, presently, as he carried a
+trunk into the room.</p>
+
+<p>"The signore!" said Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he going, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" said Hermione, swiftly.</p>
+
+<p>She put her finger to her lips. Delarey was just coming
+into the room.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"It brings a lump into my throat," she said, after a
+little pause. "It's too beautiful and too still to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"I love being here," he said.</p>
+
+<p>They ate their dinner in silence for some time. Presently
+Maurice began to crumble his bread.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione," he said. "Look here&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Maurice."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been thinking&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Hermione's rugged face was lit up by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+fire of joy that made her look beautiful. Maurice went
+on crumbling his bread.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't say anything at first," he continued, "because
+I&mdash;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&mdash;why shouldn't I come, too, to
+look after you?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Maurice," she said, quietly. "Thank you,
+dear. I should love to have you with me, but it would
+be a shame!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Why&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"But the journey?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I am accustomed to being a lonely woman.
+Think how short a time we've been married! I've nearly
+always travelled alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know," he said. "Of course there's no danger.
+I didn't mean that, only&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;the very first. Let's try to think of
+that&mdash;of the day when I come up the mountain again to
+my&mdash;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&mdash;and the
+white wall of our little&mdash;home."</p>
+
+<p>She stopped. Then she added:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said. "But you won't see me on the
+terrace."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because, of course, I shall come to the station to meet
+you. That day will be a festa."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione managed to laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of course, Gaspare! Did you think I was going
+away forever?"</p>
+
+<p>"Africa is a long way off."</p>
+
+<p>"Only nine hours from Trapani. I may be back very
+soon. Will you forget me?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione quickly laid her hand on his.</p>
+
+<p>"I was only laughing. You know your padrona trusts
+you to remember her as she remembers you."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare lifted up her hand quickly, kissed it, and
+hurried away, lifting his own hand to his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure he would," said Maurice. "But one doesn't
+find a padrona like you every day."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Let us walk to the arch," she said. "I must take
+my last look at the mountains with you."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," she said. "Do you often try to read people?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that I do, Hermione," he said. "Is it
+easy?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think&mdash;I'm thinking it especially to-night&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why, Hermione?" he asked, simply.</p>
+
+<p>He was looking a little puzzled, but still reverential.</p>
+
+<p>"I love Emile as a friend. You know that."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Would you go to Kairouan if you didn't?"</p>
+
+<p>"If he were to die it would be a great sorrow, a great
+loss to me. I pray that he may live. And yet&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she took his other hand in hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Maurice, I've been thinking to-day, I'm thinking
+now&mdash;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&mdash;nothing left."</p>
+
+<p>He put his arm round her, and was going to speak, but
+she went on:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>She put her head on his shoulder, and he felt her body
+trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'm always natural with you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"You're as natural as Gaspare. Only once, and&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her head and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>"Please God we'll have many more nights together
+here," she said&mdash;"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&mdash;when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+two people love each other in the midst of such a silence
+as this."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The enthusiasm of Hermione for Sicily, the flood of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+understanding 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.</p>
+
+<p>This was just at first, in the silence that followed the
+music.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Courage, Gaspare!" said Maurice, putting his hand
+on the boy's shoulder. "She'll come back very soon."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"The poor signora!" he repeated. "She did not like
+to leave us."</p>
+
+<p>"Let's think of her return," said Maurice.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He turned away suddenly from the terrace and went
+into the house.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;of
+change that was not without excitement. But now&mdash;He
+began to think of the days ahead of him with a faint
+apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The signora should have taken us with her to Africa.
+It would have been better."</p>
+
+<p>"It was impossible, Gaspare," Maurice said, rather
+hastily. "She is going to a poor signore who is ill."</p>
+
+<p>"I know."</p>
+
+<p>The boy paused for a moment. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Is the signore her brother?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her brother! No."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he a relation?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he very old?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare repeated:</p>
+
+<p>"The signora should have taken us with her to
+Africa."</p>
+
+<p>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 was <i>The
+Thousand and One Nights</i>, in Italian. He wanted to
+do something definite, to distract his thoughts&mdash;more
+than ever now after his conversation with Gaspare.
+An idea occurred to him.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"There are stories of Africa in this book," said Maurice,
+opening it.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare looked more alert.</p>
+
+<p>"Of where the signora will be?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?"</p>
+
+<p>He lay down on the warm ground, set his back against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+a 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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>He stretched himself on the warm ground like a
+young animal, then added:</p>
+
+<p>"I shall not take a wife&mdash;ever."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, Gasparino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because if one has a wife one is not free."</p>
+
+<p>"Hm!"</p>
+
+<p>"If I had a wife I should be like the Mago Africano
+when he was shut up in the box."</p>
+
+<p>"And I?" Maurice said, suddenly sitting up. "What
+about me?"</p>
+
+<p>For the first time it seemed to occur to Gaspare that
+he was speaking to a married man. He sat up, too.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but you&mdash;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"&mdash;and he laughed at his own ingenious
+comparison&mdash;"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!"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Maurice frowned.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It isn't like&mdash;" he began.</p>
+
+<p>Then he stopped. The lines in his forehead disappeared,
+and he laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I am pretty free here, too," he said. "At least,
+I feel so."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;dotted with trees near him, but farther away
+bare and sunbaked&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;and what
+more do we want?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand English."</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!" Delarey roared with laughter. "And
+I've been talking English. Well, Gaspare, I can't say it
+in Sicilian&mdash;can I? Let's see."</p>
+
+<p>He thought a minute. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's something like this. Life is simple and splen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>did
+if you let it alone. But if you worry it&mdash;well, then,
+like a dog, it bites you."</p>
+
+<p>He imitated a dog biting. Gaspare nodded seriously.</p>
+
+<p>"Mi piace la vita," he remarked, calmly.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare baaed ironically in reply.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't dinner-time already?" said Maurice, getting
+up reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, meester sir, eef you pleesi," said Gaspare, with
+conscious pride. "We go way."</p>
+
+<p>"Bravo. Well, I'm getting hungry."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+harm 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&mdash;or more&mdash;one of them. He had had a kiss from
+Sicily now&mdash;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&mdash;his
+kiss from Sicily.</p>
+
+<p>He took it at evening.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Damn!"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare came running.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I didn't call, Gaspare, I only said 'Mamma mia!'
+because I burned my fingers."</p>
+
+<p>He struck another match and lit the cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore&mdash;" Gaspare began, and stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes? What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, I&mdash;Lucrezia, you know, has relatives at
+Castel Vecchio."</p>
+
+<p>Castel Vecchio was the nearest village, perched on
+the hill-top opposite, twenty minutes' walk from the
+cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"Ebbene?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Lucrezia wants to go?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, but she is afraid to ask."</p>
+
+<p>"Afraid! Of course she can go, she must go. Tell
+her. But at night can she come back alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, I am invited, but I said&mdash;I did not like the
+first evening that the padrona is away&mdash;if you would
+come they would take it as a great honor."</p>
+
+<p>"Go, Gaspare, take Lucrezia, and bring her back
+safely."</p>
+
+<p>"And you, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"I would come, too, but I think a stranger would
+spoil the festa."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, signore, on the contrary&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know&mdash;you think I shall be sad alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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-col<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>ored
+fringes. They went off together laughing and
+skipping down the stony path like two children.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and to
+Artois.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Delarey&mdash;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&mdash;now he began to realize Hermione's. How<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+quickly 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He began to walk a little faster up and down, always
+keeping along the terrace wall.</p>
+
+<p>He was primitive man to-night, and primitive feelings
+were astir in him. He had not known he possessed them,
+yet he&mdash;the secret soul of him&mdash;did not shrink from them
+in any surprise. To something in him, some part of him,
+they came as things not unfamiliar.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;who knew? Down in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+village the people were gossiping at one another's doors,
+were lounging together in the piazza, were playing cards
+in the caff&egrave;s, were singing and striking the guitars under
+the pepper-trees bathed in the rays of the moon. And
+he&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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!" "&Agrave; 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 the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+festa, the dedication of all their powers to the laughing
+worship of fun.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the passing hour would be forgotten. That was
+certain. It would be dawn ere Lucrezia and Gaspare
+returned.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He had been invited to the festa and he had refused to
+go&mdash;almost eagerly he had refused. Why? There had
+been something secret in his mind which had prompted
+him. He had said&mdash;and even to himself&mdash;that he did
+not go lest his presence might bring a disturbing element
+into the peasants' gayety. But was that his reason?</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Maju torna, maju veni<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cu li belli soi ciureri&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He tried to hum the tune, but it had left his memory.
+He longed to hear it once more under the olive-trees of
+the Sirens' Isle.</p>
+
+<p>Again his thought went to Hermione. Very soon she
+would be out there, far out on the silver of the sea. Had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+she wanted him to go with her? He knew that she had.
+Yet she had not asked him to go, had not hinted at his
+going. Even she had refused to let him go. And he
+had not pressed it. Something had held him back from
+insisting, something secret, and something secret had
+kept her from accepting his suggestion. She was going
+to her greatest friend, to the man she had known intimately,
+long before she had known him&mdash;Delarey&mdash;and
+he was left alone. In England he had never had a
+passing moment of jealousy of Artois; but now, to-night,
+mingled with his creeping resentment against the joys
+of the peasants, of those not far from him under the moon
+of Sicily, there was a sensation of jealousy which came
+from the knowledge that his wife was travelling to her
+friend. That friend might be dead, or she might nurse
+him back to life. Delarey thought of her by his bedside,
+ministering to him, performing the intimate offices of the
+attendant on a sick man, raising him up on his pillows,
+putting a cool hand on his burning forehead, sitting by
+him at night in the silence of a shadowy room, and quite
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>He thought of all this, and the Sicilian that was in him
+grew suddenly hot with a burning sense of anger, a burning
+desire for action, preventive or revengeful. It was
+quite unreasonable, as unreasonable as the vagrant impulse
+of a child, but it was strong as the full-grown determination
+of a man. Hermione had belonged to him.
+She was his. And the old Sicilian blood in him protested
+against that which would be if Artois were still
+alive when she reached Africa.</p>
+
+<p>But it was too late now. He could do nothing. He
+could only look at the shining sea on which the ship
+would bear her that very night.</p>
+
+<p>His inaction and solitude began to torture him. If
+he went in he knew he could not sleep. The mere thought
+of the festa would prevent him from sleeping. Again he
+looked at the lights of Castel Vecchio. He saw only one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+now, and imagined it set in the window of Pancrazio's
+house. He even fancied that down the mountain-side
+and across the ravine there floated to him the faint wail
+of the ceramella playing a dance measure.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he knew that he could not remain all night
+alone on the mountain-side.</p>
+
+<p>He went quickly into the cottage, got his soft hat, then
+went from room to room, closing the windows and barring
+the wooden shutters. When he had come out again
+upon the steps and locked the cottage door he stood for
+a moment hesitating with the large door-key in his hand.
+He said to himself that he was going to the festa at Castel
+Vecchio. Of course he was going there, to dance
+the country dances and join in the songs of Sicily. He
+slipped the key into his pocket and went down the steps
+to the terrace. But there he hesitated again. He took
+the key out of his pocket, looked at it as it lay in his hand,
+then put it down on the sill of the sitting-room window.</p>
+
+<p>"If any one comes, there isn't very much to steal," he
+thought. "And, perhaps&mdash;" Again he looked at the
+lights of Castel Vecchio, then down towards the sea. The
+star of the sea shone steadily and seemed to summon
+him. He left the key on the window-sill, with a quick
+gesture pulled his hat-brim down farther over his eyes,
+hastened along the terrace, and, turning to the left beyond
+the archway, took the path that led through the
+olive-trees towards Isola Bella and the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Through the wonderful silence of the night among the
+hills there came now a voice that was thrilling to his ears&mdash;the
+voice of youth by the sea calling to the youth that
+was in him.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was travelling to her friend. Must he remain
+quite friendless?</p>
+
+<p>All the way down to the sea he heard the calling of the
+voice.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+
+<p>As dawn was breaking, Lucrezia and Gaspare climbed
+slowly up the mountain-side towards the cottage. Lucrezia's
+eyes were red, for she had just bidden good-bye
+to Sebastiano, who was sailing that day for the
+Lipari Isles, and she did not know how soon he would
+be back. Sebastiano had not cried. He loved change,
+and was radiant at the prospect of his voyage. But
+Lucrezia's heart was torn. She knew Sebastiano, knew
+his wild and adventurous spirit, his reckless passion for
+life, and the gifts it scatters at the feet of lusty youth.
+There were maidens in the Lipari Isles. They might be
+beautiful. She had scarcely been jealous of Sebastiano
+before her betrothal to him, for then she had had no
+rights over him, and she was filled with the spirit of
+humbleness that still dwells in the women of Sicily, the
+spirit that whispers "Man may do what he will." But
+now something had arisen within her to do battle with
+that spirit. She wanted Sebastiano for her very own,
+and the thought of his freedom when away tormented
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare comforted her in perfunctory fashion.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it matter?" he said. "When you are
+married you can keep him in the house, and make him
+spin the flax for you."</p>
+
+<p>And he laughed aloud. But when they drew near to
+the cottage he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Zitta, Lucrezia! The padrone is asleep. We must
+steal in softly and not waken him."</p>
+
+<p>On tiptoe they crept along the terrace.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"He will have left the door open for us," whispered
+Gaspare. "He has the revolver beside him and will not
+have been afraid."</p>
+
+<p>But when they stood before the steps the door was
+shut. Gaspare tried it gently. It was locked.</p>
+
+<p>"Phew!" he whistled. "We cannot get in, for we
+cannot wake him."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia shivered. Sorrow had made her feel cold.</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!" she began.</p>
+
+<p>But Gaspare's sharp eyes had spied the key lying on
+the window-sill. He darted to it and picked it up.
+Then he stared at the locked door and at Lucrezia.</p>
+
+<p>"But where is the padrone?" he said. "Oh, I know!
+He locked the door on the inside and then put the key
+out of the window. But why is the bedroom window
+shut? He always sleeps with it open!"</p>
+
+<p>Quickly he thrust the key into the lock, opened the
+door, and entered the dark sitting-room. Holding up
+a warning hand to keep Lucrezia quiet, he tiptoed to
+the bedroom door, opened it without noise, and disappeared,
+leaving Lucrezia outside. After a minute or
+two he came back.</p>
+
+<p>"It is all right. He is sleeping. Go to bed."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia turned to go.</p>
+
+<p>"And never mind getting up early to make the padrone's
+coffee," Gaspare added. "I will do it. I am not
+sleepy. I shall take the gun and go out after the birds."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia looked surprised. Gaspare was not in the
+habit of relieving her of her duties. On the contrary,
+he was a strict taskmaster. But she was tired and
+preoccupied. So she made no remark and went off to
+her room behind the house, walking heavily and untying
+the handkerchief that was round her head.</p>
+
+<p>When she had gone, Gaspare stood by the table, thinking
+deeply. He had lied to Lucrezia. The padrone was
+not asleep. His bed had not been slept in. Where had
+he gone? Where was he now?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Sicilian servant, if he cares for his padrone, feels
+as if he had a proprietor's interest in him. He belongs
+to his padrone and his padrone belongs to him. He
+will allow nobody to interfere with his possession. He
+is intensely jealous of any one who seeks to disturb the
+intimacy between his padrone and himself, or to enter
+into his padrone's life without frankly letting him know
+it and the reason for it. The departure of Hermione had
+given an additional impetus to Gaspare's always lively
+sense of proprietorship in Maurice. He felt as if he had
+been left in charge of his padrone, and had an almost
+sacred responsibility to deliver him up to Hermione happy
+and safe when she returned. This absence, therefore,
+startled and perturbed him&mdash;more&mdash;made him feel guilty
+of a lapse from his duty. Perhaps he should not have
+gone to the festa. True, he had asked the padrone to
+accompany him.    But still&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He went out onto the terrace and looked around him.
+The dawn was faint and pale. Wreaths of mist, like
+smoke trails, hung below him, obscuring the sea. The
+ghostly cone of Etna loomed into the sky, extricating
+itself from swaddling bands of clouds which shrouded
+its lower flanks. The air was chilly upon this height,
+and the aspect of things was gray and desolate, without
+temptation, without enchantment, to lure men out
+from their dwellings.</p>
+
+<p>What could have kept the padrone from his sleep till
+this hour?</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare shivered a little as he stared over the wall.
+He was thinking&mdash;thinking furiously. Although scarcely
+educated at all, he was exceedingly sharp-witted,
+and could read character almost as swiftly and surely
+as an Arab. At this moment he was busily recalling
+the book he had been reading for many weeks in Sicily,
+the book of his padrone's character, written out for him
+in words, in glances, in gestures, in likes and dislikes,
+most clearly in actions.    Mentally he turned the leaves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+until he came to the night of the fishing, to the waning
+of the night, to the journey to the caves, to the dawn
+when he woke upon the sand and found that the padrone
+was not beside him. His brown hand tightened
+on the stick he held, his brown eyes stared with the
+glittering acuteness of a great bird's at the cloud trails
+hiding the sea below him&mdash;hiding the sea, and all that
+lay beside the sea.</p>
+
+<p>There was no one on the terrace. But there was a
+figure for a moment on the mountain-side, leaping downward.
+The ravine took it and hid it in a dark embrace.
+Gaspare had found what he sought, a clew to guide him.
+His hesitation was gone. In his uneducated and intuitive
+mind there was no longer any room for a doubt.
+He knew that his padrone was where he had been in
+that other dawn, when he slipped away from the cave
+where his companions were sleeping.</p>
+
+<p>Surefooted as a goat, and incited to abnormal activity
+by a driving spirit within him that throbbed with closely
+mingled curiosity, jealousy, and anger, Gaspare made
+short work of the path in the ravine. In a few minutes
+he came out on to the road by Isola Bella. On the shore
+was a group of fishermen, all of them friends of his, getting
+ready their fishing-tackle, and hauling down the
+boats to the gray sea for the morning's work. Some of
+them hailed him, but he took no notice, only pulled his
+soft hat down sideways over his cheek, and hurried on
+in the direction of Messina, keeping to the left side of
+the road and away from the shore, till he gained the
+summit of the hill from which the Caff&egrave; Berardi and
+the caves were visible. There he stopped for a moment
+and looked down. He saw no one upon the shore, but
+at some distance upon the sea there was a black dot, a
+fishing-boat. It was stationary. Gaspare knew that
+its occupant must be hauling in his net.</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore is out then!" he muttered to himself, as
+he turned aside from the road onto the promontory,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+which was connected by the black wall of rock with
+the land where stood the house of the sirens. This
+wall, forbidding though it was, and descending sheer
+into the deep sea on either side, had no terrors for him.
+He dropped down to it with a sort of skilful carelessness,
+then squatted on a stone, and quickly unlaced his
+mountain boots, pulled his stockings off, slung them
+with the boots round his neck, and stood up on his bare
+feet. Then, balancing himself with his out-stretched
+arms, he stepped boldly upon the wall. It was very
+narrow. The sea surged through it. There was not
+space on it to walk straight-footed, even with only one
+foot at a time upon the rock. Gaspare was obliged to
+plant his feet sideways, the toes and heels pointing to
+the sea on either hand. But the length of the wall was
+short, and he went across it almost as quickly as if he
+had been walking upon the road. Heights and depths
+had no terrors for him in his confident youth. And he
+had been bred up among the rocks, and was a familiar
+friend of the sea. A drop into it would have only meant
+a morning bath. Having gained the farther side, he
+put on his stockings and boots, grasped his stick, and
+began to climb upward through the thickly growing
+trees towards the house of the sirens. His instinct had
+told him upon the terrace that the padrone was there.
+Uneducated people have often marvellously retentive
+memories for the things of every-day life. Gaspare remembered
+the padrone's question about the little light
+beside the sea, his answer to it, the way in which the
+padrone had looked towards the trees when, in the
+dawn, they stood upon the summit of the hill and he
+pointed out the caves where they were going to sleep.
+He remembered, too, from what direction the padrone
+came towards the caff&egrave; when the sun was up&mdash;and he
+knew.</p>
+
+<p>As he drew near to the cottage he walked carefully,
+though still swiftly, but when he reached it he paused,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+bent forward his head, and listened. He was in the
+tangle of coarse grass that grew right up to the north
+wall of the cottage, and close to the angle which hid
+from him the sea-side and the cottage door. At first he
+heard nothing except the faint murmur of the sea upon
+the rocks. His stillness now was as complete as had
+been his previous activity, and in the one he was as
+assured as in the other. Some five minutes passed.
+Again and again, with a measured monotony, came to
+him the regular lisp of the waves. The grass rustled
+against his legs as the little wind of morning pushed its
+way through it gently, and a bird chirped above his
+head in the olive-trees and was answered by another
+bird. And just then, as if in reply to the voices of the
+birds, he heard the sound of human voices. They were
+distant and faint almost as the lisp of the sea, and were
+surely coming towards him from the sea.</p>
+
+<p>When Gaspare realized that the speakers were not in
+the cottage he crept round the angle of the wall, slipped
+across the open space that fronted the cottage door,
+and, gaining the trees, stood still in almost exactly the
+place where Maurice had stood when he watched Maddalena
+in the dawn.</p>
+
+<p>The voices sounded again and nearer. There was a
+little laugh in a girl's voice, then the dry twang of the
+plucked strings of a guitar, then silence. After a minute
+the guitar strings twanged again, and a girl's voice began
+to sing a peasant song, "Zampagnaro."</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the verse there was an imitation of the
+ceramella by the voice, humming, or rather whining,
+bouche ferm&eacute;e. As it ceased a man's voice said:</p>
+
+<p>"Ancora! Ancora!"</p>
+
+<p>The girl's voice began the imitation again, and the
+man's voice joined in grotesquely, exaggerating the
+imitation farcically and closing it with a boyish shout.</p>
+
+<p>In response, standing under the trees, Gaspare
+shouted. He had meant to keep silence; but the twang<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+of the guitar, with its suggestion of a festa, the singing
+voices, the youthful laughter, and the final exclamation
+ringing out in the dawn, overcame the angry and suspicious
+spirit that had hitherto dominated him. The
+boy's imp of fun was up and dancing within him. He
+could not drive it out or lay it to rest.</p>
+
+<p>"Hi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi!"</p>
+
+<p>His voice died away, and was answered by a silence
+that seemed like a startled thing holding its breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Hi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi!"</p>
+
+<p>He called again, lustily, leaped out from the trees, and
+went running across the open space to the edge of the
+plateau by the sea. A tiny path wound steeply down
+from here to the rocks below, and on it, just under the
+concealing crest of the land, stood the padrone with
+Maddalena. Their hands were linked together, as if
+they had caught at each other sharply for sympathy
+or help. Their faces were tense and their lips parted.
+But as they saw Gaspare's light figure leaping over the
+hill edge, his dancing eyes fixed shrewdly, with a sort
+of boyish scolding, upon them, their hands fell apart,
+their faces relaxed.</p>
+
+<p>"Gasparino!" said Maurice. "It was you who called!"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>He came up to them. Maddalena's oval face had
+flushed, and she dropped the full lids over her black
+eyes as she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Buon giorno, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>"Buon giorno, Donna Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>Then they stood there for a moment in silence. Maurice
+was the first to speak again.</p>
+
+<p>"But why did you come here?" he said. "How did
+you know?"</p>
+
+<p>Already the sparkle of merriment had dropped out
+of Gaspare's face as the feeling of jealousy, of not having
+been completely trusted, returned to his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Did not the signore wish me to know?" he said,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+almost gruffly, with a sort of sullen violence. "I am
+sorry."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice touched the back of his hand, giving it a
+gentle, half-humorous slap.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be an ass, Gaspare. But how could you
+guess where I had gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where did you go before, signore, when you could
+not sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>At this thrust Maurice imitated Maddalena and reddened
+slightly. It seemed to him as if he had been living
+under glass while he had fancied himself enclosed in
+rock that was impenetrable by human eyes. He tried
+to laugh away his slight confusion.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, you are the most birbante boy in Sicily!"
+he said. "You are like a Mago Africano."</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, you should trust me," returned the boy,
+sullenly.</p>
+
+<p>His own words seemed to move him, as if their sound
+revealed to him the whole of the injury that had been
+inflicted upon his amour propre, and suddenly angry
+tears started into his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I was a servant of confidence" (un servitore
+di confidenza), he added, bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was amazed at the depth of feeling thus abruptly
+shown to him. This was the first time he had been
+permitted to look for a moment deep down into that
+strange volcano, a young and passionate Sicilian heart.
+As he looked, swift and short as was his glance, his
+amazement died away. Narcissus saw himself in the
+stream. Maurice saw, or believed he saw, his heart's
+image, trembling perhaps and indistinct, far down in
+the passion of Gaspare. So could he have been with
+a padrone had fate made his situation in life a different
+one. So could he have felt had something been concealed
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice said nothing in reply. Maddalena was there.
+They walked in silence to the cottage door, and there,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+rather like a detected school-boy, he bade her good-bye,
+and set out through the trees with Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"That's not the way, is it?" Maurice said, presently,
+as the boy turned to the left.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you come, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"I!"</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated. Then he saw the uselessness of striving
+to keep up a master's pose with this servant of the
+sea and of the hills.</p>
+
+<p>"I came by water," he said, smiling. "I swam, Gasparino."</p>
+
+<p>The boy answered the smile, and suddenly the tension
+between them was broken, and they were at their ease
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"I will show you another way, signore, if you are not
+afraid."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice laughed out gayly.</p>
+
+<p>"The way of the rocks?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. But you must go barefooted and be
+as nimble as a goat."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you doubt me, Gasparino?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at the boy hard, with a deliberately quizzing
+kindness, that was gay but asked forgiveness, too,
+and surely promised amendment.</p>
+
+<p>"I have never doubted my padrone."</p>
+
+<p>They said nothing more till they were at the wall of
+rock. Then Gaspare seemed struck by hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps&mdash;" he began. "You are not accustomed
+to the rocks, signore, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Silenzio!" cried Maurice, bending down and pulling
+off his boots and stockings.</p>
+
+<p>"Do like this, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare slung his boots and stockings round his neck.
+Maurice imitated him.</p>
+
+<p>"And now give me your hand&mdash;so&mdash;without pulling."</p>
+
+<p>"But you hadn't&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Give me your hand, signore!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was an order. Maurice obeyed it, feeling that in
+these matters Gaspare had the right to command.</p>
+
+<p>"Walk as I do, signore, and keep step with me."</p>
+
+<p>"Bene!"</p>
+
+<p>"And look before you. Don't look down at the sea."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene."</p>
+
+<p>A moment, and they were across. Maurice blew out
+his breath.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove!" he said, in English.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down on the grass, put his hand on his knees,
+and looked back at the rock and at the precipices.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad I can do that!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Something within him was revelling, was dancing a
+tarantella as the sun came up, lifting its blood-red rim
+above the sea-line in the east. He looked over the trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena saw us!" he cried.</p>
+
+<p>He had caught sight of her among the olive-trees
+watching them, with her two hands held flat against her
+breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>The girl started, waved her hand, drew back, and
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad she saw us."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare laughed, but said nothing. They put on
+their boots and stockings, and started briskly off towards
+Monte Amato. When they had crossed the road,
+and gained the winding path that led eventually into
+the ravine, Maurice said:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Have you forgiven me?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is not for a servant to forgive his padrone, signorino,"
+said the boy, but rather proudly.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice feared that his sense of injury was returning,
+and continued, hastily:</p>
+
+<p>"It was like this, Gaspare. When you and Lucrezia
+had gone I felt so dull all alone, and I thought, 'ev<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>ery
+one is singing and dancing and laughing except
+me.'"</p>
+
+<p>"But I asked you to accompany us, signorino,"
+Gaspare exclaimed, reproachfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But you thought we did not want you. Well, then,
+you do not know us!"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Gaspare, don't be angry again. Remember
+that the padrona has gone away and that I depend on
+you for everything."</p>
+
+<p>At the last words Gaspare's face, which had been
+lowering, brightened up a little. But he was not yet
+entirely appeased.</p>
+
+<p>"You have Maddalena," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"She is only a girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, girls are very nice."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be ridiculous, Gaspare. I hardly know Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare laughed; not rudely, but as a boy laughs who
+is sure he knows the world from the outer shell to inner
+kernel.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore, why did you go down to the sea instead
+of coming to the festa?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice did not answer at once. He was asking himself
+Gaspare's question. Why had he gone to the Sirens'
+Isle? Gaspare continued:</p>
+
+<p>"May I say what I think, signore? You know I am
+Sicilian, and I know the Sicilians."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Strangers should be careful what they do in my
+country."</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna! You call me a stranger?"</p>
+
+<p>It was Maurice's turn to be angry. He spoke with sudden
+heat. The idea that he was a stranger&mdash;a straniero&mdash;in
+Sicily seemed to him ridiculous&mdash;almost offensive.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, signore, you have only been here a little while.
+I was born here and have never been anywhere else."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It is true. Go on then."</p>
+
+<p>"The men of Sicily are not like the English or the
+Germans. They are jealous of their women. I have
+been told that in your country, on festa days, if a man
+likes a girl and she likes him he can take her for a walk.
+Is it true?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite true."</p>
+
+<p>"He cannot walk with her here. He cannot even
+walk with her down the street of Marechiaro alone. It
+would be a shame."</p>
+
+<p>"But there is no harm in it."</p>
+
+<p>"Who knows? It is not our custom. We walk with
+our friends and the girls walk with their friends. If
+Salvatore, the father of Maddalena, knew&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He did not finish his sentence, but, with sudden and
+startling violence, made the gesture of drawing out a
+knife and thrusting it upward into the body of an adversary.
+Maurice stopped on the path. He felt as if
+he had seen a murder.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!" said Gaspare, calmly, dropping his hand, and
+staring into Maurice's face with his enormous eyes, which
+never fell before the gaze of another.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but&mdash;I mean no harm to Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>"It does not matter."</p>
+
+<p>"But she did not tell me. She is ready to talk with
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"She is a silly girl. She is flattered to see a stranger.
+She does not think. Girls never think."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke with utter contempt:</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen Salvatore, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You have seen him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not to speak to. When I came down the cottage
+was shut up. I waited&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You hid, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice's face flushed. An angry word rose to his lips,
+but he checked it and laughed, remembering that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+had to deal with a boy, and that Gaspare was devoted
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I waited among the trees&mdash;birbante!"</p>
+
+<p>"And you saw Salvatore?"</p>
+
+<p>"He came out and went down to the fishing."</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore is a terrible man. He used to beat his wife
+Teresa."</p>
+
+<p>"P'f! Would you have me be afraid of him?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice's blood was up. Even his sense of romance
+was excited. He felt that he was in the coils of an adventure,
+and his heart leaped, but not with fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Fear is not for men. But the padrona has left you
+with me because she trusts me and because I know
+Sicily."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to Maurice that he was with an inflexible
+chaperon, against whose dominion it would be difficult,
+if not useless, to struggle. They were walking on again,
+and had come into the ravine. Water was slipping
+down among the rocks, between the twisted trunks of
+the olive-trees. Its soft sound, and the cool dimness in
+this secret place, made Maurice suddenly realize that he
+had passed the night without sleep, and that he would
+be glad to rest. It was not the moment for combat,
+and it was not unpleasant, after all&mdash;so he phrased it in
+his mind&mdash;to be looked after, thought for, educated in
+the etiquette of the Enchanted Isle by a son of its soil,
+with its wild passions and its firm repressions linked
+together in his heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Gasparino," he said, meekly. "I want you to look
+after me. But don't be unkind to me. I'm older than
+you, I know, but I feel awfully young here, and I do
+want to have a little fun without doing any harm to
+anybody, or getting any harm myself. One thing I
+promise you, that I'll always trust you and tell you
+what I'm up to. There! Have you quite forgiven me
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare's face became radiant. He felt that he had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+done his duty, and that he was now properly respected
+by one whom he looked up to and of whom he was not
+merely the servant, but also the lawful guardian.</p>
+
+<p>They went up to the cottage singing in the morning
+sunshine.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice lifted his head lazily from the hands that
+served it as a pillow, and called out, sleepily:</p>
+
+<p>"Che cosa c'&eacute;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Down here under the oak-trees."</p>
+
+<p>He sank back again, and looked up at the section of
+deep-blue sky that was visible through the leaves.
+How he loved the blue, and gloried in the first strong
+heat that girdled Sicily to-day, and whispered to his
+happy body that summer was near, the true and fearless
+summer that comes to southern lands. Through all his
+veins there crept a subtle sense of well-being, as if every
+drop of his blood were drowsily rejoicing. Three days
+had passed, had glided by, three radiant nights, warm,
+still, luxurious. And with each his sense of the south
+had increased, and with each his consciousness of being
+nearer to the breast of Sicily. In those days and nights
+he had not looked into a book or glanced at a paper.
+What had he done? He scarcely knew. He had lived
+and felt about him the fingers of the sun touching him
+like a lover. And he had chattered idly to Gaspare about
+Sicilian things, always Sicilian things; about the fairs
+and the festivals, Capo d'Anno and Carnevale, marted&igrave;
+grasso with its <i>Tavulata</i>, the solemn family banquet at
+which all the relations assemble and eat in company,
+the feasts of the different saints, the peasant marriages
+and baptisms, the superstitions&mdash;Gaspare did not call
+them so&mdash;that are alive in Sicily, and that will surely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+live till Sicily is no more; the fear of the evil-eye and of
+spells, and the best means of warding them off, the
+"guaj di lu linu," the interpretation of dreams, the
+power of the Mafia, the legends of the brigands, and the
+vanished glory of Musolino. Gaspare talked without reserve
+to his padrone, as to another Sicilian, and Maurice
+was never weary of listening. All that was of Sicily
+caught his mind and heart, was full of meaning to him,
+and of irresistible fascination. He had heard the call
+of the blood once for all and had once for all responded
+to it.</p>
+
+<p>But the nights he had loved best. For then he slept
+under the stars. When ten o'clock struck he and Gaspare
+carried out one of the white beds onto the terrace,
+and he slipped into it and lay looking up at the clear
+sky, and at the dimness of the mountain flank, and at
+the still silhouettes of the trees, till sleep took him,
+while Gaspare, rolled up in a rug of many colors, snuggled
+up on the seat by the wall with his head on a cushion
+brought for him by the respectful Lucrezia. And
+they awoke at dawn to see the last star fade above the
+cone of Etna, and the first spears of the sun thrust up
+out of the stillness of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, ecco la posta!"</p>
+
+<p>And Gaspare came running down from the terrace,
+the wide brim of his white linen hat flapping round his
+sun-browned face.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want it, Gaspare.    I don't want anything."</p>
+
+<p>"But I think there's a letter from the signora!"</p>
+
+<p>"From Africa?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice sat up and held out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it is from Kairouan. Sit down, Gaspare, and
+I'll tell you what the padrona says."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare squatted on his haunches like an Oriental,
+not touching the ground with his body, and looked
+eagerly at the letter that had come across the sea. He
+adored his padrona, and was longing for news of her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+Already he had begun to send her picture post-cards,
+laboriously written over. "Tanti saluti carissima Signora
+Pertruni, a rividici, e suno il suo servo fidelisimo per
+sempre&mdash;Martucci Gaspare. Adio! Adio! Ciao! Ciao!"
+What would she say? And what message would she
+send to him? His eyes sparkled with affectionate expectation.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+<span class="smcap">"Hotel de France, Kairouan.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My Dearest</span>,&mdash;I cannot write very much, for all my moments
+ought to be given up to nursing Emile. Thank God, I
+arrived in time. Oh, Maurice, when I saw him I can't tell you how
+thankful I was that I had not hesitated to make the journey,
+that I had acted at once on my first impulse to come here. And
+how I blessed God for having given me an unselfish husband
+who trusted me completely, and who could understand what
+true friendship between man and woman means, and what one
+owes to a friend. You might so easily have misunderstood,
+and you are so blessedly understanding. Thank you, dearest,
+for seeing that it was right of me to go, and for thinking of
+nothing but that. I feel so proud of you, and so proud to be
+your wife. Well, I caught the train at Tunis mercifully, and
+got here at evening. He is frightfully ill. I hardly recognized
+him. But his mind is quite clear, though he suffers terribly.
+He was poisoned by eating some tinned food, and peritonitis
+has set in. We can't tell yet whether he will live or die. When
+he saw me come in he gave me such a look of gratitude, although
+he was writhing with pain, that I couldn't help crying. It
+made me feel so ashamed of having had any hesitation in my
+heart about coming away from our home and our happiness.
+And it was difficult to give it all up, to come out of paradise.
+That last night I felt as if I simply couldn't leave you, my
+darling. But I'm glad and thankful I've done it. I have to
+do everything for him. The doctor's rather an ass, very French
+and excitable, but he does his best. But I have to see to
+everything, and be always there to put on the poultices and the
+ice, and&mdash;poor fellow, he does suffer so, but he's awfully brave
+and determined to live. He says he will live if it's only to
+prove that I came in time to save him. And yet, when I look
+at him, I feel as if&mdash;but I won't give up hope. The heat here
+is terrible, and tries him very much now he is so desperately ill,
+and the flies&mdash;but I don't want to bother you with my troubles.
+They're not very great&mdash;only one. Do you guess what that is?
+I scarcely dare to think of Sicily. Whenever I do I feel such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+a horrible ache in my heart. It seems to me as if I had not seen
+your face or touched your hand for centuries, and sometimes&mdash;and
+that's the worst of all&mdash;as if I never should again, as if
+our time together and our love were a beautiful dream, and
+God would never allow me to dream it again. That's a little
+morbid, I know, but I think it's always like that with a great
+happiness, a happiness that is quite complete. It seems almost
+a miracle to have had it even for a moment, and one can scarcely
+believe that one will be allowed to have it again. But,
+please God, we will. We'll sit on the terrace again together, and
+see the stars come out, and&mdash;The doctor's come and I must
+stop. I'll write again almost directly. Good-night, my dearest.
+Buon riposo. Do you remember when you first heard
+that? Somehow, since then I always connect the words with
+you. I won't send my love, because it's all in Sicily with you.
+I'll send it instead to Gaspare. Tell him I feel happy that he
+is with the padrone, because I know how faithful and devoted
+he is. Tanti saluti a Lucrezia. Oh, Maurice, pray that I may
+soon be back. You do want me, don't you?</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Hermione.</span>"<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Maurice looked up from the letter and met Gaspare's
+questioning eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"There's something for you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>And he read in Italian Hermione's message. Gaspare
+beamed with pride and pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"And the sick signore?" he asked. "Is he better?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice explained how things were.</p>
+
+<p>"The signora is longing to come back to us," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course she is," said Gaspare, calmly.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly he jumped up.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino," he said. "I am going to write a letter
+to the signora. She will like to have a letter from me.
+She will think she is in Sicily."</p>
+
+<p>"And when you have finished, I will write," said
+Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>And Gaspare ran off up the hill towards the cottage,
+leaving his master alone.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice began to read the letter again, slowly. It made
+him feel almost as if he were with Hermione. He seem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>ed
+to see her as he read, and he smiled. How good she
+was and true, and how enthusiastic! When he had
+finished the second reading of the letter he laid it down,
+and put his hands behind his head again, and looked
+up at the quivering blue. Then he thought of Artois.
+He remembered his tall figure, his robust limbs, his
+handsome, powerful face. It was strange to think that
+he was desperately ill, perhaps dying. Death&mdash;what
+must that be like? How deep the blue looked, as if
+there were thousands of miles of it, as if it stretched
+on and on forever! Artois, perhaps, was dying, but he
+felt as if he could never die, never even be ill. He
+stretched his body on the warm ground. The blue
+seemed to deny the fact of death. He tried to imagine
+Artois in bed in the heat of Africa, with the flies buzzing
+round him. Then he looked again at the letter,
+and reread that part in which Hermione wrote of her
+duties as sick-nurse.</p>
+
+<p>"I have to see to everything, and be always there to
+put on the poultices and the ice."</p>
+
+<p>He read those words again and again, and once more
+he was conscious of a stirring of anger, of revolt, such
+as he had felt on the night after Hermione's departure
+when he was alone on the terrace. She was his wife,
+his woman. What right had she to be tending another
+man? His imagination began to work quickly now,
+and he frowned as he looked up at the blue. He forgot
+all the rest of Hermione's letter, all her love of him
+and her longing to be back in Sicily with him, and
+thought only of her friendship for Artois, of her ministrations
+to Artois. And something within him sickened
+at the thought of the intimacy between patient and
+nurse, raged against it, till he felt revengeful. The wild
+unreasonableness of his feeling did not occur to him
+now. He hated that his wife should be performing these
+offices for Artois; he hated that she had chosen to go
+to him, that she had considered it to be her duty to go.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Had it been only a sense of duty that had called her
+to Africa?</p>
+
+<p>When he asked himself this question he could not
+hesitate what answer to give. Even this new jealousy,
+this jealousy of the Sicilian within him, could not trick
+him into the belief that Hermione had wanted to leave
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Yet his feeling of bitterness, of being wronged, persisted
+and grew.</p>
+
+<p>When, after a very long time, Gaspare came to show
+him a letter written in large, round hand, he was still
+hot with the sense of injury. And a new question was
+beginning to torment him.    What must Artois think?</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you going to write, signorino?" asked Gaspare,
+when Maurice had read his letter and approved it.</p>
+
+<p>"I?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>He saw an expression of surprise on Gaspare's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, of course. I'll write now. Help me up. I
+feel so lazy!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare seized his hands and pulled, laughing. Maurice
+stood up and stretched.</p>
+
+<p>"You are more lazy than I, signore," said Gaspare.
+"Shall I write for you, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke abstractedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know what to say?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice looked at him swiftly. The boy had divined
+the truth. In his present mood it would be difficult for
+him to write to Hermione. Still, he must do it. He
+went up to the cottage and sat down at the writing-table
+with Hermione's letter beside him.</p>
+
+<p>He read it again carefully, then began to write. Now
+he was faintly aware of the unreason of his previous
+mood and quite resolved not to express it, but while
+he was writing of his every-day life in Sicily a vision of
+the sick-room in Africa came before him again. He
+saw his wife shut in with Artois, tending him. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+night, warm and dark. The sick man was hot with
+fever, and Hermione bent over him and laid her cool
+hand on his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>Abruptly Maurice finished his letter and thrust it into
+an envelope.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, Gaspare!" he said. "Take the donkey and
+ride down with these to the post."</p>
+
+<p>"How quick you have been, signore! I believe my
+letter to the signora is longer than yours."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it is. I don't know. Off with you!"</p>
+
+<p>When Gaspare was gone, Maurice felt restless, almost
+as he had felt on the night when he had been left alone
+on the terrace. Then he had been companioned by a
+sensation of desertion, and had longed to break out into
+some new life, to take an ally against the secret enemy
+who was attacking him. He had wanted to have his
+Emile Artois as Hermione had hers. That was the
+truth of the matter. And his want had led him down
+to the sea. And now again he looked towards the sea,
+and again there was a call from it that summoned him.</p>
+
+<p>He had not seen Maddalena since Gaspare came to
+seek him in the Sirens' Isle. He had scarcely wanted
+to see her. The days had glided by in the company of
+Gaspare, and no moment of them had been heavy or
+had lagged upon its way.</p>
+
+<p>But now he heard again the call from the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was with her friend. Why should not he
+have his? But he did not go down the path to the
+ravine, for he thought of Gaspare. He had tricked him
+once, while he slept in the cave, and once Gaspare had
+tracked him to the sirens' house. They had spoken of
+the matter of Maddalena. He knew Gaspare. If he
+went off now to see Maddalena the boy would think
+that the sending him to the post was a pretext, that he
+had been deliberately got out of the way. Such a crime
+could never be forgiven. Maurice knew enough about
+the Sicilian character to be fully aware of that. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+what had he to hide? Nothing. He must wait for
+Gaspare, and then he could set out for the sea.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him a long time before he saw Tito, the
+donkey, tripping among the stones, and heard Gaspare's
+voice hailing him from below. He was impatient to
+be off, and he shouted out:</p>
+
+<p>"Presto, Gaspare, presto!"</p>
+
+<p>He saw the boy's arm swing as he tapped Tito behind
+with his switch, and the donkey's legs moving in a canter.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, signorino? Has anything happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. But&mdash;Gaspare, I'm going down to the sea."</p>
+
+<p>"To bathe?"</p>
+
+<p>"I may bathe. I'm not sure. It depends upon how
+I go."</p>
+
+<p>"You are going to the Casa delle Sirene?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't care to go off while you were away."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you wish me to come with you, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>The boy's great eyes were searching him, yet he did
+not feel uncomfortable, although he wished to stand well
+with Gaspare. They were near akin, although different
+in rank and education. Between their minds there was
+a freemasonry of the south.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want to come?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's as you like, signore."</p>
+
+<p>He was silent for a moment; then he added:</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore might be there now. Do you want him
+to see you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>A project began to form in his mind. If he took Gaspare
+with him they might go to the cottage more naturally.
+Gaspare knew Salvatore and could introduce
+him, could say&mdash;well, that he wanted sometimes to go
+out fishing and would take Salvatore's boat. Salvatore
+would see a prospect of money. And he&mdash;Maurice&mdash;did
+want to go out fishing. Suddenly he knew it. His
+spirits rose and he clapped Gaspare on the back.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course I do. I want to know Salvatore. Come
+along. We'll take his boat one day and go out fishing."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare's grave face relaxed in a sly smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!" he said, shaking his hand to and fro
+close to his nose. "Birbante!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a world of meaning in his voice. Maurice
+laughed joyously. He began to feel like an ingenious
+school-boy who was going to have a lark. There was
+neither thought of evil nor even a secret stirring of
+desire for it in him.</p>
+
+<p>"A rivederci, Lucrezia!" he cried.</p>
+
+<p>And they set off.</p>
+
+<p>When they were not far from the sea, Gaspare said:</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, why do you like to come here? What
+is the good of it?"</p>
+
+<p>They had been walking in silence. Evidently these
+questions were the result of a process of thought which
+had been going on in the boy's mind.</p>
+
+<p>"The good!" said Maurice. "What is the harm?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, here in Sicily, when a man goes to see a girl
+it is because he wants to love her."</p>
+
+<p>"In England it is different, Gaspare. In England
+men and women can be friends.  Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"You want just to be a friend of Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. I like to talk to the people. I want to
+understand them. Why shouldn't I be friends with
+Maddalena as&mdash;as I am with Lucrezia?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Lucrezia is your servant."</p>
+
+<p>"It's all the same."</p>
+
+<p>"But perhaps Maddalena doesn't know. We are
+Sicilians here, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean? That Maddalena might&mdash;nonsense,
+Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a sound as of sudden pleasure, even sudden triumph,
+in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure you understand our girls, signore?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"If Maddalena does like me there's no harm in it.
+She knows who I am now. She knows I&mdash;she knows
+there is the signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. There is the signora. She is in Africa,
+but she is coming back."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course!"</p>
+
+<p>"When the sick signore gets well?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice said nothing. He felt sure Gaspare was
+wondering again, wondering that Hermione was in
+Africa.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot understand how it is in England," continued
+the boy. "Here it is all quite different."</p>
+
+<p>Again jealousy stirred in Maurice and a sensation almost
+of shame. For a moment he felt like a Sicilian
+husband at whom his neighbors point the two fingers
+of scorn, and he said something in his wrath which
+was unworthy.</p>
+
+<p>"You see how it is," he said. "If the signora can go
+to Africa to see her friend, I can come down here to see
+mine. That is how it is with the English."</p>
+
+<p>He did not even try to keep the jealousy out of his
+voice, his manner. Gaspare leaped to it.</p>
+
+<p>"You did not like the signora to go to Africa!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she will come back. It's all right," Maurice
+answered, hastily. "But, while she is there, it would
+be absurd if I might not speak to any one."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare's burden of doubt, perhaps laid on his young
+shoulders by his loyalty to his padrona, was evidently
+lightened.</p>
+
+<p>"I see, signore," he said. "You can each have a
+friend. But have you explained to Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you think it necessary, I will explain."</p>
+
+<p>"It would be better, because she is Sicilian and she
+must think you love her."</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy looked at him keenly and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"You would like her to think that?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Maurice denied it vigorously, but Gaspare only shook
+his head and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I know, I know. Girls are nicest when they think
+that, because they are pleased and they want us to go
+on. You think I see nothing, signorino, but I saw it
+all in Maddalena's face. Per Dio!"</p>
+
+<p>And he laughed aloud, with the delight of a boy who
+has discovered something, and feels that he is clever and
+a man. And Maurice laughed too, not without a pride
+that was joyous. The heart of his youth, the wild
+heart, bounded within him, and the glory of the sun,
+and the passionate blue of the sea seemed suddenly
+deeper, more intense, more sympathetic, as if they felt
+with him, as if they knew the rapture of youth, as if
+they were created to call it forth, to condone its carelessness,
+to urge it to some almost fierce fulfilment.</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore is there, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw the smoke from his pipe. Look, there it is
+again!"</p>
+
+<p>A tiny trail of smoke curled up; and faded in the blue.</p>
+
+<p>"I will go first because of Maddalena. Girls are silly.
+If I do this at her she will understand. If not she may
+show her father you have been here before."</p>
+
+<p>He closed one eye in a large and expressive wink.</p>
+
+<p>"Birbante!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is good to be birbante sometimes."</p>
+
+<p>He went out from the trees and Maurice heard his
+voice, then a man's, then Maddalena's. He waited where
+he was till he heard Gaspare say:</p>
+
+<p>"The padrone is just behind. Signorino, where are
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here!" he answered, coming into the open with a
+careless air.</p>
+
+<p>Before the cottage door in the sunshine a great fishing-net
+was drying, fastened to two wooden stakes. Near
+it stood Salvatore, dressed in a dark-blue jersey, with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+soft black hat tilted over his left ear, above which was
+stuck a yellow flower. Maddalena was in the doorway
+looking very demure. It was evident that the wink of
+Gaspare had been seen and comprehended. She stole a
+glance at Maurice but did not move. Her father took
+off his hat with an almost wildly polite gesture, and said,
+in a loud voice:</p>
+
+<p>"Buona sera, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Buona sera," replied Maurice, holding out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore took it in a large grasp.</p>
+
+<p>"You are the signore who lives up on Monte Amato
+with the English lady?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"I know. She has gone to Africa."</p>
+
+<p>He stared at Maurice while he spoke, with small, twinkling
+eyes, round which was a minute and intricate web
+of wrinkles, and again Maurice felt almost&mdash;or was it
+quite?&mdash;ashamed. What were these Sicilians thinking
+of him?</p>
+
+<p>"The signora will be back almost directly," he said.
+"Is this your daughter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Maddalena. Bring a chair for the signore,
+Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena obeyed. There was a slight flush on her
+face and she did not look at Maurice. Gaspare stood
+pulling gently at the stretched-out net, and smiling.
+That he enjoyed the mild deceit of the situation was
+evident. Maurice, too, felt amused and quite at his
+ease now. His sensation of shame had fleeted away,
+leaving only a conviction that Hermione's absence gave
+him a right to snatch all the pleasure he could from the
+hands of the passing hour.</p>
+
+<p>He drew out his cigar-case and offered it to Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"One day I want to come fishing with you if you'll
+take me," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore looked eager. A prospect of money floated
+before him:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I can show you fine sport, signore," he answered,
+taking one of the long Havanas and examining it with
+almost voluptuous interest as he turned it round and
+round in his salty, brown fingers. "But you should
+come out at dawn, and it is far from the mountain to
+the sea."</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't I sleep here, so as to be ready?"</p>
+
+<p>He stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking at
+her feet, and twisting the front of her short dress, but
+her lips were twitching with a smile which she tried to
+repress.</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't I sleep here to-night?" he added, boldly.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore looked more eager. He loved money almost
+as an Arab loves it, with anxious greed. Doubtless
+Arab blood ran in his veins. It was easy to see from
+whom Maddalena had inherited her Eastern appearance.
+She reproduced, on a diminished scale, her father's outline
+of face, but that which was gentle, mysterious, and
+alluring in her, in him was informed with a rugged
+wildness. There was something bird-like and predatory
+in his boldly curving nose with its narrow nostrils, in
+his hard-lipped mouth, full of splendid teeth, in his sharp
+and pushing chin. His whole body, wide-shouldered
+and deep-chested, as befitted a man of the sea, looked
+savage and fierce, but full of an intensity of manhood
+that was striking, and his gestures and movements, the
+glance of his penetrating eyes, the turn of his well-poised
+head, revealed a primitive and passionate nature, a nature
+with something of the dagger in it, steely, sharp, and
+deadly.</p>
+
+<p>"But, signore, our home is very poor. Look, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>A turkey strutted out through the doorway, elongating
+its neck and looking nervously intent.</p>
+
+<p>"Ps&mdash;sh&mdash;sh&mdash;sh!"</p>
+
+<p>He shooed it away, furiously waving his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"And what could you eat? There is only bread and
+wine."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And the yellow cheese!" said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"The&mdash;?" Salvatore looked sharply interrogative.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean, there is always cheese, isn't there, in Sicily,
+cheese and macaroni? But if there isn't, it's all right.
+Anything will do for me, and I'll buy all the fish we
+take from you, and Maddalena here shall cook it for us
+when we come back from the sea. Will you, Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>The answer came in a very small voice.</p>
+
+<p>"The signore is too good."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore was looking openly voracious now.</p>
+
+<p>"I can sleep on the floor."</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore. We have beds, we have two fine beds.
+Come in and see."</p>
+
+<p>With not a little pride he led Maurice into the cottage,
+and showed him the bed on which he had already slept.</p>
+
+<p>"That will be for the signore, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>"Si&mdash;&egrave; molto bello."</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena and I&mdash;we will sleep in the outer room."</p>
+
+<p>"And I, Salvatore?" demanded the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"You! Do you stay too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. Don't I stay, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if Lucrezia won't be frightened."</p>
+
+<p>"It does not matter if she is. When we do not come
+back she will keep Guglielmo, the contadino."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you must stay. You can sleep with me.
+And to-night we'll play cards and sing and dance.
+Have you got any cards, Salvatore?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. They are dirty, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right. And we'll sit outside and tell
+stories, stories of brigands and the sea. Salvatore,
+when you know me, you'll know I'm a true Sicilian."</p>
+
+<p>He grasped Salvatore's hand, but he looked at Maddalena.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Night had come to the Sirens' Isle&mdash;a night that was
+warm, gentle, and caressing. In the cottage two candles
+were lit, and the wick was burning in the glass before
+the Madonna. Outside the cottage door, on the flat
+bit of ground that faced the wide sea, Salvatore and his
+daughter, Maurice and Gaspare, were seated round the
+table finishing their simple meal, for which Salvatore
+had many times apologized. Their merry voices, their
+hearty laughter rang out in the darkness, and below the
+sea made answer, murmuring against the rocks.</p>
+
+<p>At the same moment in an Arab house Hermione bent
+over a sick man, praying against death, whose footsteps
+she seemed already to hear coming into the room and
+approaching the bed on which he tossed, white with
+agony. And when he was quiet for a little and ceased
+from moving, she sat with her hand on his and thought
+of Sicily, and pictured her husband alone under the
+stars upon the terrace before the priest's house, and
+imagined him thinking of her. The dry leaves of a
+palm-tree under the window of the room creaked in the
+light wind that blew over the flats, and she strove to
+hear the delicate rustling of the leaves of olive-trees.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore had little food to offer his guests, only
+bread, cheese, and small, black olives; but there was
+plenty of good red wine, and when the time of brindisi
+was come Salvatore and Gaspare called for health after
+health, and rivalled each other in wild poetic efforts,
+improvising extravagant compliments to Maurice, to the
+absent signora, to Maddalena, and even to themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+And with each toast the wine went down till Maurice
+called a halt.</p>
+
+<p>"I am a real Sicilian," he said. "But if I drink any
+more I shall be under the table. Get out the cards,
+Salvatore. Sette e mezzo, and I'll put down the stakes.
+No one to go above twenty-five centesimi, with fifty for
+the doubling. Gaspare's sure to win. He always does.
+And I've just one cigar apiece. There's no wind. Bring
+out the candles and let's play out here."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare ran for the candles while Salvatore got the
+cards, well-thumbed and dirty. Maddalena's long eyes
+were dancing. Such a festa as this was rare in her life,
+for, dwelling far from the village, she seldom went to
+any dance or festivity. Her blood was warm with the
+wine and with joy, and the youth in her seemed to flow
+like the sea in a flood-tide. Scarcely ever before had
+she seen her harsh father so riotously gay, so easy with
+a stranger, and she knew in her heart that this was her
+festival. Maurice's merry and ardent eyes told her that,
+and Gaspare's smiling glances of boyish understanding.
+She felt excited, almost light-headed, childishly proud of
+herself. If only some of the girls of Marechiaro could
+see, could know!</p>
+
+<p>When the cards were thrown upon the table, and
+Maurice had dealt out a lira to each one of the players
+as stakes, and cried, "Maddalena and I'll share against
+you, Salvatore, and Gaspare!" she felt that she had
+nothing more to wish for, that she was perfectly happy.
+But she was happier still when, after a series of games,
+Maurice pushed back his chair and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I've had enough. Salvatore, you are like Gaspare,
+you have the devil's luck. Together you can't be
+beaten. But now you play against each other and let's
+see who wins. I'll put down twenty-five lire. Play till
+one of you's won every soldo of it. Play all night if
+you like."</p>
+
+<p>And he counted out the little paper notes on the table,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+giving two to Salvatore and two to Gaspare, and putting
+one under a candlestick.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll keep the score," he added, pulling out a pencil
+and a sheet of paper. "No play higher than fifty, with
+a lira when one of you makes 'sette e mezzo' with under
+four cards."</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio!" cried Gaspare, flushed with excitement.
+"Avanti, Salvatore!"</p>
+
+<p>"Avanti, Avanti!" cried Salvatore, in answer, pulling
+his chair close up to the table, and leaning forward,
+looking like a handsome bird of prey in the faint candlelight.</p>
+
+<p>They cut for deal and began to play, while Maddalena
+and Maurice watched.</p>
+
+<p>When Sicilians gamble they forget everything but
+the game and the money which it brings to them or
+takes from them. Salvatore and Gaspare were at once
+passionately intent on their cards, and as the night
+drew on and fortune favored first one and then the
+other, they lost all thought of everything except the
+twenty-five lire which were at stake. When Maddalena
+slipped away into the darkness they did not notice
+her departure, and when Maurice laid down the paper on
+which he had tried to keep the score, and followed her,
+they were indifferent. They needed no score-keeper,
+for they had Sicilian memories for money matters.
+Over the table they leaned, the two candles, now burning
+low, illuminating their intense faces, their violent
+eyes, their brown hands that dealt and gathered up
+the cards, and held them warily, alert for the cheating
+that in Sicily, when possible, is ever part of the game.</p>
+
+<p>"Carta da cinquanta!"</p>
+
+<p>They had forgotten Maurice's limit for the stakes.</p>
+
+<p>"Carta da cento!"</p>
+
+<p>Their voices died away from Maurice's ears as he stole
+through the darkness seeking Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>Where had she gone, and why? The last question<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+he could surely answer, for as she stole past him silently,
+her long, mysterious eyes, that seemed to hold in their
+depths some enigma of the East, had rested on his
+with a glance that was an invitation. They had not
+boldly summoned him. They had lured him, as an
+echo might, pathetic in its thrilling frailty. And now,
+as he walked softly over the dry grass, he thought of
+those eyes as he had first seen them in the pale light
+that had preceded the dawn. Then they had been full
+of curiosity, like a young animal's. Now surely they
+were changed. Once they had asked a question. They
+delivered a summons to-night. What was in them to-night?
+The mystery of young maidenhood, southern,
+sunlit, on the threshold of experience, waking to curious
+knowledge, to a definite consciousness of the meaning
+of its dreams, of the truth of its desires.</p>
+
+<p>When he was out of hearing of the card-players Maurice
+stood still. He felt the breath of the sea on his face.
+He heard the murmur of the sea everywhere around
+him, a murmur that in its level monotony excited him,
+thrilled him, as the level monotony of desert music
+excites the African in the still places of the sand. His
+pulses were beating, and there was an almost savage
+light in his eyes. Something in the atmosphere of the
+sea-bound retreat made him feel emancipated, as if he
+had stepped out of the prison of civilized life into a
+larger, more thoughtless existence, an existence for
+which his inner nature fitted him, for which he had
+surely been meant all these years that he had lived, unconscious
+of what he really was and of what he really
+needed.</p>
+
+<p>"How happy I could have been as a Sicilian fisherman!"
+he thought. "How happy I could be now!"</p>
+
+<p>"St! St!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked round quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"St! St!"</p>
+
+<p>It must be  Maddalena, but where was she? He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+moved forward till he was at the edge of the land where
+the tiny path wound steeply downward to the sea. There
+she was standing with her face turned in his direction,
+and her lips opened to repeat the little summoning sound.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you know I was there?" he said, whispering,
+as he joined her. "Did you hear me come?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, I felt that you were there."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled. It pleased him to think that he threw
+out something, some invisible thread, perhaps, that
+reached her and told her of his nearness. Such communication
+made sympathy. He did not say it to himself,
+but his sensation to-night was that everything was
+in sympathy with him, the night with its stars, the sea
+with its airs and voices, Maddalena with her long eyes
+and her brown hands, and her knowledge of his presence
+when she did not see or hear him.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go down to the sea," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He longed to be nearer to that low and level sound
+that moved and excited him in the night.</p>
+
+<p>"Father's boat is there," she said. "It is so calm
+to-night that he did not bring it round into the bay."</p>
+
+<p>"If we go out in it for a minute, will he mind?"</p>
+
+<p>A sly look came into her face.</p>
+
+<p>"He will not know," she said. "With all that money
+Gaspare and he will play till dawn. Per Dio, signore,
+you are birbante!"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little low laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"So you think I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped. What need was there to go on? She
+had read him and was openly rejoicing in what she
+thought his slyness.</p>
+
+<p>"And my father," she added, "is a fox of the sea,
+signore. Ask Gaspare if there is another who is like
+him. You will see! When they stop playing at dawn
+the twenty-five lire will be in his pocket!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She spoke with pride.</p>
+
+<p>"But Gaspare is so lucky," said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare is only a boy. How can he cheat better
+than my father?"</p>
+
+<p>"They cheat, then!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, when they can. Why not, madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice burst out laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"And you call me birbante!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"To know what my father loves best! Signorino!
+Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her out-stretched forefinger to and fro near
+her nose, smiling, with her head a little on one side like
+a crafty child.</p>
+
+<p>"But why, Maddalena&mdash;why should I wish your father
+to play cards till the dawn. Tell me that! Why should
+not I wish him, all of us, to go to bed?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are not sleepy, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be in the morning when it's time to fish."</p>
+
+<p>"Then perhaps you will not fish."</p>
+
+<p>"But I must. That is why I have stayed here to-night,
+to be ready to go to sea in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing, only smiled again. He felt a longing
+to shake her in joke. She was such a child now.
+And yet a few minutes ago her dark eyes had lured him,
+and he had felt almost as if in seeking her he sought a
+mystery.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you believe me?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>But she only answered, with her little gesture of smiling
+rebuke:</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>He did not protest, for now they were down by the
+sea, and saw the fishing-boats swaying gently on the
+water.</p>
+
+<p>"Get in Maddalena. I will row."</p>
+
+<p>He untied the rope, while she stepped lightly in, then
+he pushed the boat off, jumping in himself from the
+rocks.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You are like a fisherman, signore," said Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled and drew the great bladed oars slowly
+through the calm water, leaning towards her with each
+stroke and looking into her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I were really a fisherman," he said, "like
+your father!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, signore?" she asked, in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"Because it's a free life, because it's a life I should
+love."</p>
+
+<p>She still looked at him with surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"But a fisherman has few soldi, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena," he said, letting the oars drift in the
+water, "there's only one good thing in the world, and
+that is to be free in a life that is natural to one."</p>
+
+<p>He drew up his feet onto the wooden bench and
+clasped his hands round his knees, and sat thus, looking
+at her while she faced him in the stern of the boat.
+He had not turned the boat round. So Maddalena had
+her face towards the land, while his was set towards the
+open sea.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't having many soldi that makes happiness,"
+he went on. "Gaspare thinks it is, and Lucrezia, and
+I dare say your father would&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, signore! In Sicily we all think so!"</p>
+
+<p>"And so they do in England. But it isn't true."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you have many soldi you can do anything."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"No you can't. I have plenty of soldi, but I can't
+always live here, I can't always live as I do now. Some
+day I shall have to go away from Sicily&mdash;I shall have
+to go back and live in London."</p>
+
+<p>As he said the last words he seemed to see London
+rise up before him in the night, with shadowy domes
+and towers and chimneys; he seemed to hear through
+the exquisite silence of night upon the sea the mutter
+of its many voices.</p>
+
+<p>"It's beastly there! It's beastly!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And he set his teeth almost viciously.</p>
+
+<p>"Why must you go, then, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Oh, I have work to do."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you are rich why must you work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;I&mdash;I can't explain in Italian. But my father
+expects me to."</p>
+
+<p>"To get more rich?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you are rich why cannot you live as you
+please?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, Maddalena. But the rich scarcely
+ever live really as they please, I think. Their soldi
+won't let them, perhaps."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, a man must do something, must get on, and
+if I lived always here I should do nothing but enjoy
+myself."</p>
+
+<p>He was silent for a minute. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"And that's all I want to do, just to enjoy myself
+here in the sun."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you happy here, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, tremendously happy."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;because it's Sicily here! Aren't you happy?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>She said it with simplicity and looked at him almost
+as if she were inquiring of him whether she were happy
+or not. That look tempted him.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know whether you are happy to-night?"
+he asked, putting an emphasis on the last word, and
+looking at her more steadily, almost cruelly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, to-night&mdash;it is a festa."</p>
+
+<p>"A festa? Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Because it is different from other nights.
+On other nights I am alone with my father."</p>
+
+<p>"And to-night you are alone with me. Does that
+make it a festa?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She looked down.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>The childish merriment and slyness had gone out of
+her now, and there was a softness almost of sentimentality
+in her attitude, as she drooped her head and moved
+one hand to and fro on the gunwale of the boat, touching
+the wood, now here, now there, as if she were picking
+up something and dropping it gently into the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Maurice wondered about Maddalena. He
+wondered whether she had ever had a Sicilian lover,
+whether she had one now.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not 'promised,' are you, Maddalena?" he
+asked, leaning a little nearer to her. He saw the red
+come into her brown skin. She shook her head without
+looking up or speaking.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder why," he said. "I think&mdash;I think there
+must be men who want you."</p>
+
+<p>She slightly raised her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, there are, signore. But&mdash;but I must wait
+till my father chooses one."</p>
+
+<p>"Your father will choose the man who is to be your
+husband?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"But perhaps you won't like him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I shall have to like him, signore."</p>
+
+<p>She did not speak with any bitterness or sarcasm, but
+with perfect simplicity. A feeling of pity that was certainly
+not Sicilian but that came from the English blood
+in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena looked
+so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so
+ready to be cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with
+the ardor that is the tender cruelty of passion, that her
+childlike submission to the Sicilian code woke in him
+an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps,
+to some hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped
+together more soldi than his fellows, or to some coarse,
+avaricious contadino who would make her toil till her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled
+withered, sun-dried hag, while she was yet young in
+years.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish," he said&mdash;"I wish, when you have to marry,
+I could choose your husband, Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her head quite up and regarded him with
+wonder.</p>
+
+<p>"You, signorino! Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I would choose a man who would be very
+good to you, who would love you and work for you and
+always think of you, and never look at another woman.
+That is how your husband should be."</p>
+
+<p>She looked more wondering.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you like that, then, signore?" she asked. "With
+the signora?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice unclasped his hands from his knees, and
+dropped his feet down from the bench.</p>
+
+<p>"I!" he said, in a voice that had changed. "Oh&mdash;yes&mdash;I
+don't know."</p>
+
+<p>He took the oars again and began to row farther out
+to sea.</p>
+
+<p>"I was talking about you," he said, almost roughly.</p>
+
+<p>"I have never seen your signora," said Maddalena.
+"What is she like?" Maurice saw Hermione before him
+in the night, tall, flat, with her long arms, her rugged,
+intelligent face, her enthusiastic brown eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Is she pretty?" continued Maddalena. "Is she as
+young as I am?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is good, Maddalena," Maurice answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Is she santa?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean that. But she is good to every one."</p>
+
+<p>"But is she pretty, too?" she persisted. "And
+young?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is not at all old. Some day you shall see&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He checked himself. He had been going to say,
+"Some day you shall see her."</p>
+
+<p>"And she is very clever," he said, after a moment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Clever?" said Maddalena, evidently not understanding
+what he meant.</p>
+
+<p>"She can understand many things and she has read
+many books."</p>
+
+<p>"But what is the good of that? Why should a girl
+read many books?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is not a girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Not a girl!"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with amazed eyes and her voice
+was full of amazement.</p>
+
+<p>"How old are you, signorino?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"How old do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>She considered him carefully for a long time.</p>
+
+<p>"Old enough to make the visit," she said, at length.</p>
+
+<p>"The visit?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"What? Oh, do you mean to be a soldier?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be twenty, wouldn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I am older than that. I am twenty-four."</p>
+
+<p>"Truly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Truly."</p>
+
+<p>"And is the signora twenty-four, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!" Maurice exclaimed, with a sudden impatience
+that was almost fierce. "Why do you keep on
+talking about the signora to-night? This is your festa.
+The signora is in Africa, a long way off&mdash;there&mdash;across
+the sea." He stretched out his arm, and pointed towards
+the wide waters above which the stars were watching.
+"When she comes back you can see her, if you
+wish&mdash;but now&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When is she coming back?" asked the girl.</p>
+
+<p>There was an odd pertinacity in her character, almost
+an obstinacy, despite her young softness and gentleness.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," Maurice said, with difficulty controlling
+his gathering impatience.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why did she go away?"</p>
+
+<p>"To nurse some one who is ill."</p>
+
+<p>"She went all alone across the sea?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena turned and looked into the dimness of the
+sea with a sort of awe.</p>
+
+<p>"I should be afraid," she said, after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>And she shivered slightly.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice had let go the oars again. He felt a longing
+to put his arm round her when he saw her shiver. The
+night created many longings in him, a confusion of longings,
+of which he was just becoming aware.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a child," he said, "and have never been
+away from your 'paese.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I have."</p>
+
+<p>"Where?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have been to the fair of San Felice."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;San Felice! And did you go in the train?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, signore. I went on a donkey. It was last
+year, in June. It was beautiful. There were women
+there in blue silk dresses with ear-rings as long as that"&mdash;she
+measured their length in the air with her brown
+fingers&mdash;"and there was a boy from Napoli, a real
+Napolitano, who sang and danced as we do not dance
+here. I was very happy that day. And I was given
+an image of Sant' Abbondio."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with a sort of dignity, as if expecting
+him to be impressed.</p>
+
+<p>"Carissima!" he whispered, almost under his breath.</p>
+
+<p>Her little air of pride, as of a travelled person, enchanted
+him, even touched him, he scarcely knew why,
+as he had never been enchanted or touched by any
+London beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I had been at the fair with you. I would
+have given you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What, signorino?" she interrupted, eagerly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A blue silk dress and a pair of ear-rings longer&mdash;much
+longer&mdash;than those women wore."</p>
+
+<p>"Really, signorino? Really?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really and truly! Do you doubt me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>She sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"How I wish you had been there! But this year&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped, hesitating.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;this year?"</p>
+
+<p>"In June there will be the fair again."</p>
+
+<p>He moved from his seat, softly and swiftly, turned the
+boat's prow towards the open sea, then went and sat
+down by her in the stern.</p>
+
+<p>"We will go there," he said, "you and I and Gaspare&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And my father."</p>
+
+<p>"All of us together."</p>
+
+<p>"And if the signora is back?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was conscious of a desire that startled him
+like a sudden stab from something small and sharp&mdash;the
+desire that on that day Hermione should not be with him
+in Sicily.</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say the signora will not be back."</p>
+
+<p>"But if she is, will she come, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think you would like it better if she came?"</p>
+
+<p>He was so close to her now that his shoulder touched
+hers. Their faces were set seaward and were kissed by
+the breath of the sea. Their eyes saw the same stars
+and were kissed by the light of the stars. And the
+subtle murmur of the tide spoke to them both as if they
+were one.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you?" he repeated. "Do you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?" she responded.</p>
+
+<p>He thought, when she said that, that her voice sounded
+less simple than before.</p>
+
+<p>"You do know!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You do!" he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>He stretched out his hand and took her hand. He
+had to take it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>She had turned her head away from him, and now,
+speaking as if to the sea, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps if she was there you could not give me the
+blue silk dress and the&mdash;and the ear-rings. Perhaps she
+would not like it."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he thought he was disappointed by her
+answer. Then he knew that he loved it, for its utter
+naturalness, its laughable na&iuml;vet&eacute;. It seemed, too, to
+set him right in his own eyes, to sweep away a creeping
+feeling that had been beginning to trouble him. He
+was playing with a child. That was all. There was no
+harm in it. And when he had kissed her in the dawn
+he had been kissing a child, playfully, kindly, as a big
+brother might. And if he kissed her now it would mean
+nothing to her. And if it did mean something&mdash;just a
+little more&mdash;to him, that did not matter.</p>
+
+<p>"Bambina mia!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not a bambina," she said, turning towards him
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes you are."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are a bambino."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? I feel like a boy to-night, like a naughty
+little boy."</p>
+
+<p>"Naughty, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, because I want to do something that I ought
+not to do."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"This, Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>And he kissed her. It was the first time he had kissed
+her in darkness, for on his second visit to the sirens'
+house he had only taken her hand and held it, and that
+was nothing. The kiss in the dawn had been light, gay,
+a sort of laughing good-bye to a kind hostess who was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+of a class that, he supposed, thought little of kisses.
+But this kiss in the night, on the sea, was different. Only
+when he had given it did he understand how different it
+was, how much more it meant to him. For Maddalena
+returned it gently with her warm young lips, and her
+response stirred something at his heart that was surely
+the very essence of the life within him.</p>
+
+<p>He held her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!" he said, and there was in his voice a
+startled sound. "Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>Again Hermione had risen up before him in the night,
+almost as one who walked upon the sea. He was conscious
+of wrong-doing. The innocence of his relation
+with Maddalena seemed suddenly to be tarnished, and
+the happiness of the starry night to be clouded. He
+felt like one who, in summer, becomes aware of a heaviness
+creeping into the atmosphere, the message of a
+coming tempest that will presently transform the face
+of nature. Surely there was a mist before the faces of
+the stars.</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing, only looked at him as if she wanted
+to know many things which only he could tell her, which
+he had begun to tell her. That was her fascination for
+his leaping youth, his wild heart of youth&mdash;this ignorance
+and this desire to know. He had sat in spirit at the
+feet of Hermione and loved her with a sort of boyish
+humbleness. Now one sat at his feet. And the attitude
+woke up in him a desire that was fierce in its intensity&mdash;the
+desire to teach Maddalena the great realities of love.</p>
+
+<p>"Hi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi!"</p>
+
+<p>Faintly there came to them a cry across the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" Maurice said.</p>
+
+<p>He turned his head. In the darkness, high up, he saw a
+light, descending, ascending, then describing a wild circle.</p>
+
+<p>"Hi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi&mdash;yi!"</p>
+
+<p>"Row back, signorino! They have done playing, and
+my father will be angry."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He moved, took the oars, and sent the boat towards
+the island. The physical exertion calmed him, restored
+him to himself.</p>
+
+<p>"After all," he thought, "there is no harm in it."</p>
+
+<p>And he laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Which has won, Maddalena?" he said, looking back
+at her over his shoulder, for he was standing up and
+rowing with his face towards the land.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope it is my father, signorino. If he has got the
+money he will not be angry; but if Gaspare has it&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Your father is a fox of the sea, and can cheat better
+than a boy. Don't be frightened."</p>
+
+<p>When they reached the land, Salvatore and Gaspare
+met them. Gaspare's face was glum, but Salvatore's
+small eyes were sparkling.</p>
+
+<p>"I have won it all&mdash;all!" he said. "Ecco!"</p>
+
+<p>And he held out his hand with the notes.</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore is birbante!" said Gaspare, sullenly. "He
+did not win it fairly. I saw him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, Gaspare!" said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>He put his hand on the boy's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow I'll give you the same," he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," he added, aloud, "let's go to bed. I've
+been rowing Maddalena round the island and I'm tired.
+I shall sleep like a top."</p>
+
+<p>As they went up the steep path he took Salvatore
+familiarly by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>"You are too clever, Salvatore," he said. "You
+play too well for Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore chuckled and handled the five-lire notes
+voluptuously.</p>
+
+<p>"Cci basu li manu!" he said. "Cci basu li manu!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Maurice lay on the big bed in the inner room of the
+siren's house, under the tiny light that burned before
+Maria Addolorata. The door of the house was shut,
+and he heard no more the murmur of the sea. Gaspare
+was curled up on the floor, on a bed made of some old
+sacking, with his head buried in his jacket, which he had
+taken off to use as a pillow. In the far room Maddalena
+and her father were asleep. Maurice could hear
+their breathing, Maddalena's light and faint, Salvatore's
+heavy and whistling, and degenerating now and then
+into a sort of stifled snore. But sleep did not come to
+Maurice. His eyes were open, and his clasped hands
+supported his head. He was thinking, thinking almost
+angrily.</p>
+
+<p>He loved joy as few Englishmen love it, but as many
+southerners love it. His nature needed joy, was made
+to be joyous. And such natures resent the intrusion
+into their existence of any complications which make
+for tragedy as northern natures seldom resent anything.
+To-night Maurice had a grievance against fate, and he
+was considering it wrathfully and not without confusion.</p>
+
+<p>Since he had kissed Maddalena in the night he was
+disturbed, almost unhappy. And yet he was surely face
+to face with something that was more than happiness.
+The dancing faun was dimly aware that in his nature
+there was not only the capacity for gayety, for the performance
+of the tarantella, but also a capacity for violence
+which he had never been conscious of when he
+was in England. It had surely been developed within<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+him by the sun, by the coming of the heat in this delicious
+land. It was like an intoxication of the blood,
+something that went to head as well as heart. He
+wondered what it meant, what it might lead him to.
+Perhaps he had been faintly aware of its beginnings on
+that day when jealousy dawned within him as he
+thought of his wife, his woman, nursing her friend in
+Africa. Now it was gathering strength like a stream
+flooded by rains, but it was taking a different direction
+in its course.</p>
+
+<p>He turned upon the pillow so that he could see the
+light burning before the Madonna. The face of the
+Madonna was faintly visible&mdash;a long, meek face with
+downcast eyes. Maddalena crossed herself often when she
+looked at that face. Maurice put up his hand to make
+the sign, then dropped it with a heavy sigh. He was
+not a Catholic. His religion&mdash;what was it? Sunworship
+perhaps, the worship of the body, the worship of
+whim. He did not know or care much. He felt so full
+of life and energy that the far, far future after death
+scarcely interested him. The present was his concern,
+the present after that kiss in the night. He had loved
+Hermione. Surely he loved her now. He did love her
+now. And yet when he had kissed her he had never
+been shaken by the headstrong sensation that had hold
+of him to-night, the desire to run wild in love. He
+looked up to Hermione. The feeling of reverence had
+been a governing factor in his love for her. Now it
+seemed to him that a feeling of reverence was a barrier
+in the path of love, something to create awe, admiration,
+respect, but scarcely the passion that irresistibly
+draws man to woman. And yet he did love Hermione.
+He was confused, horribly confused.</p>
+
+<p>For he knew that his longing was towards Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>He would like to rise up in the dawn, to take her in
+his arms, to carry her off in a boat upon the sea, or to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+set her on a mule and lead her up far away into the
+recesses of the mountains. By rocky paths he would
+lead her, beyond the olives and the vines, beyond the
+last cottage of the contadini, up to some eyrie from
+which they could look down upon the sunlit world. He
+wanted to be in wildness with her, inexorably divided
+from all the trammels of civilization. A desire of
+savagery had hold upon him to-night. He did not go
+into detail. He did not think of how they would pass
+their days. Everything presented itself to him broadly,
+tumultuously, with a surging, onward movement of
+almost desperate advance.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to teach those dark, inquiring young eyes
+all that they asked to know, to set in them the light of
+knowledge, to make them a woman's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>And that he could never do.</p>
+
+<p>His whole body was throbbing with heat, and tingling
+with a desire of movement, of activity. The
+knowledge that all this beating energy was doomed to
+uselessness, was born to do nothing, tortured him.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to think steadily of Hermione, but he found
+the effort a difficult one. She was remote from his
+body, and that physical remoteness seemed to set her
+far from his spirit, too. In him, though he did not
+know it, was awake to-night the fickleness of the south,
+of the southern spirit that forgets so quickly what is
+no longer near to the southern body. The sun makes
+bodily men, makes very strong the chariot of the flesh.
+Sight and touch are needful, the actions of the body, to
+keep the truly southern spirit true. Maurice could neither
+touch nor see Hermione. In her unselfishness she had
+committed the error of dividing herself from him. The
+natural consequences of that self-sacrifice were springing
+up now like the little yellow flowers in the grasses
+of the lemon groves. With all her keen intelligence
+she made the mistake of the enthusiast, that of reading
+into those whom she loved her own shining qualities,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+of seeing her own sincerities, her own faithfulness, her
+own strength, her own utter loyalty looking out on
+her from them. She would probably have denied that
+this was so, but so it was. At this very moment in
+Africa, while she watched at the bedside of Artois, she
+was thinking of her husband's love for her, loyalty to
+her, and silently blessing him for it; she was thanking
+God that she had drawn such a prize in the lottery of
+life. And had she been already separated from Maurice
+for six months she would never have dreamed of doubting
+his perfect loyalty now that he had once loved her
+and taken her to be his. The "all in all or not at all"
+nature had been given to Hermione. She must live,
+rejoice, suffer, die, according to that nature. She
+knew much, but she did not know how to hold herself
+back, how to be cautious where she loved, how to dissect
+the thing she delighted in. She would never know
+that, so she would never really know her husband, as
+Artois might learn to know him, even had already
+known him. She would never fully understand the tremendous
+barriers set up between people by the different
+strains of blood in them, the stern dividing lines that are
+drawn between the different races of the earth. Her
+nature told her that love can conquer all things. She
+was too enthusiastic to be always far-seeing.</p>
+
+<p>So now, while Maurice lay beneath the tiny light in the
+house of the sirens and was shaken by the wildness of
+desire, and thought of a mountain pilgrimage far up
+towards the sun with Maddalena in his arms, she sat
+by Artois's bed and smiled to herself as she pictured
+the house of the priest, watched over by the stars of
+Sicily, and by her many prayers. Maurice was there, she
+knew, waiting for her return, longing for it as she longed
+for it. Artois turned on his pillow wearily, saw her,
+and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"You oughtn't to be here," he whispered. "But I
+am glad you are here."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And I am glad, I am thankful I am here!" she said,
+truly.</p>
+
+<p>"If there is a God," he said, "He will bless you for
+this!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! You must try to sleep."</p>
+
+<p>She laid her hand in his.</p>
+
+<p>"God has blessed me," she thought, "for all my poor
+little attempts at goodness, how far, far more than I
+deserve!"</p>
+
+<p>And the gratitude within her was almost like an
+ache, like a beautiful pain of the heart.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning Maurice put to sea with Gaspare and
+Salvatore. He knew the silvery calm of dawn on a
+day of sirocco. Everything was very still, in a warm
+and heavy stillness of silver that made the sweat run
+down at the least movement or effort. Masses of white,
+feathery vapors floated low in the sky above the sea,
+concealing the flanks of the mountains, but leaving
+their summits clear. And these vapors, hanging like
+veils with tattered edges, created a strange privacy
+upon the sea, an atmosphere of eternal mysteries. As
+the boat went out from the shore, urged by the powerful
+arms of Salvatore, its occupants were silent. The
+merriment and the ardor of the night, the passion of
+cards and of desire, were gone, as if they had been
+sucked up into the smoky wonder of the clouds, or
+sucked down into the silver wonder of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare looked drowsy and less happy than usual.
+He had not yet recovered from his indignation at the
+success of Salvatore's cheating, and Maurice, who had
+not slept, felt the bounding life, the bounding fire of his
+youth held in check as by the action of a spell. The
+carelessness of excitement, of passion, was replaced by
+another carelessness&mdash;the carelessness of dream. It
+seemed to him now as if nothing mattered or ever could
+matter. On the calm silver of a hushed and breathless
+sea, beneath dense white vapors that hid the sky, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+was going out slowly, almost noiselessly, to a fate of
+which he knew nothing, to a quiet emptiness, to a region
+which held no voices to call him this way or that, no
+hands to hold him, no eyes to regard him. His face
+was damp with sweat. He leaned over the gunwale
+and trailed his hand in the sea. It seemed to him unnaturally
+warm. He glanced up at the clouds. Heaven
+was blotted out. Was there a heaven? Last night he
+had thought there must be&mdash;but that was long ago.
+Was he sad? He scarcely knew. He was dull, as if
+the blood in him had run almost dry. He was like a
+sapless tree. Hermione and Maddalena&mdash;what were
+they? Shadows rather than women. He looked steadily
+at the sea. Was it the same element upon which
+he had been only a few hours ago under the stars with
+Maddalena? He could scarcely believe that it was the
+same. Sirocco had him fast, sirocco that leaves many
+Sicilians unchanged, unaffected, but that binds the stranger
+with cords of cotton wool which keep him like a net
+of steel.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare lay down in the bottom of the boat, buried
+his face in his arms, and gave himself again to sleep.
+Salvatore looked at him, and then at Maurice, and
+smiled with a fine irony.</p>
+
+<p>"He thought he would win, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Cosa?" said Maurice, startled by the sound of a voice.</p>
+
+<p>"He thought that he could play better than I, signore."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore closed one eye, and stuck his tongue a little
+out of the left side of his mouth, then drew it in with a
+clicking noise.</p>
+
+<p>"No one gets the better of me," he said. "They may
+try. Many have tried, but in the end&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, took his right hand from the oar
+and flapped it up and down, then brought it downward
+with force, as if beating some one, or something, to his
+feet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I see," Maurice said, dully. "I see."</p>
+
+<p>He thought to himself that he had been cleverer than
+Salvatore the preceding night, but he felt no sense of
+triumph. He had divined the fisherman's passion and
+turned it to his purpose. But what of that? Let the
+man rejoice, if he could, in this dream. Let all men
+do what they wished to do so long as he could be undisturbed.
+He looked again at the sea, dropped his
+hand into it once more.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I let down a line, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore's keen eyes were upon him. He shook his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet. I&mdash;" He hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>The still silver of the sea drew him. He touched his
+forehead with his hand and felt the dampness on it.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going in," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you swim, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, like a fish. Don't follow me with the boat.
+Just let me swim out and come back. If I want you
+I'll call. But don't follow me."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore nodded appreciatively. He liked a good
+swimmer, a real man of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"And don't wake Gaspare, or he'll be after me."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice stripped off his clothes, all the time looking
+at the sea. Then he sat down on the gunwale of the
+boat with his feet in the water. Salvatore had stopped
+rowing. Gaspare still slept.</p>
+
+<p>It was curious to be going to give one's self to this
+silent silver thing that waited so calmly for the gift.
+He felt a sort of dull voluptuousness stealing over him
+as he stared at the water. He wanted to get away
+from his companions, from the boat, to be quite alone
+with sirocco.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio Salvatore!" he said, in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>"A rivederci, signore."</p>
+
+<p>He let himself down slowly into the water, feet fore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>most,
+and swam slowly away into the dream that lay
+before him.</p>
+
+<p>Even now that he was in it the water felt strangely
+warm. He had not let his head go under, and the
+sweat was still on his face. The boat lay behind
+him. He did not think of it. He had forgotten it.
+He felt himself to be alone, utterly alone with the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>He had always loved the sea, but in a boyish, wholly
+natural way, as a delightful element, health-giving,
+pleasure-giving, associating it with holiday times, with
+bathing, fishing, boating, with sails on moonlight nights,
+with yacht-races about the Isle of Wight in the company
+of gay comrades. This sea of Sicily seemed different
+to him to-day from other seas, more mysterious
+and more fascinating, a sea of sirens about a Sirens' Isle.
+Mechanically he swam through it, scarcely moving his
+arms, with his chin low in the water&mdash;out towards the
+horizon-line.</p>
+
+<p>He was swimming towards Africa.</p>
+
+<p>Presently that thought came into his mind, that he
+was swimming towards Africa and Hermione, and away
+from Maddalena. It seemed to him, then, as if the two
+women on the opposite shores of this sea must know,
+Hermione that he was coming to her, Maddalena that
+he was abandoning her, and he began to think of them
+both as intent upon his journey, the one feeling him
+approach, the other feeling him recede. He swam more
+slowly. A curious melancholy had overtaken him, a
+deep depression of the spirit, such as often alternates in
+the Sicilian character with the lively gayety that is sent
+down upon its children by the sun. This lonely progress
+in the sea was prophetic. He must leave Maddalena.
+His friendship with her must come to an end, and soon.
+Hermione would return, and then, in no long time, they
+would leave the Casa del Prete and go back to England.
+They would settle down somewhere, probably in London,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+and he would take up his work with his father, and the
+Sicilian dream would be over.</p>
+
+<p>The vapors that hid the sky seemed to drop a little
+lower down towards the sea, as if they were going to
+enclose him.</p>
+
+<p>The Sicilian dream would be over. Was that possible?
+He felt as if the earth of Sicily would not let him
+go, as if, should the earth resign him, the sea of Sicily
+would keep him. He dwelt on this last fancy, this keeping
+of him by the sea. That would be strange, a quiet
+end to all things. Never before had he consciously contemplated
+his own death. The deep melancholy poured
+into him by sirocco caused him to do so now. Almost
+voluptuously he thought of death, a death in the sea of
+Sicily near the rocks of the isle of the sirens. The light
+would be kindled in the sirens' house and his eyes would
+not see it. They would be closed by the cold fingers of
+the sea. And Maddalena? The first time she had seen
+him she had seen him sinking in the sea. How strange
+if it should be so at the end, if the last time she saw him
+she saw him sinking in the sea. She had cried out.
+Would she cry out again or would she keep silence?
+He wondered. For a moment he felt as if it were ordained
+that thus he should die, and he let his body sink
+in the water, throwing up his hands. He went down,
+very far down, but he felt that Maddalena's eyes followed
+him and that in them he saw terrors enthroned.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare stirred in the boat, lifted his head from his
+arms and looked sleepily around him. He saw Salvatore
+lighting a pipe, bending forward over a spluttering
+match which he held in a cage made of his joined hands.
+He glanced away from him still sleepily, seeking the
+padrone, but he saw only the empty seats of the boat,
+the oars, the coiled-up nets, and lines for the fish.</p>
+
+<p>"Dove&mdash;?" he began.</p>
+
+<p>He sat up, stared wildly round.</p>
+
+<p>"Dov'&egrave; il padrone?" he cried out, shrilly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Salvatore started and dropped the match. Gaspare
+sprang at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Dov'&egrave; il padrone? Dov'&egrave; il padrone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sangue di&mdash;" began Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>But the oath died upon his lips. His keen eyes had
+swept the sea and perceived that it was empty. From
+its silver the black dot which he had been admiringly
+watching had disappeared. Gaspare had waked, had
+asked his fierce question just as Maurice threw up his
+hands and sank down in his travesty of death.</p>
+
+<p>"He was there! Madonna! He was there swimming
+a moment ago!" exclaimed Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke he seized the oars, and with furious
+strokes propelled the boat in the direction Maurice had
+taken. But Gaspare would not wait. His instinct forbade
+him to remain inactive.</p>
+
+<p>"May the Madonna turn her face from thee in the
+hour of thy death!" he yelled at Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>Then, with all his clothes on, he went over the side
+into the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was an accomplished swimmer, and had ardently
+practised swimming under water when he was a
+boy. He could hold his breath for an exceptionally long
+time, and now he strove to beat all his previous records.
+With a few strokes he came up from the depths of the
+sea towards the surface, then began swimming under
+water, swimming vigorously, though in what direction
+he knew not. At last he felt the imperative need of air,
+and, coming up into the light again, he gasped, shook
+his head, lifted his eyelids that were heavy with the
+pressure of the water, heard a shrill cry, and felt a hand
+grasp him fiercely.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" he gulped.</p>
+
+<p>He had not fully drawn breath yet.</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna! Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>The hand still held him. The fingers were dug into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+his flesh. Then he heard a shout, and the boat came
+up with Salvatore leaning over its side, glaring down at
+him with fierce anxiety. He grasped the gunwale with
+both hands. Gaspare trod water, caught him by the
+legs, and violently assisted him upward. He tumbled
+over the side into the boat. Gaspare came after him,
+sank down in the bottom of the boat, caught him by
+the arms, stared into his face, saw him smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Sta bene Lei?" he cried. "Sta bene?"</p>
+
+<p>"Benissimo."</p>
+
+<p>The boy let go of him and, still staring at him, burst
+into a passion of tears that seemed almost angry.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! What is it? What's the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>He put out his hand to touch the boy's dripping
+clothes.</p>
+
+<p>"What has happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"Niente! Niente!" said Gaspare, between violent
+sobs. "Mamma mia! Mamma mia!"</p>
+
+<p>He threw himself down in the bottom of the boat and
+wept stormily, without shame, without any attempt to
+check or conceal his emotion. As in the tarantella he
+had given himself up utterly to joy, so now he gave
+himself up utterly to something that seemed like despair.
+He cried loudly. His whole body shook. The
+sea-water ran down from his matted hair and mingled
+with the tears that rushed over his brown cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" Maurice asked of Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"He thought the sea had taken you, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"That was it? Gaspare&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Let him alone. Per Dio, signore, you gave me a
+fright, too."</p>
+
+<p>"I was only swimming under water."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Gaspare. He longed to do something
+to comfort him, but he realized that such violence could
+not be checked by anything. It must wear itself out.</p>
+
+<p>"And he thought I was dead!"</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio! And if you had been!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He wrinkled up his face and spat.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has he got a knife on him?"</p>
+
+<p>He threw out his hand towards Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know to-day. He generally has."</p>
+
+<p>"I should have had it in me by now," said Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>And he smiled at the weeping boy almost sweetly, as
+if he could have found it in his heart to caress such a
+murderer.</p>
+
+<p>"Row in to land," Maurice said.</p>
+
+<p>He began to put on his clothes. Salvatore turned
+the boat round and they drew near to the rocks. The
+vapors were lifting now, gathering themselves up to
+reveal the blue of the sky, but the sea was still gray and
+mysterious, and the land looked like a land in a dream.
+Presently Gaspare put his fists to his eyes, lifted his
+head, and sat up. He looked at his master gloomily, as
+if in rebuke, and under this glance Maurice began to feel
+guilty, as if he had done something wrong in yielding
+to his strange impulses in the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"I was only swimming under water, Gaspare," he
+said, apologetically.</p>
+
+<p>The boy said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"I know now," continued Maurice, "that I shall never
+come to any harm with you to look after me."</p>
+
+<p>Still Gaspare said nothing. He sat there on the floor
+of the boat with his dripping clothes clinging to his body,
+staring before him as if he were too deeply immersed in
+gloomy thoughts to hear what was being said to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" Maurice exclaimed, moved by a sudden
+impulse. "Do you think you would be very unhappy
+away from your 'paese'?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare shifted forward suddenly. A light gleamed
+in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"D'you think you could be happy with me in England?"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>"When we have to go away from Sicily I shall ask
+the signora to let me take you with us."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare said nothing, but he looked at Salvatore,
+and his wet face was like a song of pride and triumph.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>That day, ere he started with Gaspare for the house
+of the priest, Maurice made a promise to Maddalena. He
+pledged himself to go with her and her father to the
+great fair of San Felice, which takes place annually in
+the early days of June, when the throng of tourists has
+departed, and the long heats of the summer have not
+yet fully set in. He gave this promise in the presence
+of Salvatore and Gaspare, and while he did so he was
+making up his mind to something. That day at the fair
+should be the day of his farewell to Maddalena. Hermione
+must surely be coming back in June. It was impossible
+that she could remain in Kairouan later. The
+fury of the African summer would force her to leave
+the sacred city, her mission of salvation either accomplished
+or rendered forever futile by the death of her
+friend. And then, when Hermione came, within a short
+time no doubt they would start for England, taking
+Gaspare with them. For Maurice really meant to keep
+the boy in their service. After the strange scene of the
+morning he felt as if Gaspare were one of the family, a
+retainer with whose devoted protection he could never
+dispense. Hermione, he was sure, would not object.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione would not object. As he thought that,
+Maurice was conscious of a feeling such as sometimes
+moves a child, upon whom a parent or guardian has laid
+a gently restraining hand, violently to shrug his shoulders
+and twist his body in the effort to get away and run
+wild in freedom. He knew how utterly unreasonable
+and contemptible his sensation was, yet he had it. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+sun had bred in him not merely a passion for complete
+personal liberty, but for something more, for lawlessness.
+For a moment he envied Gaspare, the peasant
+boy, whose ardent youth was burdened with so few
+duties to society, with so few obligations.</p>
+
+<p>What was expected of Gaspare? Only a willing
+service, well paid, which he could leave forever at any
+moment he pleased. To his family he must, no doubt,
+give some of his earnings, but in return he was looked up
+to by all, even by his father, as a little god. And in
+everything else was not he free, wonderfully free in this
+island of the south, able to be careless, unrestrained,
+wild as a young hawk, yet to remain uncondemned, unwondered
+at?</p>
+
+<p>And he&mdash;Maurice?</p>
+
+<p>He thought of Hermione's ardent and tenderly observant
+eyes with a sort of terror. If she could know
+or even suspect his feelings of the previous night, what
+a tragedy he would be at once involved in! The very
+splendor of Hermione's nature, the generous nobility
+of her character, would make that tragedy the more
+poignant. She felt with such intensity, she thought
+she had so much. Careless though his own nature was,
+doubly careless here in Sicily, Maurice almost sickened
+at the idea of her ever suspecting the truth, that he was
+capable of being strongly drawn towards a girl like
+Maddalena, that he could feel as if a peasant who could
+neither read nor write caught at something within him
+that was like the essence of his life, like the core of that
+by which he enjoyed, suffered, desired.</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, she would never suspect. And he
+laughed at himself, and made the promise about the
+fair, and, having made it and his resolution in regard
+to it, almost violently resolved to take no thought for
+the morrow, but to live carelessly and with gayety the
+days that lay before him, the few more days of his utter
+freedom in Sicily.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After all, he was doing no wrong. He had lived and
+was going to live innocently. And now that he realized
+things, realized himself, he would be reasonable. He
+would be careless, gay&mdash;yes, but not reckless, not utterly
+reckless as he felt inclined to be.</p>
+
+<p>"What day of June is the fair?" he asked, looking at
+Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>"The 11th of June, signore," said Salvatore. "There
+will be many donkeys there&mdash;good donkeys."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare began to look fierce.</p>
+
+<p>"I think of buying a donkey," added Salvatore,
+carelessly, with his small, shrewd eyes fixed upon Maurice's
+face.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare muttered something unintelligible.</p>
+
+<p>"How much do they cost?" said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"For a hundred lire you can get a very good donkey.
+It would be useful to Maddalena. She could go to the
+village sometimes then&mdash;she could go to Marechiaro to
+gossip with the neighbors."</p>
+
+<p>"Has Maddalena broken her legs&mdash;Madonna!" burst
+forth Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"Come along, Gaspare!" said Maurice, hastily.</p>
+
+<p>He bade good-bye to the fisherman and his daughter,
+and set off with Gaspare through the trees.</p>
+
+<p>"Be nice to Salvatore," said Maurice, as they went
+down towards the rocky wall.</p>
+
+<p>"But he wants to make you give him a donkey, signorino.
+You do not know him. When he is with you
+at the fair he will&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind. I say, Gaspare, I want&mdash;I want that
+day at the fair to be a real festa. Don't let's have any
+row on that day."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare looked at him with surprised, inquiring eyes,
+as if struck by his serious voice, by the insisting pressure
+in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why that day specially, signorino?" he asked, after
+a pause.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well&mdash;it will be my last day of&mdash;I mean that
+the signora will be coming back from Africa by then,
+and we shall&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"We sha'n't be able to run quite so wild as we do
+now, you see. And, besides, we shall be going to England
+very soon then."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare's face lighted up.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I see London, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>He felt a sickness at his heart.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to live in London always," said Gaspare,
+excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>"In London! You don't know it. In London you
+will scarcely ever see the sun."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't there theatres in London, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Theatres? Yes, of course. But there is no sea,
+Gaspare, there are no mountains."</p>
+
+<p>"Are there many soldiers? Are there beautiful
+women?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there are plenty of soldiers and women."</p>
+
+<p>"I should like always to live in London," repeated
+Gaspare, firmly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;perhaps you will. But&mdash;remember&mdash;we are
+all to be happy at the fair of San Felice."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. But be careful, or Salvatore will make
+you buy him a donkey. He had a wine-shop once, long
+ago, in Marechiaro, and the wine&mdash;Per Dio, it was always
+vino battezzato!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore always put water in it. He is cattivo&mdash;and
+when he is angry&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know. You told me. But it doesn't matter. We
+shall soon be going away, and then we sha'n't see him
+any more."</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You&mdash;do you want to stay here always?"</p>
+
+<p>"I like being here."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you want to stay?"</p>
+
+<p>For once Maurice felt as if he could not meet the boy's
+great, steady eyes frankly. He looked away.</p>
+
+<p>"I like the sun," he answered. "I love it! I should
+like to live in the sunshine forever."</p>
+
+<p>"And I should like to live always in London," reiterated
+Gaspare. "You want to live here because you
+have always been in London, and I want to live in
+London because I have always been here. Ecco!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice tried to laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps that is it. We wish for what we can't
+have. Dio mio!"</p>
+
+<p>He threw out his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"But, anyhow, I've not done with Sicily yet! Come
+on, Gaspare! Now for the rocks! Ciao! Ciao! Ciao!
+Morettina bella ciao!"</p>
+
+<p>He burst out into a song, but his voice hardly rang
+true, and Gaspare looked at him again with a keen inquiry.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Artois was not yet destined to die. He said that
+Hermione would not let him die, that with her by his
+side it was useless for Death to approach him, to desire
+him, to claim him. Perhaps her courage gave to
+him the will to struggle against his enemy. The French
+doctor, deeply, almost sentimentally interested in the
+ardent woman who spoke his language with perfection
+and carried out such instructions of his as she considered
+sensible, with delicate care and strong thoroughness,
+thought and said so.</p>
+
+<p>"But for madame," he said to Artois, "you would
+have died, monsieur. And why? Because till she
+came you had not the will to live. And it is the will
+to live that assists the doctor."</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot be so ungallant as to die now," Artois re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>plied,
+with a feeble but not sad smile. "Were I to do
+so, madame would think me ungrateful. No, I shall
+live. I feel now that I am going to live."</p>
+
+<p>And, in fact, from the night of Maurice's visit with
+Gaspare to the house of the sirens he began to get better.
+The inflammation abated, the temperature fell till
+it was normal, the agony died away gradually from the
+tormented body, and slowly, very slowly, the strength
+that had ebbed began to return. One day, when the
+doctor said that there was no more danger of any relapse,
+Artois called Hermione and told her that now
+she must think no more of him, but of herself; that she
+must pack up her trunk and go back to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"You have saved me, and I have killed your honeymoon,"
+he said, rather sadly. "That will always be
+a regret in my life. But, now go, my dear friend, and
+try to assuage your husband's wrath against me. How
+he must hate me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Emile?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you really a woman? Yes, I know that. No
+man could have tended me as you have. Yet, being
+a woman, how can you ask that question?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice understands. He is blessedly understanding."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't try his blessed comprehension of you and of
+me too far. You must go, indeed."</p>
+
+<p>"I will go."</p>
+
+<p>A shadow that he tried to keep back flitted across
+Artois's pale face, over which the unkempt beard
+straggled in a way that would have appalled his Parisian
+barber. Hermione saw it.</p>
+
+<p>"I will go," she repeated, quietly, "when I can take
+you with me."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! You are not to argue. Haven't you an
+utter contempt for those who do things by halves?
+Well, I have. When you can travel we'll go together."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Where?"</p>
+
+<p>"To Sicily. It will be hot there, but after this it
+will seem cool as the Garden of Eden under those trees
+where&mdash;but you remember! And there is always the
+breeze from the sea. And then from there, very soon,
+you can get a ship from Messina and go back to France,
+to Marseilles. Don't talk, Emile. I am writing to-night
+to tell Maurice."</p>
+
+<p>And she left the room with quick softness.</p>
+
+<p>Artois did not protest. He told himself that he had
+not the strength to struggle against the tenderness
+that surrounded him, that made it sweet to return to
+life. But he wondered silently how Maurice would receive
+him, how the dancing faun was bearing, would
+bear, this interference with his new happiness.</p>
+
+<p>"When I am in Sicily I shall see at once, I shall
+know," he thought. "But till then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>And he gave up the faint attempt to analyze the possible
+feelings of another, and sank again into the curious
+peace of convalescence.</p>
+
+<p>And Hermione wrote to her husband, telling him of
+her plan, calling upon him with the fearless enthusiasm
+that was characteristic of her to welcome it and to rejoice,
+with her, in Artois's returning health and speedy
+presence in Sicily.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice read this letter on the terrace alone. Gaspare
+had gone down on the donkey to Marechiaro to
+buy a bottle of Marsala, which Lucrezia demanded for
+the making of a zampaglione, and Lucrezia was upon the
+mountain-side spreading linen to dry in the sun. It
+was nearly the end of May now, and the trees in the
+ravine were thick with all their leaves. The stream
+that ran down through the shadows towards the sea
+was a tiny trickle of water, and the long, black snakes
+were coming boldly forth from their winter hiding-places
+to sun themselves among the bowlders that
+skirted the mountain tracks.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell for certain," Hermione wrote, "how soon
+we shall arrive, but Emile is picking up strength every
+day, and I think, I pray, it may not be long. I dare
+to hope that we shall be with you about the second
+week of June. Oh, Maurice, something in me is almost
+mad with joy, is like Gaspare dancing the tarantella,
+when I think of coming up the mountain-side again
+with you as I came that first day, that first day of my
+real life. Tell Sebastiano he must play the 'Pastorale'
+to welcome me. And you&mdash;but I seem to feel your
+dear welcome here, to feel your hands holding mine, to
+see your eyes looking at me like Sicily. Isn't it strange?
+I feel out here in Africa as if you were Sicily. But you
+are, indeed, for me. You are Sicily, you are the sun, you
+are everything that means joy to me, that means music,
+that means hope and peace. Buon riposo, my dearest
+one.  Can you feel&mdash;can you&mdash;how happy I am to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>The second week in June! Maurice stood holding the
+letter in his hand. The fair of San Felice would take
+place during the second week in June. That was what
+he was thinking, not of Artois's convalescence, not of
+his coming to Sicily. If Hermione arrived before
+June 11th, could he go to the fair with Maddalena? He
+might go, of course. He might tell Hermione. She
+would say "Go!" She believed in him and had never
+tried to curb his freedom. A less suspicious woman
+than she was had surely never lived. But if she were
+in Sicily, if he knew that she was there in the house of
+the priest, waiting to welcome him at night when he
+came back from the fair, it would&mdash;it would&mdash;He laid
+the letter down. There was a burning heat of impatience,
+of anxiety, within him. Now that he had received
+this letter he understood with what intensity
+he had been looking forward to this day at the fair, to
+this last festa of his Sicilian life.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps they will not come so soon!" he said to him
+self. "Perhaps they will not be here."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And then he began to think of Artois, to realize the
+fact that he was coming with Hermione, that he would
+be part of the final remnant of these Sicilian days.</p>
+
+<p>His feeling towards Artois in London had been sympathetic,
+even almost reverential. He had looked at
+him as if through Hermione's eyes, had regarded him
+with a sort of boyish reverence. Hermione had said that
+Artois was a great man, and Maurice had felt that he
+was a great man, had mentally sat at his feet. Perhaps
+in London he would be ready to sit at his feet again.
+But was he ready to sit at his feet here in Sicily? As
+he thought of Artois's penetrating eyes and cool, intellectual
+face, of his air of authority, of his close intimacy
+with Hermione, he felt almost afraid of him.
+He did not want Artois to come here to Sicily. He
+hated his coming. He almost dreaded it as the coming
+of a spy. The presence of Artois would surely take
+away all the savor of this wild, free life, would import
+into it an element of the library, of the shut room, of
+that intellectual existence which Maurice was learning to
+think of as almost hateful.</p>
+
+<p>And Hermione called upon him to rejoice with her
+over the fact that Artois would be able to accompany
+her. How she misunderstood him! Good God! how
+she misunderstood him! It seemed really as if she
+believed that his mind was cast in precisely the same
+mould as her own, as if she thought that because she
+and he were married they must think and feel always
+alike. How absurd that was, and how impossible!</p>
+
+<p>A sense of being near a prison door came upon him.
+He threw Hermione's letter onto the writing-table, and
+went out into the sun.</p>
+
+<p>When Gaspare returned that evening Maurice told him
+the news from Africa. The boy's face lit up.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, then shall we go to London?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" Maurice exclaimed, almost violently. "It
+will all be different! Yes, we had better go to London!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Signorino."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what is it, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"You do not like that signore to come here."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;why not?   Yes, I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signorino. I can see in your face that you do
+not like it. Your face got quite black just now. But
+if you do not like it why do you let him come? You
+are the padrone here."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand. The signore is a friend of
+mine."</p>
+
+<p>"But you said he was the friend of the signora."</p>
+
+<p>"So he is. He is the friend of both of us."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare said nothing for a moment. His mind was
+working busily. At last he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Then Maddalena&mdash;when the signora comes will she
+be the friend of the signora, as well as your friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena&mdash;that has nothing to do with it."</p>
+
+<p>"But Maddalena is your friend!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's quite different."</p>
+
+<p>"I do not understand how it is in England," Gaspare
+said, gravely. "But"&mdash;and he nodded his head
+wisely and spread out his hands&mdash;"I understand many
+things, signorino, perhaps more than you think. You
+do not want the signore to come. You are angry at
+his coming."</p>
+
+<p>"He is a very kind signore," said Maurice, hastily.
+"And he can speak dialetto."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare smiled and shook his head again. But he
+did not say anything more. For a moment Maurice had
+an impulse to speak to him frankly, to admit him into
+the intimacy of a friend. He was a Sicilian, although
+he was only a boy. He was Sicilian and he would understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," he began.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"As you understand so much&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you&mdash;" He checked himself, realizing that
+he was on the edge of doing an outrageous thing. "You
+must know that the friends of the signora are my friends
+and that I am always glad to welcome them."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signorino! Va bene!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy began to look glum, understanding at once
+that he was being played with.</p>
+
+<p>"I must go to give Tito his food."</p>
+
+<p>And he stuck his hands in his pockets and went away
+round the corner of the cottage, whistling the tune of
+the "Canzone di Marechiaro."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice began to feel as if he were in the dark, but
+as if he were being watched there. He wondered how
+clearly Gaspare read him, how much he knew. And
+Artois? When he came, with his watchful eyes, there
+would be another observer of the Sicilian change. He
+did not much mind Gaspare, but he would hate Artois.
+He grew hot at the mere thought of Artois being there
+with him, observing, analyzing, playing the literary
+man's part in this out-door life of the mountains and of
+the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not a specimen," he said to himself, "and I'm
+damned if I'll be treated as one!"</p>
+
+<p>It did not occur to him that he was anticipating that
+which might never happen. He was as unreasonable
+as a boy who foresees possible interference with his
+pleasures.</p>
+
+<p>This decision of Hermione to bring with her to Sicily
+Artois, and its communication to Maurice, pushed him
+on to the recklessness which he had previously resolved
+to hold in check. Had Hermione been returning to
+him alone he would have felt that a gay and thoughtless
+holiday time was coming to an end, but he must
+have felt, too, that only tenderness and strong affection
+were crossing the sea from Africa to bind him in chains
+that already he had worn with happiness and peace.
+But the knowledge that with Hermione was coming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+Artois gave to him a definite vision of something that
+was like a cage. Without consciously saying it to himself,
+he had in London been vaguely aware of Artois's
+coldness of feeling towards him. Had any one spoken
+of it to him he would probably have denied that this
+was so. There are hidden things in a man that he himself
+does not say to himself that he knows of. But Maurice's
+vision of a cage was conjured up by Artois's mental
+attitude towards him in London, the attitude of the
+observer who might, in certain circumstances, be cruel,
+who was secretly ready to be cruel. And, anticipating
+the unpleasant probable, he threw himself with the greater
+violence into the enjoyment of his few more days of
+complete liberty.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote to Hermione, expressing as naturally as he
+could his ready acquiescence in her project, and then
+gave himself up to the light-heartedness that came
+with the flying moments of these last days of emancipation
+in the sun. His mood was akin to the mood of
+the rich man, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
+die." The music, he knew, must presently fail. The
+tarantella must come to an end. Well, then he would
+dance with his whole soul. He would not husband his
+breath nor save his strength. He would be thoughtless
+because for a moment he had thought too much,
+too much for his nature of the dancing faun who had
+been given for a brief space of time his rightful heritage.</p>
+
+<p>Each day now he went down to the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"How hot it is!" he would say to Gaspare. "If I
+don't have a bath I shall be suffocated."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. At what time shall we go?"</p>
+
+<p>"After the siesta. It will be glorious in the sea to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, it is good to be in the sea."</p>
+
+<p>The boy smiled, at last would sometimes laugh. He
+loved his padrona, but he was a male and a Sicilian.
+And the signora had gone across the sea to her friend.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+These visits to the sea seemed to him very natural.
+He would have done the same as his padrone in similar
+circumstances with a light heart, with no sense of doing
+wrong.    Only sometimes he raised a warning voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino," he would say, "do not forget what I
+have told you."</p>
+
+<p>"What, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore is birbante.    You think he likes you."</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't he like me?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are a forestiere. To him you are as nothing.
+But he likes your money."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then? I don't care whether he likes me or
+not.    What does it matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Be careful, signorino. The Sicilian has a long hand.
+Every one knows that. Even the Napoletano knows
+that. I have a friend who was a soldier at Naples,
+and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Come, now, Gaspare! What reason will there ever
+be for Salvatore to turn against me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signorino, va bene! But Salvatore is a
+bad man when he thinks any one has tried to do him a
+wrong. He has blood in his eyes then, and when we
+Sicilians see through blood we do not care what we do&mdash;no,
+not if all the world is looking at us."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall do no wrong to Salvatore. What do you
+mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Niente, signorino, niente!"</p>
+
+<p>"Stick the cloth on Tito, and put something in the
+pannier.    Al mare!    Al mare!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy's warning rang in deaf ears. For Maurice
+really meant what he said. He was reckless, perhaps,
+but he was going to wrong no one, neither Salvatore,
+nor Hermione, nor Maddalena. The coming of Artois
+drove him into the arms of pleasure, but it would never
+drive him into the arms of sin. For it was surely no
+sin to make a little love in this land of the sun, to touch
+a girl's hand, to snatch a kiss sometimes from the soft<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+lips of a girl, from whom he would never ask anything
+more, whatever leaping desire might prompt him.</p>
+
+<p>And Salvatore was always at hand. He seldom put to
+sea in these days unless Maurice went with him in the
+boat. His greedy eyes shone with a light of satisfaction
+when he saw Tito coming along the dusty white road
+from Isola Bella, and at night, when he crossed himself
+superstitiously before Maria Addolorata, he murmured
+a prayer that more strangers might be wafted to his
+"Paese," many strangers with money in their pockets
+and folly in their hearts. Then let the sea be empty
+of fish and the wind of the storm break up his boat&mdash;it
+would not matter. He would still live well. He
+might even at the last have money in the bank at
+Marechiaro, houses in the village, a larger wine-shop than
+Oreste in the Corso.</p>
+
+<p>But he kept his small eyes wide open and seldom let
+Maddalena be long alone with the forestiere, and this
+supervision began to irritate Maurice, to make him at
+last feel hostile to Salvatore. He remembered Gaspare's
+words about the fisherman&mdash;"To him you are as nothing.
+But he likes your money"&mdash;and a longing to trick this
+fox of the sea, who wanted to take all and make no
+return, came to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why can one never be free in this world?" he thought,
+almost angrily. "Why must there always be some one
+on the watch to see what one is doing, to interfere with
+one's pleasure?"</p>
+
+<p>He began presently almost to hate Salvatore, who evidently
+thought that Maurice was ready to wrong him,
+and who, nevertheless, grasped greedily at every soldo
+that came from the stranger's pocket, and touted perpetually
+for more.</p>
+
+<p>His attitude was hideous. Maurice pretended not to
+notice it, and was careful to keep on the most friendly
+possible terms with him. But, while they acted their
+parts, the secret sense of enmity grew steadily in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+two men, as things grow in the sun. When Maurice
+saw the fisherman, with a smiling, bird's face, coming
+to meet him as he climbed up through the trees to the
+sirens' house, he sometimes longed to strike him. And
+when Maurice went away with Gaspare in the night
+towards the white road where Tito, tied to a stake, was
+waiting to carry the empty pannier that had contained
+a supper up the mountain to the house of the priest,
+Salvatore stood handling his money, and murmuring:</p>
+
+<p>"Maledetto straniero! Madonna! Ma io sono pi&ugrave;
+birbante di Lei, mille volte pi&ugrave; birbante, Dio mio!"</p>
+
+<p>And he laughed as he went towards the sirens' house.
+It amused him to think that a stranger, an "Inglese,"
+fancied that he could play with a Sicilian, who had
+never been "worsted," even by one of his own countrymen.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Maurice had begun to dread the arrival of the post.
+Artois was rapidly recovering his strength, and in each
+of her letters Hermione wrote with a more glowing certainty
+of her speedy return to Sicily, bringing the invalid
+with her. Would they come before June 11th,
+the day of the fair? That was the question which preoccupied
+Maurice, which began to haunt him, and set
+a light of anxiety in his eyes when he saw Antonino
+climbing up the mountain-side with the letter-bag
+slung over his shoulder. He felt as if he could not
+forego this last festa. When it was over, when the
+lights had gone out in the houses of San Felice, and
+the music was silent, and the last rocket had burst in
+the sky, showering down its sparks towards the gaping
+faces of the peasants, he would be ready to give up this
+free, unintellectual life, this life in which his youth ran
+wild. He would resign himself to the inevitable, return
+to the existence in which, till now, he had found
+happiness, and try to find it there once more, try to
+forget the strange voices that had called him, the
+strange impulses that had prompted him. He would
+go back to his old self, and seek pleasure in the old
+paths, where he walked with those whom society would
+call his "equals," and did not spend his days with men
+who wrung their scant livelihood from the breast of the
+earth and from the breast of the sea, with women whose
+eyes, perhaps, were full of flickering fires, but who had
+never turned the leaves of a printed book, or traced a
+word upon paper.    He would sit again at the feet of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+people who were cleverer and more full of knowledge
+than himself, and look up to them with reverence.</p>
+
+<p>But he must have his festa first. He counted upon
+that. He desired that so strongly, almost so fiercely,
+that he felt as if he could not bear to be thwarted, as
+if, should fate interfere between him and the fulfilment
+of this longing, he might do something almost desperate.
+He looked forward to the fair with something
+of the eagerness and the anticipation of a child expectant
+of strange marvels, of wonderful and mysterious
+happenings, and the name San Felice rang in
+his ears with a music that was magical, suggesting
+curious joys.</p>
+
+<p>He often talked about the fair to Gaspare, asking him
+many questions which the boy was nothing loath to answer.</p>
+
+<p>To Gaspare the fair of San Felice was the great event
+of the Sicilian year. He had only been to it twice; the
+first time when he was but ten years old, and was
+taken by an uncle who had gone to seek his fortune in
+South America, and had come back for a year to his
+native land to spend some of the money he had earned
+as a cook, and afterwards as a restaurant proprietor,
+in Buenos Ayres; the second time when he was sixteen,
+and had succeeded in saving up a little of the money
+given to him by travellers whom he had accompanied
+as a guide on their excursions. And these two days
+had been red-letter days in his life. His eyes shone
+with excitement when he spoke of the festivities at San
+Felice, of the bands of music&mdash;there were three "musics"
+in the village; of the village beauties who sauntered
+slowly up and down, dressed in brocades and
+adorned with jewels which had been hoarded in the
+family chests for generations, and were only taken out
+to be worn at the fair and at wedding-feasts; of the
+booths where all the desirable things of the world were
+exposed for sale&mdash;rings, watches, chains, looking-glasses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+clocks that sang and chimed with bells like church
+towers, yellow shoes, and caps of all colors, handkerchiefs,
+and shawls with fringes that, when worn, drooped
+almost to the ground; ballads written by native
+poets, relating the life and the trial of Musolino, the
+famous brigand, his noble address to his captors, and
+his despair when he was condemned to eternal confinement;
+and the adventures of Giuseppe Moroni, called
+"Il Niccheri" (illetterato), composed in eight-lined
+verses, and full of the most startling and passionate
+occurrences. There were donkeys, too&mdash;donkeys from
+all parts of Sicily, mules from Girgenti, decorated with
+red-and-yellow harness, with pyramids of plumes and
+bells upon their heads, painted carts with pictures of
+the miracles of the saints and the conquests of the
+Saracens, turkeys and hens, and even cages containing
+yellow birds that came from islands far away and that
+sang with the sweetness of the angels. The ristoranti
+were crowded with people, playing cards and eating
+delicious food, and outside upon the pavements were
+dozens of little tables at which you could sit, drinking
+syrups of beautiful hues and watching at your ease the
+marvels of the show. Here came boys from Naples to
+sing and dance, peddlers with shining knives and elegant
+walking-sticks for sale, fortune-tellers with your fate
+already printed and neatly folded in an envelope,
+sometimes a pigeon-man with a high black hat, who
+made his doves hop from shoulder to shoulder along
+a row of school-children, or a man with a monkey that
+played antics to the sound of a grinding organ, and
+that was dressed up in a red worsted jacket and a
+pair of cloth trousers. And there were shooting-galleries
+and puppet-shows and dancing-rooms, and at
+night, when the darkness came, there were giuochi di
+fuoco which lit up the whole sky, till you could see
+Etna quite plainly.</p>
+
+<p>"E' veramente un paradiso!" concluded Gaspare.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A paradise!" echoed Maurice. "A paradise! I say,
+Gaspare, why can't we always live in paradise? Why
+can't life be one long festa?"</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so, signore. And the signora? Do you think
+she will be here for the fair?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. But if she is here, I am not sure
+that she will come to see it."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, signorino? Will she stay with the sick
+signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps. But I don't think she will be here. She
+does not say she will be here."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want her to be here, signorino?" Gaspare
+asked, abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you ask such a question? Of course I am
+happy, very happy, when the signora is here."</p>
+
+<p>As he said the words Maurice remembered how happy
+he had been in the house of the priest alone with Hermione.
+Indeed, he had thought that he was perfectly
+happy, that he had nothing left to wish for. But that
+seemed long ago. He wondered if he could ever again
+feel that sense of perfect contentment. He could
+scarcely believe so. A certain feverishness had stolen
+into his Sicilian life. He felt often like a man in suspense,
+uncertain of the future, almost apprehensive.
+He no longer danced the tarantella with the careless
+abandon of a boy. And yet he sometimes had a strange
+consciousness that he was near to something that
+might bring to him a joy such as he had never yet experienced.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I knew what day Hermione is arriving," he
+thought, almost fretfully. "I wish she wouldn't keep
+me hung up in this condition of uncertainty. She
+seems to think that I have nothing to do but just wait
+here upon the pleasure of Artois."</p>
+
+<p>With that last thought the old sense of injury rose
+in him again. This friend of Hermione's was spoiling
+everything, was being put before every one. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+really monstrous that even during their honeymoon
+this old friendship should intrude, should be allowed
+to govern their actions and disturb their serenity.
+Now that Artois was out of danger Maurice began to
+forget how ill he had been, began sometimes to doubt
+whether he had ever been so ill as Hermione supposed.
+Perhaps Artois was one of those men who liked to have
+a clever woman at his beck and call. These literary
+fellows were often terribly exigent, eaten up with the
+sense of their own importance. But he, Maurice, was
+not going to allow himself to be made a cat's-paw of.
+He would make Artois understand that he was not
+going to permit his life to be interfered with by any
+one.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll let him see that when he comes," he said to
+himself. "I'll take a strong line. A man must be the
+master of his own life if he's worth anything. These
+Sicilians understand that."</p>
+
+<p>He began secretly to admire what before he had
+thought almost hateful, the strong Arab characteristics
+that linger on in many Sicilians, to think almost
+weak and unmanly the Western attitude to woman.</p>
+
+<p>"I will be master," he said to himself again. "All
+these Sicilians are wondering that I ever let Hermione
+go to Africa. Perhaps they think I'm a muff to have
+given in about it. And now, when Hermione comes
+back with a man, they'll suppose&mdash;God knows what
+they won't imagine!"</p>
+
+<p>He had begun so to identify himself with the Sicilians
+about Marechiaro that he cared what they thought, was
+becoming sensitive to their opinion of him as if he had
+been one of themselves. One day Gaspare told him a
+story of a contadino who had bought a house in the
+village, but who, being unable to complete the payment,
+had been turned out into the street.</p>
+
+<p>"And now, signorino," Gaspare concluded, "they
+are all laughing at him in Marechiaro. He dare not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+show himself any more in the Piazza. When a man
+cannot go any more into the Piazza&mdash;Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands
+in a gesture of contemptuous pity.</p>
+
+<p>"E' finito!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Certo!" said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>He was resolved that he would never be in such a
+case. Hermione, he felt now, did not understand the
+Sicilians as he understood them. If she did she would
+not bring back Artois from Africa, she would not arrive
+openly with him. But surely she ought to understand
+that such an action would make people wonder,
+would be likely to make them think that Artois was
+something more than her friend. And then Maurice
+thought of the day of their arrival, of his own descent
+to the station, to wait upon the platform for the train.
+Artois was not going to stay in the house of the priest.
+That was impossible, as there was no guest-room. He
+would put up at the hotel in Marechiaro. But that
+would make little difference. He was to arrive with Hermione.
+Every one would know that she had spent all
+this time with him in Africa. Maurice grew hot as he
+thought of the smiles on the Sicilian faces, of the looks
+of astonishment at the strange doings of the forestieri.
+Hermione's enthusiastic kindness was bringing her husband
+almost to shame. It was a pity that people were
+sometimes thoughtless in their eager desire to be generous
+and sympathetic.</p>
+
+<p>One day, when Maurice had been brooding over this
+matter of the Sicilian's view of Hermione's proceedings,
+the spirit moved him to go down on foot to Marechiaro
+to see if there were any letters for him at the post. It
+was now June 7th. In four days would come the fair.
+As the time for it drew near, his anxiety lest anything
+should interfere to prevent his going to it with Maddalena
+increased, and each day at post time he was filled
+with a fever of impatience to know whether there would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+be a letter from Africa or not. Antonino generally appeared
+about four o'clock, but the letters were in the
+village long before then, and this afternoon Maurice felt
+that he could not wait for the boy's coming. He had
+a conviction that there was a letter, a decisive letter
+from Hermione, fixing at last the date of her arrival
+with Artois. He must have it in his hands at the first
+possible moment. If he went himself to the post he
+would know the truth at least an hour and a half sooner
+than if he waited in the house of the priest. He resolved,
+therefore, to go, got his hat and stick, and set
+out, after telling Gaspare, who was watching for birds
+with his gun, that he was going for a stroll on the mountain-side
+and might be away for a couple of hours.</p>
+
+<p>It was a brilliant afternoon. The landscape looked
+hard in the fiery sunshine, the shapes of the mountains
+fierce and relentless, the dry watercourses almost bitter
+in their barrenness. Already the devastation of
+the summer was beginning to be apparent. All tenderness
+had gone from the higher slopes of the mountains
+which, jocund in spring and in autumn with growing
+crops, were now bare and brown, and seamed like
+the hide of a tropical reptile gleaming with metallic
+hues. The lower slopes were still panoplied with the
+green of vines and of trees, but the ground beneath the
+trees was arid. The sun was coming into his dominion
+with pride and cruelty, like a conqueror who loots
+the land he takes to be his own.</p>
+
+<p>But Maurice did not mind the change, which drove
+the tourists northward, and left Sicily to its own people.
+He even rejoiced in it. As each day the heat increased
+he was conscious of an increasing exultation, such as
+surely the snakes and the lizards feel as they come out
+of their hiding-places into the golden light. He was
+filled with a glorious sense of expansion, as if his capabilities
+grew larger, as if they were developed by heat
+like certain plants. None of the miseries that afflict<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+many people in the violent summers which govern
+southern lands were his. His skin did not peel, his
+eyes did not become inflamed, nor did his head ache
+under the action of the burning rays. They came to
+him like brothers and he rejoiced in their company.
+To-day, as he descended to Marechiaro, he revelled in
+the sun. Its ruthlessness made him feel ruthless. He
+was conscious of that. At this moment he was in absolutely
+perfect physical health. His body was lithe
+and supple, yet his legs and arms were hard with springing
+muscle. His warm blood sang through his veins
+like music through the pipes of an organ. His eyes
+shone with the superb animation of youth that is radiantly
+sound. For, despite his anxiety, his sometimes
+almost fretful irritation when he thought about the
+coming of Artois and the passing of his own freedom,
+there were moments when he felt as if he could leap
+with the sheer joy of life, as if he could lift up his arms
+and burst forth into a wild song of praise to his divinity,
+the sun. And this grand condition of health made him
+feel ruthless, as the man who conquers and enters a
+city in triumph feels ruthless. As he trod down towards
+Marechiaro to-day, thinking of the letter that perhaps
+awaited him, it seemed to him that it would be
+monstrous if anything, if any one, were to interfere with
+his day of joy, the day he was looking forward to with
+such eager anticipation. He felt inclined to trample
+over opposition. Yet what could he do if, by some
+evil chance, Hermione and Artois arrived the day before
+the fair, or on the very day of the fair? He hurried
+his steps. He wanted to be in the village, to know
+whether there was a letter for him from Africa.</p>
+
+<p>When he came into the village it was about half-past
+two o'clock, and the long, narrow main street was deserted.
+The owners of some of the antiquity shops had
+already put up their shutters for the summer. Other
+shops,  still  open,  showed gaping  doorways, through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+which no travellers passed. Inside, the proprietors were
+dozing among their red brocades, their pottery, their
+Sicilian jewelry and obscure pictures thick with dust,
+guarded by squadrons of large, black flies, which droned
+on walls and ceilings, crept over the tiled floors, and
+clung to the draperies and laces which lay upon the
+cabinets. In the shady little rooms of the barbers
+small boys in linen jackets kept a drowsy vigil for the
+proprietors, who were sleeping in some dark corner of
+bedchamber or wine-shop. But no customer came to
+send them flying. The sun made the beards push on
+the brown Sicilian faces, but no one wanted to be shaved
+before the evening fell. Two or three lads lounged by
+on their way to the sea with towels and bathing-drawers
+over their arms. A few women were spinning flax on
+the door-lintels, or filling buckets of water from the
+fountain. A few children were trying to play mysterious
+games in the narrow alleys that led downward
+to the sea and upward to the mountains on the left and
+right of the street. A donkey brayed under an archway
+as if to summon its master from his siesta. A cat
+stole along the gutter, and vanished into a hole beneath
+a shut door. But the village was almost like a dead
+village, slain by the sun in his carelessness of pride.</p>
+
+<p>On his way to the post Maurice passed through the
+Piazza that was the glory of Marechiaro and the place
+of assemblage for its people. Here the music sounded
+on festa days before the stone steps that led up to the
+church of San Giuseppe. Here was the principal caff&egrave;,
+the Caff&egrave; Nuovo, where granite and ices were to be had,
+delicious yellow cakes, and chocolate made up into shapes
+of crowing cocks, of pigs, of little men with hats, and
+of saints with flowing robes. Here, too, was the club,
+with chairs and sofas now covered with white, and long
+tables adorned with illustrated journals and the papers
+of Catania, of Messina, and Palermo. But at this hour
+the caff&egrave; was closed and the club was empty. For the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
+sun beat down with fury upon the open space with its
+tiled pavement, and the seats let into the wall that
+sheltered the Piazza from the precipice that frowned
+above the sea were untenanted by loungers. As Maurice
+went by he thought of Gaspare's words, "When a
+man cannot go any more into the Piazza&mdash;Madonna, it
+is finished!" This was the place where the public opinion
+of Marechiaro was formed, where fame was made and
+characters were taken away. He paused for an instant
+by the church, then went on under the clock tower and
+came to the post.</p>
+
+<p>"Any letters for me, Don Paolo?" he asked of the
+postmaster.</p>
+
+<p>The old man saluted him languidly through the peep-hole.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, ce ne sono."</p>
+
+<p>He turned to seek for them while Maurice waited. He
+heard the flies buzzing. Their noise was loud in his
+ears. His heart beat strongly and he was gnawed by
+suspense. Never before had he felt so anxious, so
+impatient to know anything as he was now to know
+if among the letters there was one from Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice took the packet.</p>
+
+<p>"A rivederci!"</p>
+
+<p>"A rivederlo, signore."</p>
+
+<p>He went away down the street. But now he had his
+letters he did not look at them immediately. Something
+held him back from looking at them until he had
+come again into the Piazza. It was still deserted. He
+went over to the seat by the wall, and sat down sideways,
+so that he could look over the wall to the sea
+immediately below him. Then, very slowly, he drew
+out his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, lit it, and
+began to smoke like a man who was at ease and idle.
+He glanced over the wall. At the foot of the precipice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+by the sea was the station of Cattaro, at which Hermione
+and Artois would arrive when they came. He
+could see the platform, some trucks of merchandise
+standing on the rails, the white road winding by towards
+San Felice and Etna. After a long look down he
+turned at last to the packet from the post which he had
+laid upon the hot stone at his side. The <i>Times</i>, the
+"Pink 'un," the <i>Illustrated London News</i>, and three
+letters. The first was obviously a bill forwarded from
+London. The second was also from England. He
+recognized the handwriting of his mother. The third?
+He turned it over. Yes, it was from Hermione. His
+instinct had not deceived him. He was certain, too,
+that it did not deceive him now. He was certain that
+this was the letter that fixed the date of her coming
+with Artois. He opened the two other letters and
+glanced over them, and then at last he tore the covering
+from Hermione's. A swift, searching look was
+enough. The letter dropped from his hand to the seat.
+He had seen these words:</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it splendid? Emile may leave at once. But
+there is no good boat till the tenth. We shall take that,
+and be at Cattaro on the eleventh at five o'clock in the
+afternoon...."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it splendid?"</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he sat quite still in the glare of the
+sun, mentally repeating to himself these words of his
+wife. So the inevitable had happened. For he felt it
+was inevitable. Fate was against him. He was not
+to have his pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Come sta lei? Lei sta bene?"</p>
+
+<p>He started and looked up. He had heard no footstep.
+Salvatore stood by him, smiling at him, Salvatore
+with bare feet, and a fish-basket slung over his
+arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Buon giorno, Salvatore!" he answered, with an effort.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Salvatore looked at Maurice's cigarette, put down the
+basket, and sat down on the seat by Maurice's side.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't smoked to-day, signore," he began. "Dio
+mio! But it must be good to have plenty of soldi!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice held out his cigarette-case.</p>
+
+<p>"Take two&mdash;three!"</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, signore, mille grazie!"</p>
+
+<p>He took them greedily.</p>
+
+<p>"And the fair, signorino&mdash;only four days now to the
+fair! I have been to order the donkeys for me and
+Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>"Davvero?" Maurice said, mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. From Angelo of the mill. He wanted
+fifteen lire, but I laughed at him. I was with him a
+good hour and I got them for nine. Per Dio! Fifteen
+lire and to a Siciliano! For he didn't know you were
+coming. I took care not to tell him that."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you took care not to tell him that I was coming!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was looking over the wall at the platform of
+the station far down below. He seemed to see himself
+upon it, waiting for the train to glide in on the day of
+the fair, waiting among the smiling Sicilian facchini.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. Was not I right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite right."</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio, signore, these are good cigarettes. Where
+do they come from?"</p>
+
+<p>"From Cairo, in Egypt."</p>
+
+<p>"Egitto! They must cost a lot."</p>
+
+<p>He edged nearer to Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"You must be very happy, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>"I!" Maurice laughed. "Madonna! Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you are so rich!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a fawning sound in the fisherman's voice,
+a fawning look in his small, screwed-up eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"To you it would be nothing to buy all the donkeys
+at the fair of San Felice."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Maurice moved ever so little away from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, signorino, if I had been born you how happy
+I should be!"</p>
+
+<p>And he heaved a great sigh and puffed at the cigarette
+voluptuously.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice said nothing. He was still looking at the
+railway platform. And now he seemed to see the train
+gliding in on the day of the fair of San Felice.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what is it, Salvatore?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have ordered the donkeys for ten o'clock. Then
+we can go quietly. They will be at Isola Bella at ten
+o'clock. I shall bring Maddalena round in the boat."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!"</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>"She has got a surprise for you, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"A surprise?"</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio!"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice was listless, but now he looked at Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"I ought not to tell you, signore. But&mdash;if I do&mdash;you
+won't ever tell her?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"A new gown, signorino, a beautiful new gown, made
+by Maria Compagni here in the Corso. Will you be at
+Isola Bella with Gaspare by ten o'clock on the day,
+signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Salvatore!" Maurice said, in a loud, firm, almost
+angry voice. "I will be there. Don't doubt it. Addio
+Salvatore!"</p>
+
+<p>He got up.</p>
+
+<p>"A rivederci, signore. Ma&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He got up, too, and bent to pick up his fish-basket.</p>
+
+<p>"No, don't come with me. I'm going up now,
+straight up by the Castello."</p>
+
+<p>"In all this heat? But it's steep there, signore, and
+the path is all covered with stones. You'll never&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That doesn't matter. I like the sun. Addio!"</p>
+
+<p>"And this evening, signorino? You are coming to
+bathe this evening?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I don't think so. Don't wait for me.
+Go to sea if you want to!"</p>
+
+<p>"Birbanti!" muttered the fisherman, as he watched
+Maurice stride away across the Piazza, and strike up the
+mountain-side by the tiny path that led to the Castello.
+"You want to get me out of the way, do you? Birbanti!
+Ah, you fine strangers from England! You think to come
+here and find men that are babies, do you? men that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He went off noiselessly on his bare feet, muttering to
+himself with the half-smoked cigarette in his lean, brown
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Maurice climbed rapidly up the steep track
+over the stones in the eye of the sun. He had not lied
+to Salvatore. While the fisherman had been speaking
+to him he had come to a decision. A disgraceful decision
+he knew it to be, but he would keep to it. Nothing
+should prevent him from keeping to it. He would
+be at Isola Bella on the day of the fair. He would go
+to San Felice. He would stay there till the last rocket
+burst in the sky over Etna, till the last song had been
+sung, the last toast shouted, the last tarantella danced,
+the last&mdash;kiss given&mdash;the last, the very last. He would
+ignore this message from Africa. He would pretend he
+had never received it. He would lie about it. Yes,
+he would lie&mdash;but he would have his pleasure. He was
+determined upon that, and nothing should shake him,
+no qualms of conscience, no voices within him, no memories
+of past days, no promptings of duty.</p>
+
+<p>He hurried up the stony path. He did not feel the
+sun upon him. The sweat poured down over his face,
+his body. He did not know it. His heart was set
+hard, and he felt villanous, but he felt quite sure what
+he was going to do, quite sure that he was going to the
+fair despite that letter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When he reached the priest's house he felt exhausted.
+Without knowing it he had come up the mountain at
+a racing pace. But he was not tired merely because
+of that. He sank down in a chair in the sitting-room.
+Lucrezia came and peeped at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is Gaspare?" he asked, putting his hand instinctively
+over the pocket in which were the letters.</p>
+
+<p>"He is still out after the birds, signore. He has shot
+five already."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little wretches! And he's still out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. He has gone on to Don Peppino's terreno
+now. There are many birds there. How hot you
+are, signorino! Shall I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. Nothing, Lucrezia! Leave me alone!"</p>
+
+<p>She disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Then Maurice drew the letters from his pocket and
+slowly spread out Hermione's in his lap. He had not
+read it through yet. He had only glanced at it and seen
+what he had feared to see. Now he read it word by
+word, very slowly and carefully. When he had come
+to the end he kept it on his knee and sat for some time
+quite still.</p>
+
+<p>In the letter Hermione asked him to go to the H&ocirc;tel
+Regina Margherita at Marechiaro, and engage two good
+rooms facing the sea for Artois, a bedroom and a sitting-room.
+They were to be ready for the eleventh. She
+wrote with her usual splendid frankness. Her soul was
+made of sincerity as a sovereign is made of gold.</p>
+
+<p>"I know"&mdash;these were her words&mdash;"I know you will
+try and make Emile's coming to Sicily a little festa.
+Don't think I imagine you are personally delighted at
+his coming, though I am sure you are delighted at his
+recovery. He is my old friend, not yours, and I am
+not such a fool as to suppose that you can care for
+him at all as I do, who have known him intimately and
+proved his loyalty and his nobility of nature. But I
+think, I am certain, Maurice, that you will make his com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>ing
+a festa for my sake. He has suffered very much.
+He is as weak almost as a child still. There's something
+tremendously pathetic in the weakness of body of a
+man so brilliant in mind, so powerful of soul. It goes
+right to my heart as I think it would go to yours. Let
+us make his return to life beautiful and blessed. Sha'n't
+we? Put flowers in the rooms for me, won't you?
+Make them look homey. Put some books about. But
+I needn't tell you. We are one, you and I, and I
+needn't tell you any more. It would be like telling
+things to myself&mdash;as unnecessary as teaching an organ-grinder
+how to turn the handle of his organ! Oh, Maurice,
+I can laugh to-day! I could almost&mdash;<i>I</i>&mdash;get up and
+dance the tarantella all alone here in my little, bare
+room with no books and scarcely any flowers. And at
+the station show Emile he is welcome. He is a little
+diffident at coming. He fancies perhaps he will be in
+the way. But one look of yours, one grasp of your
+hand will drive it all out of him! God bless you, my
+dearest. How he has blessed me in giving you to
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>As Maurice sat there, under his skin, burned deep
+brown by the sun, there rose a hot flush of red! Yes,
+he reddened at the thought of what he was going to do,
+but still he meant to do it. He could not forego his
+pleasure. He could not. There was something wild
+and imperious within him that defied his better self at
+this moment. But the better self was not dead. It
+was even startlingly alive, enough alive to stand almost
+aghast at that which was going, it knew, to dominate
+it&mdash;to dominate it for a time, but only for a time. On
+that he was resolved, as he was resolved to have this
+one pleasure to which he had looked forward, to which
+he was looking forward now. Men often mentally put
+a period to their sinning. Maurice put a period to his
+sinning as he sat staring at the letter on his knees. And
+the period which he put was the day of the fair at San<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+Felice. After that day this book of his wild youth was
+to be closed forever.</p>
+
+<p>After the day of the fair he would live rightly, sincerely,
+meeting as it deserved to be met the utter sincerity
+of his wife. He would be, after that date, entirely
+straight with her. He loved her. As he looked at her
+letter he felt that he did love, must love, such love as
+hers. He was not a bad man, but he was a wilful man.
+The wild heart of youth in him was wilful. Well, after
+San Felice, he would control that wilfulness of his heart,
+he would discipline it. He would do more, he would forget
+that it existed.    After San Felice!</p>
+
+<p>With a sigh, like that of a burdened man, he got up,
+took the letter in his hand, and went out up the mountain-side.
+There he tore the letter and its envelope into
+fragments, and hid the fragments in a heap of stones
+hot with the sun.</p>
+
+<p>When Gaspare came in that evening with a string of
+little birds in his hand and asked Maurice if there were
+any letter from Africa to say when the signora would
+arrive, Maurice answered "No."</p>
+
+<p>"Then the signora will not be here for the fair, signorino?"
+said the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't suppose&mdash;no, Gaspare, she will not be here
+for the fair."</p>
+
+<p>"She would have written by now if she were coming.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if she were coming she would certainly have
+written by now."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino! Are you ready?"</p>
+
+<p>It was Gaspare's voice shouting vivaciously from the
+sunny terrace, where Tito and another donkey, gayly caparisoned
+and decorated with flowers and little streamers
+of colored ribbon, were waiting before the steps.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, si! I'm coming in a moment!" replied Maurice's
+voice from the bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia stood by the wall looking very dismal. She
+longed to go to the fair, and that made her sad. But
+there was also another reason for her depression. Sebastiano
+was still away, and for many days he had not
+written to her. This was bad enough. But there was
+something worse. News had come to Marechiaro from
+a sailor of Messina, a friend of Sebastiano's, that Sebastiano
+was lingering in the Lipari Isles because he had
+found a girl there, a pretty girl called Teodora Amalfi,
+to whom he was paying attentions. And although
+Lucrezia laughed at the story, and pretended to disbelieve
+it, her heart was rent by jealousy and despair,
+and a longing to travel away, to cross the sea, to tear
+her lover from temptation, to&mdash;to speak for a few
+moments quietly&mdash;oh, very quietly&mdash;with this Teodora.
+Even now, while she stared at the donkeys, and at
+Gaspare in his festa suit, with two large, pink roses
+above his ears, she put up her hands instinctively to
+her own ears, as if to pluck the ear-rings out of them, as
+the Sicilian women of the lower classes do, deliberately,
+sternly, before they begin to fight their rivals, women
+who have taken their lovers or their husbands from them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Ah, if she were only in the Lipari Isles she would
+speak with Teodora Amalfi, speak with her till the
+blood flowed! She set her teeth, and her face looked
+almost old in the sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>"Coraggio, Lucrezia!" laughed Gaspare. "He will
+come back some day when&mdash;when he has sold enough
+to the people of the isles! But where is the padrone,
+Dio mio? Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice appeared at the sitting-room door and came
+slowly down the steps.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare stared. "Eccomi!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, signorino, what is the matter? What has
+happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"Happened? Nothing!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then why do you look so black?"</p>
+
+<p>"I! It's the shadow of the awning on my face."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled. He kept on smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, Gasparino, how splendid the donkeys are!
+And you, too!"</p>
+
+<p>He took hold of the boy by the shoulders and turned
+him round.</p>
+
+<p>"Per Bacco! We shall make a fine show at the fair!
+I've got money, lot's of money, to spend!"</p>
+
+<p>He showed his portfolio, full of dirty notes. Gaspare's
+eyes began to sparkle.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>He lifted his hands to Maurice's striped flannel jacket
+and thrust two large bunches of flowers and ferns into
+the two button-holes, to right and left.</p>
+
+<p>"Bravo! Now, then."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, signorino! Wait!"</p>
+
+<p>"More flowers! But where&mdash;what, over my ears,
+too!"</p>
+
+<p>He began to laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, si!   To-day you must be a real Siciliano!"</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He bent down his head to be decorated.</p>
+
+<p>"Pouf! They tickle! There, then! Now let's be
+off!"</p>
+
+<p>He leaped onto Tito's back. Gaspare sprang up on
+the other donkey.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Lucrezia!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice turned to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't leave the house to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore," said poor Lucrezia, in a deplorable
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Mind, now! Don't go down to Marechiaro this afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>There was an odd sound, almost of pleading, in his
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"I trust you to be here&mdash;remember."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;a&mdash;a&mdash;ah!" shouted Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>They were off.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino," said Gaspare, presently, when they were
+in the shadow of the ravine, "why did you say all that
+to Lucrezia?"</p>
+
+<p>"All what?"</p>
+
+<p>"All that about not leaving the house to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;why&mdash;it's better to have some one there."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. But why to-day specially?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. There's no particular reason."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought there was."</p>
+
+<p>"No, of course not. How could there be?"</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so."</p>
+
+<p>"If Lucrezia goes down to the village they'll be filling
+her ears with that stupid gossip about Sebastiano and
+that girl&mdash;Teodora."</p>
+
+<p>"It was for Lucrezia then, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, for Lucrezia. She's miserable enough already.
+I don't want her to be a spectacle when&mdash;when the
+signora returns."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I wonder when she is coming? I wonder why she
+has not written all these days?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she'll soon come. We shall&mdash;we shall very soon
+have her here with us."</p>
+
+<p>He tried to speak naturally, but found the effort
+difficult, knowing what he knew, that in the evening
+of that day Hermione would arrive at the house of the
+priest and find no preparations made for her return, no
+one to welcome her but Lucrezia&mdash;if, indeed, Lucrezia
+obeyed his orders and refrained from descending to the
+village on the chance of hearing some fresh news of her
+fickle lover. And Artois! There were no rooms engaged
+for him at the H&ocirc;tel Regina Margherita. There were
+no flowers, no books. Maurice tingled&mdash;his whole body
+tingled for a moment&mdash;and he felt like a man guilty of
+some mean crime and arraigned before all the world.
+Then he struck Tito with his switch, and began to gallop
+down the steep path at a breakneck pace, sticking his
+feet far out upon either side. He would forget. He
+would put away these thoughts that were tormenting
+him. He would enjoy this day of pleasure for which
+he had sacrificed so much, for which he had trampled
+down his self-respect in the dust.</p>
+
+<p>When they reached the road by Isola Bella, Salvatore's
+boat was just coming round the point, vigorously propelled
+by the fisherman's strong arms over the radiant
+sea. It was a magnificent day, very hot but not sultry,
+free from sirocco. The sky was deep blue, a passionate,
+exciting blue that seemed vocal, as if it were saying
+thrilling things to the world that lay beneath it. The
+waveless sea was purple, a sea, indeed, of legend, a wine-dark,
+lustrous, silken sea. Into it, just here along this
+magic coast, was surely gathered all the wonder of color
+of all the southern seas. They must be blanched to
+make this marvel of glory, this immense jewel of God.
+And the lemon groves were thick along the sea. And
+the orange-trees stood in their decorative squadrons<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+drinking in the rays of the sun with an ecstatic submission.
+And Etna, snowless Etna, rose to heaven out of
+this morning world, with its base in the purple glory
+and its feather of smoke in the calling blue, child of the
+sea-god and of the god that looks down from the height,
+majestically calm in the riot of splendor that set the
+feet of June dancing in a great tarantella.</p>
+
+<p>As Maurice saw the wonder of sea and sky, the boat
+coming in over the sea, with Maddalena in the stern
+holding a bouquet of flowers, his heart leaped up and he
+forgot for a moment the shadow in himself, the shadow
+of his own unworthiness. He sprang off the donkey.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go down to meet them!" he cried. "Catch hold
+of Tito, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>The railway line ran along the sea, between road and
+beach. He had to cross it. In doing so one of his feet
+struck the metal rail, which gave out a dry sound. He
+looked down, suddenly recalled to a reality other than
+the splendor of the morning, the rapture of this careless
+festa day. And again he was conscious of the shadow.
+Along this line, in a few hours, would come the train
+bearing Hermione and Artois. Hermione would be at
+the window, eagerly looking out, full of happy anticipation,
+leaning to catch the first sight of his face, to receive
+and return his smile of welcome. What would her
+face be like when&mdash;? But Salvatore was hailing him
+from the sea. Maddalena was waving her hand. The
+thing was done. The die was cast. He had chosen
+his lot. Fiercely he put away from him the thought
+of Hermione, lifted his voice in an answering hail, his
+hand in a salutation which he tried to make carelessly
+joyous. The boat glided in between the flat rocks.
+And then&mdash;then he was able to forget. For Maddalena's
+long eyes were looking into his, with the joyousness
+of a child's, and yet with something of the expectation
+of a woman's, too. And her brown face was alive
+with a new and delicious self-consciousness, asking him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+to praise her for the surprise she had prepared, in his
+honor surely, specially for him, and not for her comrades
+and the public of the fair.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>He put out his hands to help her out. She stood on
+the gunwale of the boat and jumped lightly down, with
+a little laugh, onto the beach.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena! Per Dio! Ma che bellezza!"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed again, and stood there on the stones
+before him smiling and watching him, with her head a
+little on one side, and the hand that held the tight
+bouquet of roses and ferns, round as a ring and red as
+dawn, up to her lips, as if a sudden impulse prompted
+her now to conceal something of her pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"Le piace?"</p>
+
+<p>It came to him softly over the roses.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice said nothing, but took her hand and looked
+at her. Salvatore was fastening up the boat and putting
+the oars into their places, and getting his jacket and hat.</p>
+
+<p>What a transformation it was, making an almost
+new Maddalena! This festival dress was really quite
+wonderful. He felt inclined to touch it here and there,
+to turn Maddalena round for new aspects, as a child
+turns round a marvellous doll.</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena wore a tudischina, a bodice of blue cotton
+velvet, ornamented with yellow silken fringes, and opening
+over the breast to show a section of snowy white
+edged with little buttons of sparkling steel. Her petticoat&mdash;the
+sinava&mdash;was of pea-green silk and thread,
+and was partially covered by an apron, a real coquette
+of an apron, white and green, with little pockets and
+puckers, and a green rosette where the strings met round
+the supple waist. Her sleeves were of white muslin,
+bound with yellow silk ribbons, and her stockings were
+blue, the color of the bodice. On her feet were shining
+shoes of black leather, neatly tied with small, black
+ribbons, and over her shoulders was a lovely shawl of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+blue and white with a pattern of flowers. She wore
+nothing on her head, but in her ears were heavy ear-rings,
+and round her neck was a thin silver chain with
+bright-blue stones threaded on it here and there.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!" Maurice said, at last. "You are a queen
+to-day!"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, then he added:</p>
+
+<p>"No, you are a siren to-day, the siren I once fancied
+you might be."</p>
+
+<p>"A siren, signorino?    What is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"An enchantress of the sea with a voice that makes
+men&mdash;that makes men feel they cannot go, they cannot
+leave it."</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena lifted the roses a little higher to hide her
+face, but Maurice saw that her eyes were still smiling,
+and it seemed to him that she looked even more radiantly
+happy than when she had taken his hands to spring
+down to the beach.</p>
+
+<p>Now Salvatore came up in his glory of a dark-blue
+suit, with a gay shirt of pink-and-white striped cotton,
+fastened at the throat with long, pink strings that had
+tasselled ends, a scarlet bow-tie with a brass anchor and
+the Italian flag thrust through it, yellow shoes, and a
+black hat, placed well over the left ear. Upon the forefinger
+of his left hand he displayed a thick snake-ring
+of tarnished metal, and he had a large, overblown rose
+in his button-hole. His mustaches had been carefully
+waxed, his hair cropped, and his hawklike, subtle, and
+yet violent face well washed for the great occasion.
+With bold familiarity he seized Maurice's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Buon giorno, signore. Come sta lei?"</p>
+
+<p>"Benissimo."</p>
+
+<p>"And Maddalena, signore? What do you think of
+Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at his girl with a certain pride, and then
+back at Maurice searchingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena is beautiful to-day," Maurice answered,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+quickly. He did not want to discuss her with her
+father, whom he longed to be rid of, whom he meant to
+get rid of if possible at the fair. Surely it would be easy
+to give him the slip there. He would be drinking with
+his companions, other fishermen and contadini, or playing
+cards, or&mdash;yes, that was an idea!</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore!" Maurice exclaimed, catching hold of the
+fisherman's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"There'll be donkeys at the fair, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Donkeys&mdash;per Dio! Why, last year there were over
+sixty, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And isn't there a donkey auction sometimes, towards
+the end of the day, when they go cheap?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore! Si, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>The fisherman's greedy little eyes were fixed on Maurice
+with keen interrogation.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let us forget that," Maurice said, returning his
+gaze. "You're a good judge of a donkey?"</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Per Bacco! There won't be a man at San Felice
+that can beat me at that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then perhaps you can do something for me. Perhaps
+you can buy me a donkey. Didn't I speak of it
+before?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. For the signora to ride when she comes
+back from Africa?"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"For a lady to ride," Maurice answered, looking at
+Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore made a clicking noise with his tongue, a
+noise that suggested eating. Then he spat vigorously
+and took from his jacket-pocket a long, black cigar.
+This was evidently going to be a great day for him.</p>
+
+<p>"Avanti, signorino! Avanti!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare was shouting and waving his hat frantically
+from the road.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Come along, Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>They left the beach and climbed the bank, Maddalena
+walking carefully in the shining shoes, and holding her
+green skirt well away from the bushes with both hands.
+Maurice hurried across the railway line without looking
+at it. He wanted to forget it. He was determined to
+forget it, and what it was bringing to Cattaro that afternoon.
+They reached the group of four donkeys which
+were standing patiently in the dusty white road.</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Gaspare, as Maddalena
+came full into his sight. "Madre mia! But you are
+like a burgisa dressed for the wedding-day, Donna Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>He wagged his head at her till the big roses above his
+ears shook like flowers in a wind.</p>
+
+<p>"Ora basta, ch' &egrave; tardu: jamu ad accumpagnari li
+Zitti!" he continued, pronouncing the time-honored
+sentence which, at a rustic wedding, gives the signal to
+the musicians to stop their playing, and to the assembled
+company the hint that the moment has come to
+escort the bride to the new home which her bridegroom
+has prepared for her.</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena laughed and blushed all over her face,
+and Salvatore shouted out a verse of a marriage song
+in high favor at Sicilian weddings:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"E cu saluti a li Zituzzi novi!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Chi bellu 'nguaggiamentu furtunatu!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Firma la menti, custanti lu cori,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">E si cci arriva a lu jornu biatu&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Maurice helped Maddalena onto her donkey,
+and paid and dismissed the boy who had brought it
+and Salvatore's beast from Marechiaro. Then he took
+out his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"A quarter-past ten," he said. "Off we go! Now,
+Gaspare&mdash;uno! due! tre!"</p>
+
+<p>They leaped simultaneously onto their donkeys, Sal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>vatore
+clambered up on his, and the little cavalcade
+started off on the long, white road that ran close along
+the sea, Maddalena and Maurice in the van, Salvatore
+and Gaspare behind. Just at first they all kept close
+together, but Sicilians are very careful of their festa
+clothes, and soon Salvatore and Gaspare dropped farther
+behind to avoid the clouds of dust stirred up by the
+tripping feet of the donkeys in front. Their chattering
+voices died away, and when Maurice looked back he saw
+them at a distance which rendered his privacy with
+Maddalena more complete than anything he had dared
+to hope for so early in the day. Yet now that they
+were thus alone he felt as if he had nothing to say to
+her. He did not feel exactly constrained, but it seemed
+to him that, to-day, he could not talk the familiar commonplaces
+to her, or pay her obvious compliments.
+They might, they would please her, but something in
+himself would resent them. This was to be such a
+great day. He had wanted it with such ardor, he had
+been so afraid of missing it, he had gained it at the cost
+of so much self-respect, that it ought to be extraordinary
+from dawn to dark, and he and Maddalena to be
+unusual, intense&mdash;something, at least, more eager, more
+happy, more intimate than usual in it.</p>
+
+<p>And then, too, as he looked at her riding along by the
+sea, with her young head held rather high and a smile
+of innocent pride in her eyes, he remembered that this
+day was their good-bye. Maddalena did not know that.
+Probably she did not think about the future. But he
+knew it. They might meet again. They would doubtless
+meet again. But it would all be different. He
+would be a serious married man, who could no longer
+frolic as if he were still a boy like Gaspare. This was
+the last day of his intimate friendship with Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>That seemed to him very strange. He had become
+accustomed to her society, to her na&iuml;ve curiosity, her
+girlish, simple gayety, so accustomed to it all that he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+could not imagine life without it, could scarcely realize
+what life had been before he knew Maddalena. It
+seemed to him that he must have always known Maddalena.
+And she&mdash;what did she feel about that?</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>She turned her head and glanced at him, smiling, as
+if she were sure of hearing something pleasant. To-day,
+in her pretty festa dress, she looked intended for
+happiness. Everything about her conveyed the suggestion
+that she was expectant of joy. The expression
+in her eyes was a summons to the world to be very
+kind and good to her, to give her only pleasant things,
+things that could not harm her.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena, do you feel as if you had known me
+long?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"How long?"</p>
+
+<p>She spread out one hand with the fingers held apart.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore&mdash;but always! I feel as if I had known
+you always."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet it's only a few days."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>She acquiesced calmly. The problem did not seem
+to puzzle her, the problem of this feeling so ill-founded.
+It was so. Very well, then&mdash;so it was.</p>
+
+<p>"And," he went on, "do you feel as if you would
+always know me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"But I shall go away, I am going away."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment her face clouded. But the influence
+of joy was very strong upon her to-day, and the cloud
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>"But you will come back, signorino. You will always
+come back."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A pretty slyness crept into her face, showed in the
+curve of the young lips, in the expression of the young
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Because you like to be here, because you like the
+Siciliani. Isn't it true?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, almost passionately. "It's true!
+Ah, Maddalena&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But at this moment a group of people from Marechiaro
+suddenly appeared upon the road beside them, having
+descended from the village by a mountain-path. There
+were exclamations, salutations. Maddalena's gown was
+carefully examined by the women of the party. The men
+exchanged compliments with Maurice. Then Salvatore
+and Gaspare, seeing friends, came galloping up, shouting,
+in a cloud of dust. A cavalcade was formed, and
+henceforth Maurice was unable to exchange any more
+confidences with Maddalena. He felt vexed at first, but
+the boisterous merriment of all these people, their glowing
+anticipation of pleasure, soon infected him. His
+heart was lightened of its burden and the spirit of the
+careless boy awoke in him. He would take no thought
+for the morrow, he would be able to take no thought so
+long as he was in this jocund company. As they trotted
+forward in a white mist along the shining sea Maurice
+was one of the gayest among them. No laugh rang out
+more frequently than his, no voice chatted more vivaciously.
+The conscious effort which at first he had to
+make seemed to give him an impetus, to send him onward
+with a rush so that he outdistanced his companions.
+Had any one observed him closely during that
+ride to the fair he might well have thought that here
+was a nature given over to happiness, a nature that was
+utterly sunny in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>They passed through the town of Cattaro, where was
+the station for Marechiaro. For a moment Maurice felt
+a pang of self-contempt, and of something more, of something
+that was tender, pitiful even, as he thought of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+Hermione's expectation disappointed. But it died away,
+or he thrust it away. The long street was full of people,
+either preparing to start for the fair themselves
+or standing at their doors to watch their friends start.
+Donkeys were being saddled and decorated with flowers.
+Tall, painted carts were being harnessed to mules.
+Visions of men being lathered and shaved, of women
+having their hair dressed or their hair searched, Sicilian
+fashion, of youths trying to curl upward scarcely
+born mustaches, of children being hastily attired in
+clothes which made them wriggle and squint, came to
+the eyes from houses in which privacy was not so much
+scorned as unthought of, utterly unknown. Turkeys
+strolled in and out among the toilet-makers. Pigs accompanied
+their mistresses from doorway to doorway
+as dogs accompany the women of other countries. And
+the cavalcade of the people of Marechiaro was hailed from
+all sides with pleasantries and promises to meet at the
+fair, with broad jokes or respectful salutations. Many
+a "Benedicite!" or "C'ci basu li mano!" greeted Maurice.
+Many a berretto was lifted from heads that he had never
+seen to his knowledge before. He was made to feel
+by all that he was among friends, and as he returned
+the smiles and salutations he remembered the saying
+Hermione had repeated: "Every Sicilian, even if he
+wears a long cap and sleeps in a hut with the pigs, is a
+gentleman," and he thought it very true.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed as if they would never get away from the
+street. At every moment they halted. One man begged
+them to wait a moment till his donkey was saddled, so
+that he might join them. Another, a wine-shop keeper,
+insisted on Maurice's testing his moscato, and thereupon
+Maurice felt obliged to order glasses all round, to
+the great delight of Gaspare, who always felt himself
+to be glorified by the generosity of his padrone, and
+who promptly took the proceedings in charge, measured
+out the wine in appropriate quantities, handed it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+about, and constituted himself master of the ceremony.
+Already, at eleven o'clock, brindisi were invented, and
+Maurice was called upon to "drop into poetry." Then
+Maddalena caught sight of some girl friends, and must
+needs show them all her finery. For this purpose she
+solemnly dismounted from her donkey to be closely
+examined on the pavement, turned about, shook forth
+her pea-green skirt, took off her chain for more minute
+inspection, and measured the silken fringes of her shawl
+in order to compare them with other shawls which were
+hastily brought out from a house near-by.</p>
+
+<p>But Gaspare, always a little ruthless with women,
+soon tired of such vanities.</p>
+
+<p>"Avanti! Avanti!" he shouted. "Dio mio! Le
+donne sono pazze! Andiamo! Andiamo!"</p>
+
+<p>He hustled Maddalena, who yielded, blushing and
+laughing, to his importunities, and at last they were
+really off again, and drowned in a sea of odor as they
+passed some buildings where lemons were being packed
+to be shipped away from Sicily. This smell seemed to
+Maurice to be the very breath of the island. He drank
+it in eagerly. Lemons, lemons, and the sun! Oranges,
+lemons, yellow flowers under the lemons, and the sun!
+Always yellow, pale yellow, gold yellow, red-gold yellow,
+and white, and silver-white, the white of the roads,
+the silver-white of dusty olive leaves, and green, the dark,
+lustrous, polished green of orange leaves, and purple
+and blue, the purple of sea, the blue of sky. What a
+riot of talk it was, and what a riot of color! It made
+Maurice feel almost drunk. It was heady, this island of
+the south&mdash;heady in the summer-time. It had a powerful
+influence, an influence that was surely an excuse
+for much. Ah, the stay-at-homes, who condemned the
+far-off passions and violences of men! What did they
+know of the various truths of the world? How should
+one in Clapham judge one at the fair of San Felice?
+Avanti! Avanti! Avanti along the blinding white road<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+by the sea, to the village on which great Etna looked
+down, not harshly for all its majesty. Nature understood.
+And God, who made Nature, who was behind
+Nature&mdash;did not He understand? There is forgiveness
+surely in great hearts, though the small hearts have no
+space to hold it.</p>
+
+<p>Something like this Maurice thought for a moment, ere
+a large thoughtlessness swept over him, bred of the sun
+and the odors, the movement, the cries and laughter of
+his companions, the gay gown and the happy glances
+of Maddalena, even of the white dust that whirled up
+from the feet of the cantering donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>And so, ever laughing, ever joking, gayly, almost
+tumultuously, they rushed upon the fair.</p>
+
+<p>San Felice is a large village in the plain at the foot of
+Etna. It lies near the sea between Catania and Messina,
+but beyond the black and forbidding lava land. Its
+patron saint, Protettore di San Felice, is Sant' Onofrio,
+and this was his festival. In the large, old church in
+the square, which was the centre of the life of the fiera,
+his image, smothered in paint, sumptuously decorated
+with red and gold and bunches of artificial flowers, was
+exposed under a canopy with pillars; and thin squares
+of paper reproducing its formal charms&mdash;the oval face
+with large eyes and small, straight nose, the ample forehead,
+crowned with hair that was brought down to a
+point in the centre, the undulating, divided beard descending
+upon the breast, one hand holding a book, the
+other upraised in a blessing&mdash;were sold for a soldo to
+all who would buy them.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing the party from Isola Bella and from
+Marechiaro did, when they had stabled their donkeys
+at Don Leontini's, in the Via Bocca di Leone, was to
+pay the visit of etiquette to Sant' Onofrio. Their laughter
+was stilled at the church doorway, through which
+women and men draped in shawls, lads and little children,
+were coming and going. Their faces assumed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+expressions of superstitious reverence and devotion.
+And, going up one by one to the large image of the
+saint, they contemplated it with awe, touched its hand
+or the hem of its robe, made the sign of the cross, and
+retreated, feeling that they were blessed for the day.</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena approached the saint with Maurice and
+Gaspare. She and Gaspare touched the hand that held
+the book, made the sign of the cross, then stared at Maurice
+to see why he did nothing. He quickly followed
+their example. Maddalena, who was pulling some of
+the roses from her tight bouquet, whispered to him:</p>
+
+<p>"Sant' Onofrio will bring us good-fortune."</p>
+
+<p>"Davvero?" he whispered back.</p>
+
+<p>"Si! Si!" said Gaspare, nodding his head.</p>
+
+<p>While Maddalena laid her flowers upon the lap of
+the saint, Gaspare bought from a boy three sheets of
+paper containing Sant' Onofrio's reproduction, and three
+more showing the effigies of San Filadelfo, Sant' Alfio,
+and San Cirino.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, Donna Maddalena! Ecco, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>He distributed his purchases, keeping two for himself.
+These last he very carefully and solemnly folded
+up and bestowed in the inner pocket of his jacket,
+which contained a leather portfolio, given to him by
+Maurice to carry his money in.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!" he said, once more, as he buttoned the flap
+of the pocket as a precaution against thieves.</p>
+
+<p>And with that final exclamation he dismissed all
+serious thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"Mangiamo, signorino!" he said. "Ora basta!"</p>
+
+<p>And they went forth into the sunshine. Salvatore
+was talking to some fishermen from Catania upon the
+steps. They cast curious glances at Maurice as he came
+out with Maddalena, and, when Salvatore went off with
+his daughter and the forestiere, they laughed among
+themselves and exchanged some remarks that were evidently
+merry. But Maurice did not heed them. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+was not a self-conscious man. And Maddalena was far
+too happy to suppose that any one could be saying
+nasty things about her.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are we going to eat?" asked Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"This way, this way, signorino!" replied Gaspare,
+elbowing a passage through the crowd. "You must
+follow me. I know where to go. I have many friends
+here."</p>
+
+<p>The truth of this statement was speedily made manifest.
+Almost every third person they met saluted Gaspare,
+some kissing him upon both cheeks, others grasping
+his hand, others taking him familiarly by the arm.
+Among the last was a tall boy with jet-black, curly hair
+and a long, pale face, whom Gaspare promptly presented
+to his padrone, by the name of Amedeo Buccini.</p>
+
+<p>"Amedeo is a parrucchiere, signorino," he said, "and
+my compare, and the best dancer in San Felice. May
+he eat with us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare informed Amedeo, who took off his hat, held
+it in his hand, and smiled all over his face with pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Gaspare is my compare, signore," he affirmed.
+"Compare, compare, compareddu"&mdash;he glanced at Gaspare,
+who joined in with him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Compare, compare, compareddu,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Io ti voglio molto bene,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mangiamo sempre insieme&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mangiamo carne e riso<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">E andiamo in Paradiso!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Carne e riso&mdash;si!" cried Maurice, laughing. "But
+Paradise! Must you go to Paradise directly afterwards,
+before the dancing and before the procession and before
+the fireworks?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore," said Gaspare. "When we are very
+old, when we cannot dance any more&mdash;non &egrave; vero,
+Amedeo?&mdash;then we will go to Paradiso."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," agreed the tall boy, quite seriously, "then we
+will go to Paradiso."</p>
+
+<p>"And I, too," said Maurice; "and Maddalena, but not
+till then."</p>
+
+<p>What a long time away that would be!</p>
+
+<p>"Here is the ristorante!"</p>
+
+<p>They had reached a long room with doors open onto
+the square, opposite to the rows of booths which were
+set up under the shadow of the church. Outside of it
+were many small tables and numbers of chairs on which
+people were sitting, contemplating the movement of the
+crowd of buyers and sellers, smoking, drinking syrups,
+gazzosa, and eating ices and flat biscuits.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare guided them through the throng to a long
+table set on a sanded floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>He installed Maurice at the top of the table.</p>
+
+<p>"And you sit here, Donna Maddalena."</p>
+
+<p>He placed her at Maurice's right hand, and was going
+to sit down himself on the left, when Salvatore roughly
+pushed in before him, seized the chair, sat in it, and
+leaned his arms on the table with a loud laugh that
+sounded defiant. An ugly look came into Gaspare's
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Macch&egrave;&mdash;" he began, angrily.</p>
+
+<p>But Maurice silenced him with a quick look.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, you come here, by Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ma&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Come along, Gasparino, and tell us what we are to
+have. You must order everything. Where's the cameriere?
+Cameriere! Cameriere!"</p>
+
+<p>He struck on his glass with a fork. A waiter came
+running.</p>
+
+<p>"Don Gaspare will order for us all," said Maurice to
+him, pointing to Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>His diplomacy was successful. Gaspare's face cleared,
+and in a moment he was immersed in an eager colloquy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+with the waiter, another friend of his from Marechiaro.
+Amedeo Buccini took a place by Gaspare, and all those
+from Marechiaro, who evidently considered that they
+belonged to the Inglese's party for the day, arranged
+themselves as they pleased and waited anxiously for the
+coming of the macaroni.</p>
+
+<p>A certain formality now reigned over the assembly.
+The movement of the road in the outside world by the
+sea had stirred the blood, had loosened tongues and
+quickened spirits. But a meal in a restaurant, with
+a rich English signore presiding at the head of the
+table, was an unaccustomed ceremony. Dark faces
+that had been lit up with laughter now looked almost
+ludicrously discreet. Brown hands which had been
+in constant activity, talking as plainly, and more expressively,
+than voices, now lay limply upon the white
+cloth or were placed upon knees motionless as the knees
+of statues. And all eyes were turned towards the giver
+of the feast, mutely demanding of him a signal of conduct
+to guide his inquiring guests. But Maurice, too, felt
+for the moment tongue-tied. He was very sensitive to
+influences, and his present position, between Maddalena
+and her father, created within him a certain confusion
+of feelings, an odd sensation of being between
+two conflicting elements. He was conscious of affection
+and of enmity, both close to him, both strong, the
+one ready to show itself, the other determined to remain
+in hiding. He glanced at Salvatore, and met the
+fisherman's keen gaze. Behind the instant smile in
+the glittering eyes he divined, rather than saw, the
+shadow of his hatred. And for a moment he wondered.
+Why should Salvatore hate him? It was reasonable
+to hate a man for a wrong done, even for a wrong deliberately
+contemplated with intention&mdash;the intention
+of committing it. But he had done no real wrong to
+Salvatore. Nor had he any evil intention with regard
+to him or his. So far he had only brought pleasure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+into their lives, his life and Maddalena's&mdash;pleasure and
+money. If there had been any secret pain engendered
+by their mutual intercourse it was his. And this day
+was the last of their intimacy, though Salvatore and
+Maddalena did not know it. Suddenly a desire, an
+almost weak desire, came to him to banish Salvatore's
+distrust of him, a distrust which he was more conscious
+of at this moment than ever before.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know of the muttered comments of the
+fishermen from Catania as he and Maddalena passed
+down the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio. But
+Salvatore's sharp ears had caught them and the laughter
+that followed them, and his hot blood was on fire.
+The words, the laughter had touched his sensitive Sicilian
+pride&mdash;the pride of the man who means never to
+be banished from the Piazza&mdash;as a knife touches a raw
+wound. And as Maurice had set a limit to his sinning&mdash;his
+insincerity to Hermione, his betrayal of her complete
+trust in him, nothing more&mdash;so Salvatore now,
+while he sat at meat with the Inglese, mentally put a
+limit to his own complaisance, a complaisance which had
+been born of his intense avarice. To-day he would get
+all he could out of the Inglese&mdash;money, food, wine, a
+donkey&mdash;who knew what? And then&mdash;good-bye to
+soft speeches. Those fishermen, his friends, his comrades,
+his world, in fact, should have their mouths shut
+once for all. He knew how to look after his girl, and
+they should know that he knew, they and all Marechiaro,
+and all San Felice, and all Cattaro. His limit, like Maurice's,
+was that day of the fair, and it was nearly reached.
+For the hours were hurrying towards the night and farewells.</p>
+
+<p>Moved by his abrupt desire to stand well with everybody
+during this last festa, Maurice began to speak to
+Salvatore of the donkey auction.    When would it begin?</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?"</p>
+
+<p>No one knew. In Sicily all feasts are movable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+Even mass may begin an hour too late or an hour too
+early. One thought the donkey auction would start
+at fourteen, another at sixteen o'clock. Gaspare was
+imperiously certain, over the macaroni, which had now
+made its appearance, that the hour was seventeen.
+There were to be other auctions, auctions of wonderful
+things. A clock that played music&mdash;the "Marcia
+Reale" and the "Tre Colori"&mdash;was to be put up; suits
+of clothes, too; boots, hats, a chair that rocked like a
+boat on the sea, a revolver ornamented with ivory.
+Already&mdash;no one knew when, for no one had missed
+him&mdash;he had been to view these treasures. As he
+spoke of them tongues were loosed and eyes shone
+with excitement. Money was in the air. Prices were
+passionately discussed, values debated. All down the
+table went the words "soldi," "lire," "lire sterline,"
+"biglietti da cinque," "biglietti da dieci." Salvatore's
+hatred died away, suffocated for the moment under the
+weight of his avarice. A donkey&mdash;yes, he meant to get
+a donkey with the stranger's money. But why stop
+there? Why not have the clock and the rocking-chair
+and the revolver? His sharpness of the Sicilian, a
+sharpness almost as keen and sure as that of the Arab,
+divined the intensity, the recklessness alive in the
+Englishman to-day, bred of that limit, "my last day
+of the careless life," to which his own limit was twin-brother,
+but of which he knew nothing. And as Maurice
+was intense to-day, because there were so few hours left
+to him for intensity, so was Salvatore intense in a different
+way, but for a similar reason. They were walking
+in step without being aware of it. Or were they not
+rather racing neck to neck, like passionate opponents?</p>
+
+<p>There was little time. Then they must use what
+there was to the full. They must not let one single
+moment find them lazy, indifferent.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 234px;">
+<a href="images/gs05.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs05_th.jpg" width="234" height="400"
+alt="&quot;&#39;I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,&#39; SHE SAID&quot;"
+title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,&#39; SHE SAID&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>Under the cover of the flood of talk Maurice turned
+to Maddalena.    She was taking no part in it, but was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+eating her macaroni gently, as if it were a new and
+wonderful food. So Maurice thought as he looked at her.
+To-day there was something strange, almost pathetic, to
+him in Maddalena, a softness, an innocent refinement
+that made him imagine her in another life than hers,
+and with other companions, in a life as free but less
+hard, with companions as natural but less ruthless to
+women.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena," he said to her. "They all want to
+buy things at the auction."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"And you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, don't you want to buy something?"</p>
+
+<p>He was testing her, testing her memory. She looked at
+him above her fork, from which the macaroni streamed
+down.</p>
+
+<p>"I am content without anything, signorino," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Without the blue dress and the ear-rings, longer
+than that?" He measured imaginary ear-rings in the
+air. "Have you forgotten, Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>She blushed and bent over her plate. She had not
+forgotten. All the day since she rose at dawn she
+had been thinking of Maurice's old promise. But she did
+not know that he remembered it, and his remembrance
+of it came to her now as a lovely surprise. He bent his
+head down nearer to her.</p>
+
+<p>"When they are all at the auction, we will go to buy
+the blue dress and the ear-rings," he almost whispered.
+"We will go by ourselves. Shall we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was very small and her cheeks still held
+their flush. She glanced, with eyes that were unusually
+conscious, to right and left of her, to see if the
+neighbors had noticed their colloquy. And that look
+of consciousness made Maurice suddenly understand that
+this limit which he had put to his sinning&mdash;so he had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+called it with a sort of angry mental sincerity, summoned,
+perhaps, to match the tremendous sincerity of
+his wife which he was meeting with a lie to-day&mdash;his
+sinning against Hermione was also a limit to something
+else. Had he not sinned against Maddalena, sinned
+when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that
+he delighted to be with her? Was he not sinning now
+when he promised to buy for her the most beautiful
+things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself
+that his fault against Maddalena was more grave,
+more unforgivable than his fault against Hermione.
+But then a sudden anger that was like a storm, against
+his own condemnation of himself, swept through him.
+He had come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and
+here he was giving himself up to gloom, to absurd self-torture.
+Where was his natural careless temperament?
+To-day his soul was full of shadows, like the
+soul of a man going to meet a doom.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's the wine?" he called to Gaspare. "Wine,
+cameriere, wine!"</p>
+
+<p>"You must not drink wine with the pasta, signorino!"
+cried Gaspare. "Only afterwards, with the vitello."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ordered vitello? Capital! But I've finished
+my pasta and I'm thirsty. Well, what do you
+want to buy at the auction, Gaspare, and you, Amedeo,
+and you Salvatore?"</p>
+
+<p>He plunged into the talk and made Salvatore show
+his keen desires, encouraging and playing with his
+avarice, now holding it off for a moment, then coaxing
+it as one coaxes an animal, stroking it, tempting it to
+a forward movement. The wine went round now, for
+the vitello was on the table, and the talk grew more
+noisy, the laughter louder. Outside, too, the movement
+and the tumult of the fair were increasing. Cries
+of men selling their wares rose up, the hard melodies
+of a piano-organ, and a strange and ecclesiastical chant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+sung by three voices that, repeated again and again, at
+last attracted Maurice's attention.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" he asked of Gaspare. "Are those
+priests chanting?"</p>
+
+<p>"Priests!    No, signore.    Those are the Romani."</p>
+
+<p>"Romans here!    What are they doing?"</p>
+
+<p>"They have a cart decorated with flags, signorino,
+and they are selling lemon-water and ices. All the people
+say that they are Romans and that is how they
+sing in Rome."</p>
+
+<p>The long and lugubrious chant of the ice-venders rose
+up again, strident and melancholy as a song chanted
+over a corpse.</p>
+
+<p>"It's funny to sing like that to sell ices," Maurice said.
+"It sounds like men at a funeral."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, they are very good ices, signorino. The Romans
+make splendid ices."</p>
+
+<p>Turkey followed the vitello.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice's guests were now completely at ease and perfectly
+happy. The consciousness that all this was going
+to be paid for, that they would not have to put
+their hands in their pockets for a soldo, warmed their
+hearts as the wine warmed their bodies. Amedeo's
+long, white face was becoming radiant, and even Salvatore
+softened towards the Inglese. A sort of respect,
+almost furtive, came to him for the wealth that could
+carelessly entertain this crowd of people, that could buy
+clocks, chairs, donkeys at pleasure, and scarcely know
+that soldi were gone, scarcely miss them. As he attacked
+his share of the turkey vigorously, picking up
+the bones with his fingers and tearing the flesh away
+with his white teeth, he tried to realize what such
+wealth must mean to the possessor of it, an effort continually
+made by the sharp-witted, very poor man.
+And this wealth&mdash;for the moment some of it was at his
+command! To ask to-day would be to have. Instinctively
+he knew that, and felt like one with money<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+in the bank. If only it might be so to-morrow and for
+many days! He began to regret the limit, almost to
+forget the sound of the laughter of the Catania fishermen
+upon the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio. His
+pride was going to sleep, and his avarice was opening its
+eyes wider.</p>
+
+<p>When the meal was over they went out onto the
+pavement to take coffee in the open air. The throng
+was much greater than it had been when they entered,
+for people were continually arriving from the more distant
+villages, and two trains had come in from Messina
+and Catania. It was difficult to find a table. Indeed,
+it might have been impossible had not Gaspare ruthlessly
+dislodged a party of acquaintances who were comfortably
+established around one in a prominent position.</p>
+
+<p>"I must have a table for my padrone," he said. "Go
+along with you!"</p>
+
+<p>And they meekly went, smiling, and without ill-will&mdash;indeed,
+almost as if they had received a compliment.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Gaspare," began Maurice, "I can't&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Here is a chair for you, signorino. Take it quickly."</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate, let us offer them something."</p>
+
+<p>"Much better spare your soldi now, signorino, and
+buy something at the auction. That clock plays the
+'Tre Colori' just like a band."</p>
+
+<p>"Buy it. Here is some money."</p>
+
+<p>He thrust some notes into the boy's ready hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, signorino. Ecco la musica!"</p>
+
+<p>In the distance there rose the blare of a processional
+march from "A&iuml;da," and round the corner of the Via
+di Polifemo came a throng of men and boys in dark
+uniforms, with epaulets and cocked hats with flying
+plumes, blowing with all their might into wind instruments
+of enormous size.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the musica of the citt&agrave;, signore," explained
+Amedeo. "Afterwards there will be the Musica Mascagni
+and the Musica Leoncavallo."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!    And will they all play together?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore. They have quarrelled. At Pasqua we
+had no music, and the archpriest was hooted by all in
+the Piazza."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so. I think he had forbidden the Musica
+Mascagni to play at Madre Lucia's funeral, and the
+Musica Mascagni went to fight with the Musica della
+citt&agrave;. To-day they will all play, because it is the festa
+of the Santo Patrono, but even for him they will not
+play together."</p>
+
+<p>The bandsmen had now taken their places upon a
+wooden dais exactly opposite to the restaurant, and
+were indulging in a military rendering of "Celeste A&iuml;da,"
+which struck most of the Sicilians at the small tables
+to a reverent silence. Maddalena's eyes had become
+almost round with pleasure, Gaspare was singing the
+air frankly with Amedeo, and even Salvatore seemed
+soothed and humanized, as he sipped his coffee, puffed
+at a thin cigar, and eyed the women who were slowly
+sauntering up and down to show their finery. At the
+windows of most of the neighboring houses appeared
+parties of dignified gazers, important personages of the
+town, who owned small balconies commanding the
+piazza, and who now stepped forth upon these coigns
+of vantage, and leaned upon the rails that they might
+see and be seen by the less favored ones below. Amedeo
+and Gaspare began to name these potentates. The
+stout man with a gray mustache, white trousers, and a
+plaid shawl over his shoulders was Signor Torloni, the
+syndic of San Felice. The tall, angry-looking gentleman,
+with bulging, black eyes and wrinkled cheeks, was
+Signor Carata, the avvocato; and the lady in black and
+a yellow shawl was his wife, who was the daughter of
+the syndic. Close by was Signorina Maria Sacchetti,
+the beauty of San Felice, already more than plump, but
+with a good complexion, and hair so thick that it stood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+out from her satisfied face as if it were trained over a
+trellis. She wore white, and long, thread gloves which
+went above her elbows. Maddalena regarded her with
+awe when Amedeo mentioned a rumor that she was
+going to be "promised" to Dr. Marinelli, who was to
+be seen at her side, wearing a Gibus hat and curling a
+pair of gigantic black mustaches.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice listened to the music and the chatter which,
+silenced by the arrival of the music, had now burst
+forth again, with rather indifferent ears. He wanted to
+get away somewhere and to be alone with Maddalena.
+The day was passing on. Soon night would be falling.
+The fair would be at an end. Then would come the
+ride back, and then&mdash;&mdash;But he did not care to look
+forward into that future. He had not done so yet.
+He would not do so now. It would be better, when the
+time came, to rush upon it blindly. Preparation, forethought,
+would only render him unnatural. And he
+must seem natural, utterly natural, in his insincere surprise,
+in his insincere regret.</p>
+
+<p>"Pay for the coffee, Gaspare," he said, giving the
+boy some money. "Now I want to walk about and
+see everything. Where are the donkeys?"</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore," said Gaspare, "they are outside the
+town in the watercourse that runs under the bridge&mdash;you
+know, that broke down this spring where the line
+is? They have only just finished mending it."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember your telling me."</p>
+
+<p>"And you were so glad the signora was travelling the
+other way."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke hastily. Salvatore was on his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"What hour have we?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice looked at his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"Half-past two already! I say, Salvatore, you
+mustn't forget the donkeys."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Salvatore came close up to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore," he began, in a low voice, "what do you
+wish me to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bid for a good donkey."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"For the best donkey they put up for sale."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore began to look passionately eager.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore.    And if I get it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come to me and I will give you the money to
+pay."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore.    How high shall I go?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare was listening intently, with a hard face and
+sullen eyes. His whole body seemed to be disapproving
+what Maurice was doing. But he said nothing. Perhaps
+he felt that to-day it would be useless to try to
+govern the actions of his padrone.</p>
+
+<p>"How high? Well"&mdash;Maurice felt that, before Gaspare,
+he must put a limit to his price, though he did not
+care what it was&mdash;"say a hundred. Here, I'll give it
+you now."</p>
+
+<p>He put his hand into his pocket and drew out his
+portfolio.</p>
+
+<p>"There's the hundred."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore took it eagerly, spread it over his hand,
+stared at it, then folded it with fingers that seemed for
+the moment almost delicate, and put it into the inside
+pocket of his jacket. He meant to go presently and
+show it to the fishermen of Catania, who had laughed
+upon the steps of the church, and explain matters to
+them a little. They thought him a fool. Well, he
+would soon make them understand who was the fool.</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>He said it through his teeth. Maurice turned to Gaspare.
+He felt the boy's stern disapproval of what he
+had done, and wanted, if possible, to make amends.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," he said, "here is a hundred lire for you.
+I want you to go to the auction and to bid for anything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+you think worth having. Buy something for your
+mother and father, for the house, some nice things!"</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, signore."</p>
+
+<p>He took the note, but without alacrity, and his face
+was still lowering.</p>
+
+<p>"And you, signore?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Are you not coming with me to the auction?
+It will be better for you to be there to choose the things."</p>
+
+<p>For an instant Maurice felt irritated. Was he never
+to be allowed a moment alone with Maddalena?</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but I'm no good at&mdash;&mdash;" he began.</p>
+
+<p>Then he stopped. To-day he must be birbante&mdash;on
+his guard. Once the auction was in full swing&mdash;so he
+thought&mdash;Salvatore and Gaspare would be as they were
+when they gambled beside the sea. They would forget
+everything. It would be easy to escape. But till that
+moment came he must be cautious.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I'll come," he exclaimed, heartily. "But
+you must do the bidding, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>The boy looked less sullen.</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signorino. I shall know best what the
+things are worth. And Salvatore"&mdash;he glanced viciously
+at the fisherman&mdash;"can go to the donkeys. I have
+seen them. They are poor donkeys this year."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore returned his vicious glance and said something
+in dialect which Maurice did not understand. Gaspare's
+face flushed, and he was about to burst into an
+angry reply when Maurice touched his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Come along, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>As they got up, he whispered:</p>
+
+<p>"Remember what I said about to-day!"</p>
+
+<p>"Macch&egrave;&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice closed his fingers tightly on Gaspare's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, you must remember! Afterwards what
+you like, but not to-day. Andiamo!"</p>
+
+<p>They all got up. The Musica della citt&agrave; was now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+playing a violent jig, undoubtedly composed by Bellini,
+who was considered almost as a child of San Felice,
+having been born close by at Catania.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are the women in the wonderful blue dresses?"
+Maurice asked, as they stepped into the road; "and the
+ear-rings? I haven't seen them yet."</p>
+
+<p>"They will come towards evening, signorino," replied
+Gaspare, "when it gets cool. They do not care
+to be in the sun dressed like that. It might spoil their
+things."</p>
+
+<p>Evidently the promenade of these proud beauties was
+an important function.</p>
+
+<p>"We must not miss them," Maurice said to Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>She looked conscious.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"They will all be here this evening, signore," said
+Amedeo, "for the giuochi di fuoco."</p>
+
+<p>"The giuochi di fuoco&mdash;they will be at the end?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. After the giuochi di fuoco it is all finished."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice stifled a sigh. "It is all finished," Amedeo had
+said. But for him? For him there would be the ride
+home up the mountain, the arrival upon the terrace
+before the house of the priest. At what hour would he
+be there? It would be very late, perhaps nearly at
+dawn, in the cold, still, sad hour when vitality is at
+its lowest. And Hermione? Would she be sleeping?
+How would they meet? How would he&mdash;&mdash;?</p>
+
+<p>"Andiamo! Andiamo!"</p>
+
+<p>He cried out almost angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"Which is the way?"</p>
+
+<p>"All the auctions are held outside the town, signore,"
+said Amedeo. "Follow me."</p>
+
+<p>Proudly he took the lead, glad to be useful and important
+after the benefits that had been bestowed upon
+him, and hoping secretly that perhaps the rich Inglese<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+would give him something to spend, too, since money
+was so plentiful for donkeys and clocks.</p>
+
+<p>"They are in the fiume, near the sea and the railway
+line."</p>
+
+<p>The railway line! When he heard that Maurice had
+a moment's absurd sensation of reluctance, a desire to
+hold back, such as comes to a man who is unexpectedly
+asked to confront some danger. It seemed to him that
+if he went to the watercourse he might be seen by Hermione
+and Artois as they passed by on their way to
+Marechiaro. But of course they were coming from Messina!
+What a fool he was to-day! His recklessness
+seemed to have deserted him just when he wanted it
+most. To-day he was not himself. He was a coward.
+What it was that made him a coward he did not tell
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we can all go together," he said. "Salvatore
+and all."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore's voice was close at his ear, and he knew by
+the sound of it that the fisherman was smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"We can all keep together, signore; then we shall be
+more gay."</p>
+
+<p>They threaded their way through the throng. The
+violent jig of Bellini died away gradually, till it was
+faint in the distance. At the end of the narrow street
+Maurice saw the large bulk of Etna. On this clear afternoon
+it looked quite close, almost as if, when they got
+out of the street, they would be at its very foot, and
+would have to begin to climb. Maurice remembered his
+wild longing to carry Maddalena off upon the sea, or to
+some eyrie in the mountains, to be alone with her in
+some savage place. Why not give all these people the
+slip now&mdash;somehow&mdash;when the fun of the fair was at
+its height, mount the donkeys and ride straight for the
+huge mountain? There were caverns there and desolate
+lava wastes; there were almost impenetrable beech<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+forests. Sebastiano had told him tales of them, those
+mighty forests that climbed up to green lawns looking
+down upon the Lipari Isles. He thought of their silence
+and their shadows, their beds made of the drifted leaves
+of the autumn. There, would be no disturbance, no
+clashing of wills and of interests, but calm and silence
+and the time to love. He glanced at Maddalena. He
+could hardly help imagining that she knew what he was
+thinking of. Salvatore had dropped behind for a moment.
+Maurice did not know it, but the fisherman had
+caught sight of his comrades of Catania drinking in a
+roadside wine-shop, and had stopped to show them the
+note for a hundred francs, and to make them understand
+the position of affairs between him and the forestiere.
+Gaspare was talking eagerly to Amedeo about the things
+that were likely to be put up for sale at the auction.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena," Maurice said to the girl, in a low voice,
+"can you guess what I am thinking about?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"You see the mountain!"</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to the end of the little street.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"I am thinking that I should like to go there now
+with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Ma, signorino&mdash;the fiera!"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice sounded plaintive with surprise and she
+glanced at her pea-green skirt.</p>
+
+<p>"And this, signorino!"&mdash;she touched it carefully with
+her slim fingers. "How could I go in this?"</p>
+
+<p>"When the fair is over, then, and you are in your
+every-day gown, Maddalena, I should like to carry you
+off to Etna."</p>
+
+<p>"They say there are briganti there."</p>
+
+<p>"Brigands&mdash;would you be afraid of them with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, signore. But what should we do there
+on Etna far away from the sea and from Marechiaro?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"We should"&mdash;he whispered in her ear, seizing this
+chance almost angrily, almost defiantly, with the thought
+of Salvatore in his mind&mdash;"we should love each other,
+Maddalena. It is quiet in the beech forests on Etna.
+No one would come to disturb us, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A chuckle close to his ear made him start. Salvatore's
+hand was on his arm, and Salvatore's face, looking
+wily and triumphant, was close to his.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare was wrong, there are splendid donkeys here.
+I have been talking to some friends who have seen them."</p>
+
+<p>There was a tramp of heavy boots on the stones behind
+them. The fishermen from Catania were coming
+to see the fun. Salvatore was in glory. To get all and
+give nothing was, in his opinion, to accomplish the legitimate
+aim of a man's life. And his friends, those who
+had dared to sneer and to whisper, and to imagine that
+he was selling his daughter for money, now knew the
+truth and were here to witness his ingenuity. Intoxicated
+by his triumph, he began to show off his power
+over the Inglese for the benefit of the tramplers behind.
+He talked to Maurice with a loud familiarity, kept laying
+his hand on Maurice's arm as they walked, and even called
+him, with a half-jocose intonation, "compare." Maurice
+sickened at his impertinence, but was obliged to endure
+it with patience, and this act of patience brought to the
+birth within him a sudden, fierce longing for revenge, a
+longing to pay Salvatore out for his grossness, his greed,
+his sly and leering affectation of playing the slave when
+he was really indicating to his compatriots that he considered
+himself the master. Again Maurice heard the call
+of the Sicilian blood within him, but this time it did not
+call him to the tarantella or to love. It called him to
+strike a blow. But this blow could only be struck
+through Maddalena, could only be struck if he were
+traitor to Hermione. For a moment he saw everything
+red. Again Salvatore called him "compare." Suddenly
+Maurice could not bear it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't say that!" he said. "Don't call me that!"</p>
+
+<p>He had almost hissed the words out. Salvatore
+started, and for an instant, as they walked side by side,
+the two men looked at each other with eyes that told
+the truth. Then Salvatore, without asking for any explanation
+of Maurice's sudden outburst, said:</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signore, va bene! I thought for to-day
+we were all compares. Scusi, scusi."</p>
+
+<p>There was a bitterness of irony in his voice. As he
+finished he swept off his soft hat and then replaced it
+more over his left ear than ever. Maurice knew at once
+that he had done the unforgivable thing, that he had
+stabbed a Sicilian's amour propre in the presence of witnesses
+of his own blood. The fishermen from Catania
+had heard. He knew it from Salvatore's manner, and
+an odd sensation came to him that Salvatore had passed
+sentence upon him. In silence, and mechanically, he
+walked on to the end of the street. He felt like one
+who, having done something swiftly, thoughtlessly, is
+suddenly confronted with the irreparable, abruptly sees
+the future spread out before him bathed in a flash of
+crude light, the future transformed in a second by that
+act of his as a landscape is transformed by an earthquake
+or a calm sea by a hurricane.</p>
+
+<p>And when the watercourse came in sight, with its
+crowd, its voices, and its multitude of beasts, he looked
+at it dully for a moment, hardly realizing it.</p>
+
+<p>In Sicily the animal fairs are often held in the great
+watercourses that stretch down from the foot of the
+mountains to the sea, and that resemble huge highroads
+in the making, roads upon which the stones have
+been dumped ready for the steam-roller. In winter
+there is sometimes a torrent of water rushing through
+them, but in summer they are dry, and look like
+wounds gashed in the thickly growing lemon and orange
+groves. The trampling feet of beasts can do no harm
+to the stones, and these watercourses in the summer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+season are of no use to anybody. They are, therefore,
+often utilized at fair time. Cattle, donkeys, mules are
+driven down to them in squadrons. Painted Sicilian
+carts are ranged upon their banks, with sets of harness,
+and the auctioneers, whose business it is to sell miscellaneous
+articles, household furniture, stuffs, clocks,
+ornaments, frequently descend into them, and mount
+a heap of stones to gain command of their gaping audience
+of contadini and the shrewder buyers from the
+towns.</p>
+
+<p>The watercourse of San Felice was traversed at its
+mouth by the railway line from Catania to Messina,
+which crossed it on a long bridge supported by stone
+pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had
+said, had recently collapsed and was now nearly built
+up again. It was already in use, but the trains were
+obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in order not to
+shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed
+at each end to signal to the driver whether he was to
+stop or whether he might venture to go on. Beyond
+the watercourse, upon the side opposite to the town of
+San Felice, was a series of dense lemon groves, gained
+by a sloping bank of bare, crumbling earth, on the top
+of which, close to the line and exactly where it came
+to the bridge, was a group of four old olive-trees with
+gnarled, twisted trunks. These trees cast a patch of
+pleasant shade, from which all the bustle of the fair was
+visible, but at a distance, and as Maurice and his party
+came out of the village on the opposite bank, he whispered
+to Maddalena:</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let's get away presently, you and I; let's go and
+sit under those trees. I want to talk to you quietly."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was lower even than his own.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, signore! Ecco!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Salvatore was pointing to a crowd of donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is the man who is going to sell the clock!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy's face was intent. His eyes were shining,
+and his glum manner had vanished, under the influence
+of a keen excitement. Maurice realized that very soon
+he would be free. Once his friends were in the crowd of
+buyers and sellers everything but the chance of a bargain
+would be forgotten. His own blood quickened but
+for a different reason.</p>
+
+<p>"What beautiful carts!" he said. "We have no such
+carts in England!"</p>
+
+<p>"If you would like to buy a cart, signore&mdash;&mdash;" began
+Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>But Gaspare interrupted with violence.</p>
+
+<p>"Macch&egrave;! What is the use of a cart to the signorino?
+He is going away to England. How can he take a cart
+with him in the train?"</p>
+
+<p>"He can leave the cart with me," said Salvatore, with
+open impudence. "I can take care of it for the signore
+as well as the donkey."</p>
+
+<p>"Macch&egrave;!" cried Gaspare, furiously.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice took him by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Help me down the bank! Come on!"</p>
+
+<p>He began to run, pulling Gaspare with him. When
+they got to the bottom, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right, Gaspare. I'm not going to be such
+a fool as to buy a cart. Now, then, which way are we
+going?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, do you want to buy a very good donkey, a
+very strong donkey, strong enough to carry three Germans
+to the top of Etna? Come and see my donkey.
+He is very cheap. I make a special price because the
+signore is simpatico. All the English are simpatici.
+Come this way, signore! Gaspare knows me. Gaspare
+knows that I am not birbante."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino! Look at this clock! It plays
+the 'Tre Colori.' It is worth twenty-five lire, but I will
+make a special price for you because you love Sicily and
+are like a Siciliano. Gaspare will tell you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But Gaspare elbowed away his acquaintances roughly.</p>
+
+<p>"Let my padrone alone. He is not here to buy. He
+is only here to see the fair. Come on, signorino! Do
+not answer them. Do not take any notice. You must
+not buy anything or you will be cheated. Let me make
+the prices."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you make the prices. Per Bacco, how hot it
+is!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice pulled his hat down over his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena, you'll get a sunstroke!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, signore. I am accustomed to the sun."</p>
+
+<p>"But to-day it's terrific!"</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the masses of stones in the watercourse seemed
+to draw and to concentrate the sun-rays. The air was
+alive with minute and dancing specks of light, and in
+the distance, seen under the railway bridge, the sea
+looked hot, a fiery blue that was surely sweating in the
+glare of the afternoon. The crowd of donkeys, of cattle,
+of pigs&mdash;there were many pigs on sale&mdash;looked both
+dull and angry in the heat, and the swarms of Sicilians
+who moved slowly about among them, examining them
+critically, appraising their qualities and noting their defects,
+perspired in their festa clothes, which were mostly
+heavy and ill-adapted to summer-time. A small boy
+passed by, bearing in his arms a struggling turkey. He
+caught his foot in some stones, fell, bruised his forehead,
+and burst out crying, while the indignant and terrified
+bird broke away, leaving some feathers, and made off
+violently towards Etna. There was a roar of laughter
+from the people near. Some ran to catch the turkey,
+others picked up the boy. Salvatore had stopped to
+see this adventure, and was now at a little distance surrounded
+by the Catanesi, who were evidently deter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>mined
+to assist at his bidding for a donkey. The sight
+of the note for a hundred lire had greatly increased their
+respect for Salvatore, and with the Sicilian instinct to
+go, and to stay, where money is, they now kept close
+to their comrade, eying him almost with awe as one
+in possession of a fortune. Maurice saw them presently
+examining a group of donkeys. Salvatore, with an
+autocratic air, and the wild gestures peculiar to him,
+was evidently laying down the law as to what each animal
+was worth. The fishermen stood by, listening attentively.
+The fact of Salvatore's purchasing power
+gave him the right to pronounce an opinion. He was in
+glory. Maurice thanked Heaven for that. The man in
+glory is often the forgetful man. Salvatore, he thought,
+would not bother about his daughter and his banker
+for a little while. But how to get rid of Gaspare and
+Amedeo! It seemed to him that they would never
+leave his side.</p>
+
+<p>There were many wooden stands covered with goods
+for sale in the watercourse, with bales of stuff for suits
+and dresses, with hats and caps, shirts, cravats, boots
+and shoes, walking-sticks, shawls, household utensils,
+crockery, everything the contadino needs and loves.
+Gaspare, having money to lay out, considered it his
+serious duty to examine everything that was to be
+bought with slow minuteness. It did not matter
+whether the goods were suited to a masculine taste or
+not. He went into the mysteries of feminine attire
+with almost as much assiduity as a mother displays
+when buying a daughter's trousseau, and insisted upon
+Maurice sharing his interest and caution. All sense of
+humor, all boyish sprightliness vanished from him in
+this important epoch of his life. The suspicion, the intensity
+of the bargaining contadino came to the surface.
+His usually bright face was quite altered. He looked
+elderly, subtle, and almost Jewish as he slowly passed
+from stall to stall, testing, weighing, measuring, appraising.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It seemed to Maurice that this progress would never
+end. Presently they reached a stand covered with
+women's shawls and with aprons.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I buy an apron for my mother, signorino?"
+asked Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, certainly."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice did not know what else to say. The result of
+his consent was terrible. For a full half-hour they
+stood in the glaring sun, while Gaspare and Amedeo
+solemnly tried on aprons over their suits in the midst
+of a concourse of attentive contadini. In vain did Maurice
+say: "That's a pretty one. I should take that one."
+Some defect was always discoverable. The distant
+mother's taste was evidently peculiar and not to be
+easily suited, and Maurice, not being familiar with it, was
+unable to combat such assertions of Gaspare as that
+she objected to pink spots, or that she could never be
+expected to put on an apron before the neighbors if the
+stripes upon it were of different colors and there was no
+stitching round the hem. For the first time since he was
+in Sicily the heat began to affect him unpleasantly.
+His head felt as if it were compressed in an iron band,
+and the vision of Gaspare, eagerly bargaining, looking
+Jewish, and revolving slowly in aprons of different colors,
+shapes, and sizes, began to dance before his eyes. He
+felt desperate, and suddenly resolved to be frank.</p>
+
+<p>"Macch&egrave;!" Gaspare was exclaiming, with indignant
+gestures of protest to the elderly couple who were
+in charge of the aprons; "it is not worth two soldi!
+It is not fit to be thrown to the pigs, and you ask
+me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>"Two lire&mdash;Madonna! Sangue di San Pancrazio, they
+ask me two lire! Macch&egrave;!" (He flung down the apron
+passionately upon the stall.) "Go and find Lipari people
+to buy your dirt; don't come to one from Marechiaro."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He took up another apron.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>"One lira fifty? Madre mia, do you think I was born
+in a grotto on Etna and have never&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, listen to me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Scusi, signorino!    I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going over there to sit down in the shade for a
+minute. After that wine I drank at dinner I'm a bit
+sleepy."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore.  Shall I come with you?"</p>
+
+<p>For once there was reluctance in his voice, and he
+looked down at the blue-and-white apron he had on
+with wistful eyes. It was a new joy to him to be bargaining
+in the midst of an attentive throng of his compatriots.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. You stay here and spend the money. Bid
+for the clock when the auction comes on."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore, but you must be here, too, then."</p>
+
+<p>"All right. Come and fetch me if you like. I shall
+be over there under the trees."</p>
+
+<p>He waved his hand vaguely towards the lemon
+groves.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, choose a good apron. Don't let them cheat
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Macch&egrave;!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy laughed loudly, and turned eagerly to the
+stall again.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice drew her quickly, anxiously, out of the crowd,
+and they began to walk across the watercourse towards
+the farther bank and the group of olive-trees. Salvatore
+had forgotten them. So had Gaspare. Both father
+and servant were taken by the fascination of the
+fair. At last! But how late it must be! How many
+hours had already fled away! Maurice scarcely dared to
+look at his watch. He feared to see the time. While
+they walked he said nothing to Maddalena, but when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+they reached the bank he took her arm and helped her
+up it, and when they were at the top he drew a long
+breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you tired, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tired&mdash;yes, of all those people. Come and sit down,
+Maddalena, under the olive-trees."</p>
+
+<p>He took her by the hand. Her hand was warm and
+dry, pleasant to touch, to hold. As he felt it in his the
+desire to strike at Salvatore revived within him. Salvatore
+was laughing at him, was triumphing over him,
+triumphing in the get-all and give-nothing policy which
+he thought he was pursuing with such complete success.
+Would it be very difficult to turn that success into
+failure? Maurice wondered for a moment, then ceased to
+wonder. Something in the touch of Maddalena's hand
+told him that, if he chose, he could have his revenge
+upon Salvatore, and he was assailed by a double temptation.
+Both anger and love tempted him. If he
+stooped to do evil he could gratify two of the strongest
+desires in humanity, the desire to conquer in love and
+the desire to triumph in hate. Salvatore thought him
+such a fool, held him in such contempt! Something
+within him was burning to-day as a cheek burns with
+shame, something within him that was like the kernel
+of him, like the soul of his manhood, which the fisherman
+was sneering at. He did not say to himself strongly
+that he did not care what such men thought of him.
+He could not, for his nature was both reckless and sensitive.
+He did care, as if he had been a Sicilian half
+doubtful whether he dared to show his face in the piazza.
+And he had another feeling, too, which had come to him
+when Salvatore had answered his exclamation of irresistible
+anger at being called "compare," the feeling that,
+whether he sinned against the fisherman or not, the
+fisherman meant to do him harm. The sensation might
+be absurd, would have seemed to him probably absurd
+in England. Here, in Sicily, it sprang up and he had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+just to accept it, as a man accepts an instinct which
+guides him, prompts him.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore had turned down his thumb that day.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was not afraid of him. Physically, he was
+quite fearless. But this sensation of having been secretly
+condemned made him feel hard, cruel, ready, perhaps,
+to do a thing not natural to him, to sacrifice another
+who had never done him wrong. At that moment it
+seemed to him that it would be more manly to triumph
+over Salvatore by a double betrayal than to "run
+straight," conquer himself and let men not of his code
+think of him as they would.</p>
+
+<p>Not of his code! But what was his code? Was it
+that of England or that of Sicily? Which strain of
+blood was governing him to-day? Which strain would
+govern him finally? Artois would have had an interesting
+specimen under his observant eyes had he been
+at the fair of San Felice.</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena willingly obeyed Maurice's suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>"Get well into the shade," he said. "There's just
+enough to hold us, if we sit close together. You don't
+mind that, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Put your back against the trunk&mdash;there."</p>
+
+<p>He kept his hat off. Over the railway line from the
+hot-looking sea there came a little breeze that just
+moved his short hair and the feathers of gold about
+Maddalena's brow. In the watercourse, but at some
+distance, they saw the black crowd of men and women
+and beasts swarming over the hot stones.</p>
+
+<p>"How can they?" Maurice muttered, as he looked
+down.</p>
+
+<p>"Cosa?"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking out loud. I meant how can they bargain
+and bother hour after hour in all that sun!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, signorino, you would not have them pay too<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+much!" she said, very seriously. "It is dreadful to
+waste soldi."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose&mdash;yes, of course it is. Oh, but there are
+so many things worth more than soldi. Dio mio! Let's
+forget all that!"</p>
+
+<p>He waved his hand towards the crowd, but he saw
+that Maddalena was preoccupied. She glanced towards
+the watercourse rather wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Maddalena? Ah, I know! The blue
+dress and the ear-rings! Per Bacco!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore&mdash;no, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>She disclaimed quickly, reddening.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it is. I had forgotten. But we can't go now.
+Maddalena, we will buy them this evening. Directly
+it gets cool we'll go, directly we've rested a little. But
+don't think of them now. I've promised, and I always
+keep a promise. Now, don't think of that any more!"</p>
+
+<p>He spoke with a sort of desperation. The fair seemed
+to be his enemy, and he had thought that it would be
+his friend. It was like a personage with a stronger
+influence than his, an influence that could take away
+that which he wished to retain, to fix upon himself.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore," Maddalena said, meekly, but still
+wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you care for a blue dress and a pair of ear-rings
+more than you do for me?" cried Maurice, with sudden
+roughness. "Are you like your father? Do you only
+care for me for what you can get out of me? I believe
+you do!"</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena looked startled, almost terrified, by his
+outburst. Her lips trembled, but she gazed at him
+steadily.</p>
+
+<p>"Non &egrave; vero."</p>
+
+<p>The words sounded almost stern.</p>
+
+<p>"I do&mdash;" he said. "I do want to be cared for a
+little&mdash;just for myself."</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 236px;">
+<a href="images/gs06.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs06_th.jpg" width="236" height="400"
+alt="&quot;HE KEPT HIS HAND ON HERS AND HELD IT ON THE WARM
+GROUND&quot;"
+title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">&quot;HE KEPT HIS HAND ON HERS AND HELD IT ON THE WARM
+GROUND&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>At that moment he had a sensation of loneliness like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+that of an utterly unloved man. And yet at that moment
+a great love was travelling to him&mdash;a love that
+was complete and flawless. But he did not think of it.
+He only thought that perhaps all this time he had been
+deceived, that Maddalena, like her father, was merely
+pleased to see him because he had money and could
+spend it. He sickened.</p>
+
+<p>"Non &egrave; vero!" Maddalena repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Her lips still trembled. Maurice looked at her doubtfully,
+yet with a sudden tenderness. Always when she
+looked troubled, even for an instant, there came to him
+the swift desire to protect her, to shield her.</p>
+
+<p>"But why should you care for me?" he said. "It
+is better not. For I am going away, and probably you
+will never see me again."</p>
+
+<p>Tears came into Maddalena's eyes. He did not know
+whether they were summoned by his previous roughness
+or his present pathos. He wanted to know.</p>
+
+<p>"Probably I shall never come back to Sicily again,"
+he said, with pressure.</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be better not," he added. "Much better."</p>
+
+<p>Now he was speaking for himself.</p>
+
+<p>"There's something here, something that I love and
+that's bad for me. I'm quite changed here. I'm like
+another man."</p>
+
+<p>He saw a sort of childish surprise creeping into her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, signorino?" she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>He kept his hand on hers and held it on the warm
+ground.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it is the sun," he said. "I lose my head
+here, and I&mdash;lose my heart!"</p>
+
+<p>She still looked rather surprised, and again her ignorance
+fascinated him. He thought that it was far more
+attractive than any knowledge could have been.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm horribly happy here, but I oughtn't to be
+happy."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why, signorino? It is better to be happy."</p>
+
+<p>"Per Dio!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Now a deep desire to have his revenge upon Salvatore
+came to him, but not at all because it would hurt
+Salvatore. The cruelty had gone out of him. Maddalena's
+eyes of a child had driven it away. He wanted
+his revenge only because it would be an intense happiness
+to him to have it. He wanted it because it would
+satisfy an imperious desire of tender passion, not because
+it would infuriate a man who hated him. He
+forgot the father in the daughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose I were quite poor, Maddalena!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But you are very rich, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>"But suppose I were poor, like Gaspare, for instance.
+Suppose I were as I am, just the same, only a contadino,
+or a fisherman, as your father is. And suppose&mdash;suppose"&mdash;he
+hesitated&mdash;"suppose that I were not
+married!"</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing. She was listening with deep but
+still surprised attention.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I could&mdash;I could go to your father and ask
+him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"What could you ask him, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you guess?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"I might ask him to let me marry you. I should&mdash;if
+it were like that&mdash;I should ask him to let me marry
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Davvero?"</p>
+
+<p>An expression of intense pleasure, and of something
+more&mdash;of pride&mdash;had come into her face. She could
+not divest herself imaginatively of her conception of
+him as a rich forestiere, and she saw herself placed high
+above "the other girls," turned into a lady.</p>
+
+<p>"Magari!" she murmured, drawing in her breath,
+then breathing out.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You would be happy if I did that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Magari!" she said again.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know what the word meant, but he thought
+it sounded like the most complete expression of satisfaction
+he had ever heard.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish," he said, pressing her hand&mdash;"I wish I were
+a Sicilian of Marechiaro."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment, while he was speaking, he heard in
+the distance the shrill whistle of an engine. It ceased.
+Then it rose again, piercing, prolonged, fierce surely with
+inquiry. He put his hands to his ears.</p>
+
+<p>"How beastly that is!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>He hated it, not only for itself, but for the knowledge
+it sharply recalled to his mind, the knowledge of exactly
+what he was doing, and of the facts of his life, the
+facts that the very near future held.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do they do that?" he added, with intense
+irritation.</p>
+
+<p>"Because of the bridge, signorino. They want to
+know if they can come upon the bridge. Look! There
+is the man waving a flag. Now they can come. It is
+the train from Palermo."</p>
+
+<p>"Palermo!" he said, sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"But the train from Palermo comes the other way,
+by Messina!"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. But there are two, one by Messina
+and one by Catania. Ecco!"</p>
+
+<p>From the lemon groves came the rattle of the approaching train.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He caught at his watch, pulled it out.</p>
+
+<p>Five o'clock!</p>
+
+<p>He had taken his hand from Maddalena's, and now
+he made a movement as if to get up. But he did not
+get up. Instead, he pressed back against the olive-tree,
+upon whose trunk he was leaning, as if he wished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+to force himself into the gnarled wood of it. He had
+an instinct to hide. The train came on very slowly.
+During the two or three minutes that elapsed before it
+was in his view Maurice lived very rapidly. He felt sure
+that Hermione and Artois were in the train. Hermione
+had said that they would arrive at Cattaro at five-thirty.
+She had not said which way they were coming.
+Maurice had assumed that they would come from Messina
+because Hermione had gone away by that route.
+It was a natural error. But now? If they were at the
+carriage window! If they saw him! And surely they
+must see him. The olive-trees were close to the line
+and on a level with it. He could not get away. If he
+got up he would be more easily seen. Hermione would
+call out to him. If he pretended not to hear she might,
+she probably would, get out of the train at the San
+Felice station and come into the fair. She was impulsive.
+It was just the sort of thing she might do.
+She would do it. He was sure she would do it. He
+looked at the watercourse hard. The crowd of people
+was not very far off. He thought he detected the form
+of Gaspare. Yes, it was Gaspare. He and Amedeo were
+on the outskirts of the crowd near the railway bridge.
+As he gazed, the train whistled once more, and he saw
+Gaspare turn round and look towards the sea. He held
+his breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, signorino. Viene!"</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena touched his arm, kept her hand upon it.
+She was deeply interested in this event, the traversing by
+the train of the unfinished bridge. Maurice was thankful
+for that. At least she did not notice his violent
+perturbation.</p>
+
+<p>"Look, signorino! Look!"</p>
+
+<p>In despite of himself, Maurice obeyed her. He wanted
+not to look, but he could not help looking. The engine,
+still whistling, crept out from the embrace of the
+lemon-trees, with the dingy line of carriages behind it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+At most of the windows there were heads of people
+looking out. Third class&mdash;he saw soldiers, contadini.
+Second class&mdash;no one. Now the first-class carriages
+were coming.   They were close to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"</p>
+
+<p>He had seen Hermione. She was standing up, with
+her two hands resting on the door-frame and her head
+and shoulders outside of the carriage. Maurice sat absolutely
+still and stared at her, stared at her almost as
+if she were a stranger passing by. She was looking
+at the watercourse, at the crowd, eagerly. Her face,
+much browner than when she had left Sicily, was alight
+with excitement, with happiness. She was radiant.
+Yet he thought she looked old, older at least than he
+had remembered. Suddenly, as the train came very
+slowly upon the bridge, she drew in to speak to some
+one behind her, and he saw vaguely Artois, pale, with
+a long beard. He was seated, and he, too, was gazing
+out at the fair. He looked ill, but he, too, looked happy,
+much happier than he had in London. He put up a thin
+hand and stroked his beard, and Maurice saw wrinkles
+coming round his eyes as he smiled at something Hermione
+said to him. The train came to the middle of
+the bridge and stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!" murmured Maddalena. "The man at the
+other end has signalled!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice looked again at the watercourse. Gaspare
+was beyond the crowd now, and was staring at the train
+with interest, like Maddalena. Would it never go on?
+Maurice set his teeth and cursed it silently. And his
+soul said; "Go on! Go on!" again and again. "Go on!
+Go on!" Now Hermione was once more leaning out.
+Surely she must see Gaspare. A man waved a flag.
+The train jerked back, jangled, crept forward once
+more, this time a little faster. In a moment they would
+begone. Thank God! But what was Hermione doing?
+She started.  She leaned further forward, staring into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+the watercourse. Maurice saw her face changing. A
+look of intense surprise, of intense inquiry, came into it.
+She took one hand swiftly from the door, put it behind
+her&mdash;ah, she had a pair of opera-glasses at her
+eyes now! The train went on faster. It was nearly
+off the bridge. But she was waving her hand. She
+was calling. She had seen Gaspare. And he? Maurice
+saw him start forward as if to run to the bridge. But
+the train was gone. The boy stopped, hesitated, then
+dashed away across the stones.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!" repeated Maddalena. "Look at Gaspare!
+Is he mad? Look! How he is running!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare reached the bank, darted up it, and disappeared
+into the village.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, what is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena pulled his sleeve. She was looking almost
+alarmed.</p>
+
+<p>"Matter? Nothing."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice got up. He could not remain still. It was
+all over now. The fair was at an end for him. Gaspare
+would reach the station before the train went on, would
+explain matters. Hermione would get out. Already
+Maurice seemed to see her coming down to the watercourse,
+walking with her characteristic slow vigor. It
+did not occur to him at first that Hermione might refuse
+to leave Artois. Something in him knew that she was
+coming. Fate had interfered now imperiously. Once
+he had cheated fate. That was when he came to the
+fair despite Hermione's letter. Now fate was going
+to have her revenge upon him. He looked at Maddalena.
+Was fate working for her, to protect her?
+Would his loss be her gain? He did not know, for he
+did not know what would have been the course of his
+own conduct if fate had not interfered. He had been
+trifling, letting the current take him. It might have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+taken him far, but&mdash;now Hermione was coming. It was
+all over and the sun was still up, still shining upon the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go into the fair. It is cooler now."</p>
+
+<p>He tried to speak lightly.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena shook out her skirt and began to smile.
+She was thinking of the blue dress and the ear-rings.
+They went down into the watercourse.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, what can have been the matter with
+Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"He was looking at the train."</p>
+
+<p>"Was he? Perhaps he saw a friend in it. Yes, that
+must have been it. He saw a friend in the train."</p>
+
+<p>He stared across the watercourse towards the village,
+seeking two figures, and he was conscious now of two
+feelings that fought within him, of two desires: a desire
+that Hermione should not come, and a desire that she
+should come. He wanted, he even longed, to have his
+evening with Maddalena. Yet he wanted Hermione to
+get out of the train when Gaspare told her that he&mdash;Maurice&mdash;was
+at San Felice. If she did not get out she
+would be putting Artois before him. The pale face at
+the window, the eyes that smiled when Hermione turned
+familiarly round to speak, had stirred within him the
+jealousy of which he had already been conscious more
+than once. But now actual vision had made it fiercer.
+The woman who had leaned out looking at the fair
+belonged to him. He felt intensely that she was his
+property. Maddalena spoke to him again, two or
+three times. He did not hear her. He was seeing the
+wrinkles that came round the eyes of Artois when he
+smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are we going, signorino? Are we going back
+to the town?"</p>
+
+<p>Instinctively, Maurice was following in the direction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+taken by Gaspare. He wanted to meet fate half-way,
+to still, by action, the tumult of feeling within him.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't the best things to be bought there?" he replied.
+"By the church where all those booths are?
+I think so."</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena began to walk a little faster. The moment
+had come. Already she felt the blue dress rustling
+about her limbs, the ear-rings swinging in her ears.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice did not try to hold her back. Nor did it occur
+to him that it would be wise to meet Hermione without
+Maddalena. He had done no actual wrong, and the
+pale face of Artois had made him defiant. Hermione
+came to him with her friend. He would come to her
+with his. He did not think of Maddalena as a weapon
+exactly, but he did feel as if, without her, he would be
+at a disadvantage when he and Hermione met.</p>
+
+<p>They were in the first street now. People were beginning
+to flow back from the watercourse towards the
+centre of the fair. They walked in a crowd and could
+not see far before them. But Maurice thought he would
+know when Hermione was near him, that he would feel
+her approach. The crowd went on slowly, retarding
+them, but at last they were near to the church of Sant'
+Onofrio and could hear the sound of music. The "Intermezzo"
+from "Cavalleria Rusticana" was being
+played by the Musica Mascagni. Suddenly, Maurice
+started. He had felt a pull at his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare was by his side, streaming with perspiration
+and looking violently excited.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, cast a swift look round. Gaspare was
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino"&mdash;the boy was breathing hard&mdash;"the signora"&mdash;he
+gulped&mdash;"the signora has come back."</p>
+
+<p>The time had come for acting. Maurice feigned surprise.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The signora! What are you saying? The signora
+is in Africa."</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore!    She is here!"</p>
+
+<p>"Here in San Felice!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore! But she was in the train. I saw her
+at the window. She waved her hand to me and called
+out&mdash;when the train was on the bridge. I ran to the
+station; I ran fast, but when I got there the train had
+just gone. The signora has come back, and we are not
+there to meet her!"</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were tragic. Evidently he felt that their
+absence was a matter of immense importance, was a
+catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p>"The signora here!" Maurice repeated, trying to make
+his voice amazed. "But why did she not tell us?
+Why did not she say that she was coming?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Gaspare, but only for an instant. He
+felt afraid to meet his great, searching eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so."</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena stood by in silence. The bright look of
+anticipation had gone out of her face, and was replaced
+by a confused and slightly anxious expression.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't understand it," Maurice said, heavily. "I
+can't&mdash;was the signora alone, or did you see some one
+with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"The sick signore? I did not see him. I saw only
+the signora standing at the window, waving her hand&mdash;cos&igrave;!"</p>
+
+<p>He waved his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna!" Maurice said, mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>"What are we to do, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do!    What can we do?   The train has gone!"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore.    But shall I fetch the donkeys?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking
+frankly piteous.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you got the clock yet?" he asked Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Gaspare began to look rather miserable, too.</p>
+
+<p>"It has not been put up. Perhaps they are putting
+it up now."</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," Maurice said, hastily, "we can't be back
+to meet the signora now. Even if we went at once we
+should be hours late&mdash;and the donkeys are tired, perhaps.
+They will go slowly unless they have a proper
+rest. It is a dreadful pity, but I think if the signora
+knew she would wish us to stay now till the fair is over.
+She would not wish to spoil your pleasure. Do you
+think she would?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore. The signora always wishes people to
+be happy."</p>
+
+<p>"Even if we went at once it would be night before
+we got back."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"I think we had better stay&mdash;at any rate till the
+auction is finished and we have had something to eat.
+Then we will go."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene."</p>
+
+<p>The boy sounded doubtful.</p>
+
+<p>"La povera signora!" he said. "How disappointed
+she will be! She did want to speak to me. Her face
+was all red; she was so excited when she saw me, and
+her mouth was wide open like that!"</p>
+
+<p>He made a grimace, with earnest, heart-felt sincerity.</p>
+
+<p>"It cannot be helped. To-night we will explain
+everything and make the signora quite happy. Look
+here! Buy something for her. Buy her a present at
+the auction!"</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!" Gaspare cried. "I will give her the
+clock that plays the 'Tre Colori'! Then she will be
+happy again. Shall I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, si. And meet me in the market-place. Then
+we will eat something and we will start for home."</p>
+
+<p>The boy darted away towards the watercourse. His
+heart was light again. He had something to do for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+signora, something that would make her very happy.
+Ah, when she heard the clock playing the "Tre Colori"!
+Mamma mia!</p>
+
+<p>He tore towards the watercourse in an agony lest he
+should be too late.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Night was falling over the fair. The blue dress and
+the ear-rings had been chosen and paid for. The promenade
+of the beauties in the famous inherited brocades
+had taken place with &eacute;clat before the church of Sant'
+Onofrio. Salvatore had acquired a donkey of strange
+beauty and wondrous strength, and Gaspare had reappeared
+in the piazza accompanied by Amedeo, both
+laden with purchases and shining with excitement and
+happiness. Gaspare's pockets were bulging, and he walked
+carefully, carrying in his hands a tortured-looking parcel.</p>
+
+<p>"Dov'&egrave; il mio padrone?" he asked, as he and Amedeo
+pushed through the dense throng. "Dov'&egrave; il mio padrone?"</p>
+
+<p>He spied Maurice and Maddalena sitting before the ristorante
+listening to the performance of a small Neapolitan
+boy with a cropped head, who was singing street
+songs in a powerful bass voice, and occasionally doing
+a few steps of a melancholy dance upon the pavement.
+The crowd billowed round them. A little way off the
+"Musica della citt&agrave;," surrounded by a circle of colored
+lamps, was playing a selection from the "Puritani."
+The strange ecclesiastical chant of the Roman ice
+venders rose up against the music as if in protest. And
+these three definite and fighting melodies&mdash;of the Neapolitan,
+the band, and the ice venders&mdash;detached themselves
+from a foundation of ceaseless sound, contributed
+by the hundreds of Sicilians who swarmed about the
+ancient church, infested the narrow side streets of the
+village, looked down from the small balconies and the
+windows of the houses, and gathered in mobs in the
+wine-shops and the trattorie.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino! Look!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare had reached Maurice, and now stood by the
+little table at which his padrone and Maddalena were
+sitting, and placed the tortured parcel tenderly upon it.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that the clock?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare did not reply in words, but his brown fingers
+deftly removed the string and paper and undressed his
+treasure.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>The clock was revealed, a great circle of blue and
+white standing upon short, brass legs, and ticking loudly,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Speranza mia, non piangere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">E il marinar fedele,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vedrai tornar dall' Africa<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tra un anno queste vele&mdash;&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>bawled the little boy from Naples. Gaspare seized the
+clock, turned a handle, lifted his hand in a reverent gesture
+bespeaking attention; there was a faint whirr, and
+then, sure enough, the tune of the "Tre Colori" was tinkled
+blithely forth.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare, triumphantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!" murmured Maddalena, almost exhausted
+with the magic of the fair.</p>
+
+<p>"It's wonderful!" said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>He, too, was a little tired, but not in body.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare wound the clock again, and again the tune
+was trilled forth, competing sturdily with the giant
+noises of the fair, a little voice that made itself audible
+by its clearness and precision.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare. "Will not the signora
+be happy when she sees what I have brought her from
+the fair?"</p>
+
+<p>He sighed from sheer delight in his possession and
+the thought of his padrona's joy and wonder in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Mangiamo?" he added, descending from heavenly
+delights to earthly necessities.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it is getting late," said Maurice. "The fireworks
+will soon be beginning, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Not till ten, signorino. I have asked. There will
+be dancing first. But&mdash;are we going to stay?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice hesitated, but only for a second.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said. "Even if we went now the signora
+would be in bed and asleep long before we got home.
+We will stay to the end, the very end."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we can say 'Good-morning' to the signora
+when we get home," said Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>He was quite happy now that he had this marvellous
+present to take back with him. He felt that it would
+make all things right, would sweep away all lingering disappointment
+at their absence and the want of welcome.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore did not appear at the meal. He had gone
+off to stable his new purchase with the other donkeys,
+and now, having got a further sum of money out of the
+Inglese, was drinking and playing cards with the fishermen
+of Catania. But he knew where his girl and Maurice
+were, and that Gaspare and Amedeo were with them.
+And he knew, too, that the Inglese's signora had come
+back. He told the news to the fishermen.</p>
+
+<p>"To-night, when he gets home, his 'cristiana' will be
+waiting for him. Per Dio! it is over for him now. We
+shall see little more of him."</p>
+
+<p>"And get little more from him!" said one of the fishermen,
+who was jealous of Salvatore's good-fortune.</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore laughed loudly. He had drunk a good
+deal of wine and he had had a great deal of money
+given to him.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall find another English fool, perhaps!" he said.
+"Chi lo sa?"</p>
+
+<p>"And his cristiana?" asked another fisherman.
+"What is she like?"</p>
+
+<p>"Like!" cried Salvatore, pouring out another glass
+of wine and spitting on the discolored floor, over which
+hens were running; "what is any cristiana like?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And he repeated the contadino's proverb:</p>
+
+<p>"'La mugghieri &egrave; comu la gatta: si l'accarizzi, idda
+ti gratta!'"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps the Inglese will get scratched to-night,"
+said the first fisherman.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mind," rejoined Salvatore. "Get us a fresh
+pack of cards, Fortunato. I'll pay for 'em."</p>
+
+<p>And he flung down a lira on the wine-stained table.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare, now quite relieved in his mind, gave himself
+up with all his heart to the enjoyment of the last
+hours of the fair, and was unwearied in calling on his
+padrone to do the same. When the evening meal was
+over he led the party forth into the crowd that was
+gathered about the music; he took them to the shooting-tent,
+and made them try their luck at the little figures
+which calmly presented grotesquely painted profiles to
+the eager aim of the contadini; he made them eat ices
+which they bought at the beflagged cart of the ecclesiastical
+Romans, whose eternally chanting voices made
+upon Maurice a sinister impression, suggesting to his mind&mdash;he
+knew not why&mdash;the thought of death. Finally,
+prompted by Amedeo, he drew Maurice into a room where
+there was dancing.</p>
+
+<p>It was crowded with men and women, was rather
+dark and very hot. In a corner there was a grinding
+organ, whose handle was turned by a perspiring man
+in a long, woollen cap. Beside him, hunched up on a
+window-sill, was a shepherd boy who accompanied the
+organ upon a flute of reed. Round the walls stood a
+throng of gazers, and in the middle of the floor the
+dancers performed vigorously, dancing now a polka,
+now a waltz, now a mazurka, now an elaborate country dance
+in which sixteen or twenty people took part,
+now a tarantella, called by many of the contadini "La
+Fasola." No sooner had they entered the room than
+Gaspare gently but firmly placed his arm round his
+padrone's waist, took his left hand and began to turn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>
+him about in a slow waltz, while Amedeo followed the
+example given with Maddalena. Round and round
+they went among the other couples. The organ in the
+corner ground out a wheezy tune. The reed-flute of
+the shepherd boy twittered, as perhaps, long ago, on
+the great mountain that looked down in the night
+above the village, a similar flute twittered from the
+woods to Empedocles climbing upward for the last time
+towards the plume of smoke that floated from the volcano.
+And then Amedeo and Gaspare danced together
+and Maurice's arm was about the waist of Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time that he had danced with her,
+and the mutual act seemed to him to increase their
+intimacy, to carry them a step forward in this short
+and curious friendship which was now, surely, very
+close to its end. They did not speak as they danced.
+Maddalena's face was very solemn, like the face of one
+taking part in an important ceremonial. And Maurice,
+too, felt serious, even sad. The darkness and heat of
+the room, the melancholy with which all the tunes of
+a grinding organ seem impregnated, the complicated
+sounds from the fair outside, from which now and again
+the voices of the Roman ice-venders detached themselves,
+even the tapping of the heavy boots of the dancers
+upon the floor of brick&mdash;all things in this hour moved
+him to a certain dreariness of the spirit which was
+touched with sentimentality. This fair day was coming
+to an end. He felt as if everything were coming to
+an end.</p>
+
+<p>Every dog has his day. The old saying came to his
+mind. "Every dog has his day&mdash;and mine is over."</p>
+
+<p>He saw in the dimness of the room the face of Hermione
+at the railway carriage window. It was the face
+of one on the edge of some great beginning. But she
+did not know. Hermione did not know.</p>
+
+<p>The dance was over. Another was formed, a country dance.
+Again Maurice was Maddalena's partner. Then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+came "La Fasola," in which Amedeo proudly showed
+forth his well-known genius and Gaspare rivalled him.
+But Maurice thought it was not like the tarantella upon
+the terrace before the house of the priest. The brilliancy,
+the gayety of that rapture in the sun were not
+present here among farewells. A longing to be in the
+open air under the stars came to him, and when at last
+the grinding organ stopped he said to Gaspare:</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going outside. You'll find me there when
+you've finished dancing."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signorino. In a quarter of an hour the
+fireworks will be beginning."</p>
+
+<p>"And then we must start off at once."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>The organ struck up again and Amedeo took hold of
+Gaspare by the waist.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena, come out with me."</p>
+
+<p>She followed him. She was tired. Festivals were
+few in her life, and the many excitements of this long
+day had told upon her, but her fatigue was the fatigue
+of happiness. They sat down on a wooden bench set
+against the outer wall of the house. No one else was
+sitting there, but many people were passing to and fro,
+and they could see the lamps round the "Musica Leoncavallo,"
+and hear it fighting and conquering the twitter
+of the shepherd boy's flute and the weary wheezing
+of the organ within the house. A great, looming darkness
+rising towards the stars dominated the humming
+village. Etna was watching over the last glories of the
+fair.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been happy to-day, Maddalena?" Maurice
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, very happy.    And you?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>"It will all be very different to-morrow," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He was trying to realize to-morrow, but he could not.</p>
+
+<p>"We need not think of to-morrow," Maddalena said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She arranged her skirt with her hands, and crossed
+one foot over the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you always live for the day?" Maurice asked her.</p>
+
+<p>She did not understand him.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not want to think of to-morrow," she said.
+"There will be no fair then."</p>
+
+<p>"And you would like always to be at the fair?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, always."</p>
+
+<p>There was a great conviction in her simple statement.</p>
+
+<p>"And you, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>She was curious about him to-night.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what I should like," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up at the great darkness of Etna, and
+again a longing came to him to climb up, far up, into
+those beech forests that looked towards the Isles of
+Lipari. He wanted greater freedom. Even the fair
+was prison.</p>
+
+<p>"But I think," he said, after a pause&mdash;"I think I
+should like to carry you off, Maddalena, up there, far
+up on Etna."</p>
+
+<p>He remembered his feeling when he had put his arms
+round her in the dance. It had been like putting his
+arms round ignorance that wanted to be knowledge.
+Who would be Maddalena's teacher? Not he. And
+yet he had almost intended to have his revenge upon
+Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we go now?" he said. "Shall we go off to
+Etna, Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"We must go home after the fireworks."</p>
+
+<p>"Why should we? Why should we not take the
+donkeys now? Gaspare is dancing. Your father is
+playing cards. No one would notice. Shall we? Shall
+we go now and get the donkeys, Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>But she replied:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A girl can only go like that with a man when she is
+married."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not true," he said. "She can go like that
+with a man she loves."</p>
+
+<p>"But then she is wicked, and the Madonna will not
+hear her when she prays, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't you do anything for a man you really
+loved? Wouldn't you forget everything? Wouldn't you
+forget even the Madonna?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him that he was answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't you forget the Madonna for me?" he
+whispered, leaning towards her.</p>
+
+<p>There was a loud report close to them, a whizzing
+noise, a deep murmur from the crowd, and in the clear
+sky above Etna the first rocket burst, showering down
+a cataract of golden stars, which streamed towards the
+earth, leaving trails of fire behind them.</p>
+
+<p>The sound of the grinding organ and of the shepherd
+boy's flute ceased in the dancing-room, and the
+crowd within rushed out into the market-place.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino! Signorino! Come with me! We cannot
+see properly here! I know where to go. There
+will be wheels of fire, and masses of flowers, and a picture
+of the Regina Margherita. Presto! Presto!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare had hold of Maurice by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>"E' finito!" Maurice murmured.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him that the last day of his wild youth
+was at an end.</p>
+
+<p>"E' finito!" he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>But there was still an hour.</p>
+
+<p>And who can tell what an hour will bring forth?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Maurice
+and Gaspare said good-bye to Maddalena and her father
+on the road by Isola Bella. Salvatore had left the three
+donkeys at Cattaro, and had come the rest of the way
+on foot, while Maddalena rode Gaspare's beast.</p>
+
+<p>"The donkey you bought is for Maddalena," Maurice
+had said to him.</p>
+
+<p>And the fisherman had burst into effusive thanks.
+But already he had his eye on a possible customer in
+Cattaro. As soon as the Inglese had gone back to his
+own country the donkey would be resold at a good
+price. What did a fisherman want with donkeys, and
+how was an animal to be stabled on the Sirens' Isle?
+As soon as the Inglese was gone, Salvatore meant to
+put a fine sum of money into his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, signorino!" he said, sweeping off his hat with
+the wild, half-impudent gesture that was peculiar to
+him. "I kiss your hand and I kiss the hand of your
+signora."</p>
+
+<p>He bent down his head as if he were going to translate
+the formal phrase into an action, but Maurice drew
+back.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Salvatore," he said.</p>
+
+<p>His voice was low.</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, Maddalena!" he added.</p>
+
+<p>She murmured something in reply. Salvatore looked
+keenly from one to the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you tired, Maddalena?" he asked, with a sort
+of rough suspicion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Si," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>She followed him slowly across the railway line towards
+the sea, while Maurice and Gaspare turned their
+donkeys' heads towards the mountain.</p>
+
+<p>They rode upward in silence. Gaspare was sleepy.
+His head nodded loosely as he rode, but his hands
+never let go their careful hold of the clock. Round
+about him his many purchases were carefully disposed,
+fastened elaborately to the big saddle. The roses,
+faded now, were still above his ears. Maurice rode behind.
+He was not sleepy. He felt as if he would never
+sleep again.</p>
+
+<p>As they drew nearer to the house of the priest, Gaspare
+pulled himself together with an effort, half-turned
+on his donkey, and looked round at his padrone.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>"Si."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think the signora will be asleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I suppose so."</p>
+
+<p>The boy looked wise.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not think so," he said, firmly.</p>
+
+<p>"What&mdash;at three o'clock in the morning!"</p>
+
+<p>"I think the signora will be on the terrace watching
+for us."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice's lips twitched.</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?" he replied.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to speak carelessly, but where was his habitual
+carelessness of spirit, his carelessness of a boy
+now? He felt that he had lost it forever, lost it in that
+last hour of the fair.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where were you and Maddalena when I was helping
+with the fireworks?"</p>
+
+<p>"Close by."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see them all? Did you see the Regina
+Margherita?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Si."</p>
+
+<p>"I looked round for you, but I could not see you."</p>
+
+<p>"There was such a crowd and it was dark."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes.    Then you were there, where I left you?"</p>
+
+<p>"We may have moved a little, but we were not far off."</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot think why I could not find you when the
+fireworks were over."</p>
+
+<p>"It was the crowd. I thought it best to go to the
+stable without searching for you. I knew you and Salvatore
+would be there."</p>
+
+<p>The boy was silent for a moment. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore was very angry when he saw me come into
+the stable without you."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"He said I ought not to have left my padrone."</p>
+
+<p>"And what did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told him I would not be spoken to by him. If you
+had not come in just then I think there would have been
+a baruffa. Salvatore is a bad man, and always ready
+with his knife.  And he had been drinking."</p>
+
+<p>"He was quiet enough coming home."</p>
+
+<p>"I do not like his being so quiet."</p>
+
+<p>"What does it matter?"</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a pause. Then Gaspare said:</p>
+
+<p>"Now that the signora has come back we shall not go
+any more to the Casa delle Sirene, shall we?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't suppose we shall go any more."</p>
+
+<p>"It is better like that, signorino. It is much better
+that we do not go."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"We have been there too often," added Gaspare. "I
+am glad the signora has come back. I am sorry she
+ever went away."</p>
+
+<p>"It was not our fault that she went," Maurice said, in a
+hard voice like that of a man trying to justify something,
+to defend himself against some accusation. "We did
+not want the signora to go."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare's voice sounded almost apologetic. He was
+a little startled by his padrone's tone.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a pity she went," he continued. "The poor
+signora&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why is it such a pity?" Maurice interrupted, almost
+roughly, almost suspiciously. "Why do you say 'the
+poor signora'?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare stared at him with open surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"I only meant&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The signora wished to go to Africa. She decided for
+herself. There is no reason to call her the poor signora."</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>The boy's voice recalled Maurice to prudence.</p>
+
+<p>"It was very good of her to go," he said, more quietly.
+"Perhaps she has saved the life of the sick signore by
+going."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare said no more, but as they rode up, drawing
+ever nearer to the bare mountain-side and the house of
+the priest, Maurice's heart reiterated the thought of the
+boy. Why had Hermione ever gone? What a madness
+it had all been, her going, his staying! He knew it now
+for a madness, a madness of the summer, of the hot, the
+burning south. In this terrible quiet of the mountains,
+without the sun, without the laughter and the voices
+and the movement of men, he understood that he had
+been mad, that there had been something in him, not
+all himself, which had run wild, despising restraint.
+And he had known that it was running wild, and he had
+thought to let it go just so far and no farther. He had
+set a limit of time to his wildness and its deeds. And
+he had set another limit. Surely he had. He had not
+ever meant to go too far. And then, just when he had
+said to himself "E' finito!" the irrevocable was at hand,
+the moment of delirium in which all things that should
+have been remembered were forgotten. What had led<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+him? What spirit of evil? Or had he been led at all?
+Had not he rather deliberately forced his way to the
+tragic goal whither, through all these sunlit days, these
+starry nights, his feet had been tending?</p>
+
+<p>He looked upon himself as a man looks upon a stranger
+whom he has seen commit a crime which he could never
+have committed. Mentally he took himself into custody,
+he tried, he condemned himself. In this hour of acute
+reaction the cool justice of the Englishman judged the
+passionate impulse of the Sicilian, even marvelled at it,
+and the heart of the dancing Faun cried: "What am I&mdash;what
+am I really?" and did not find the answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>"When we get to that rock we shall see the house."</p>
+
+<p>"I know."</p>
+
+<p>How eagerly he had looked upward to the little white
+house on the mountain on that first day in Sicily, with
+what joy of anticipation, with what an exquisite sense
+of liberty and of peace! The drowsy wail of the "Pastorale"
+had come floating down to him over the olive-trees
+almost like a melody that stole from paradise.
+But now he dreaded the turn of the path. He dreaded
+to see the terrace wall, the snowy building it protected.
+And he felt as if he were drawing near to a terror, and
+as if he could not face it, did not know how to face it.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, there is no light! Look!"</p>
+
+<p>"The signora and Lucrezia must be asleep at this
+hour."</p>
+
+<p>"If they are, what are we to do? Shall we wake
+them?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke quickly, in hope of a respite.</p>
+
+<p>"We will wait&mdash;we will not disturb them."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare looked down at the parcel he was holding
+with such anxious care.</p>
+
+<p>"I would like to play the 'Tre Colori,'" he said. "I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>
+would like the first thing the signora hears when she
+wakes to be the 'Tre Colori.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! We must be very quiet."</p>
+
+<p>The noise made on the path by the tripping feet of the
+donkeys was almost intolerable to him. It must surely
+wake the deepest sleeper. They were now on the last
+ascent where the mountain-side was bare. Some stones
+rattled downward, causing a sharp, continuous sound.
+It was answered by another sound, which made both
+Gaspare and Maurice draw rein and pull up.</p>
+
+<p>As on that first day in Sicily Maurice had been welcomed
+by the "Pastorale," so he was welcomed by it now.
+What an irony that was to him! For an instant his lips
+curved in a bitter smile. But the smile died away as he
+realized things, and a strange sadness took hold of his
+heart. For it was not the ceramella that he heard in
+this still hour, but a piano played softly, monotonously,
+with a dreamy tenderness that made it surely one with
+the tenderness of the deep night. And he knew that
+Hermione had been watching, that she had heard him
+coming, that this was her welcome, a welcome from the
+depths of her pure, true heart. How much the music
+told him! How clearly it spoke to him! And how its
+caress flagellated his bare soul! Hermione had returned
+expectant of welcome and had found nothing, and instead
+of coming out upon the terrace, instead of showing
+surprise, vexation, jealous curiosity, of assuming the
+injured air that even a good woman can scarcely resist
+displaying in a moment of acute disappointment, she
+sent forth this delicate salutation to him from afar, the
+sweetest that she knew, the one she herself loved best.</p>
+
+<p>Tears came into his eyes as he listened. Then he shut
+his eyes and said to himself, shuddering:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you beast! You beast!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is the signora!" said Gaspare, turning round on
+his donkey. "She does not know we are here, and she
+is playing to keep herself awake."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He looked down at his clock, and his eyes began to
+shine.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad the signora is awake!" he said. "Signorino,
+let us get off the donkeys and leave them at the arch,
+and let us go in without any noise."</p>
+
+<p>"But perhaps the signora knows that we are here,"
+Maurice said.</p>
+
+<p>Directly he had heard the music he had known that
+Hermione was aware of their approach.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, signore. I am sure she does not, or she
+would have come out to meet us. Let us leave the
+donkeys!"</p>
+
+<p>He sprang off softly. Mechanically, Maurice followed
+his example.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy took him by the hand and led him on tiptoe
+to the terrace, making him crouch down close to the
+open French window. The "Pastorale" was louder here.
+It never ceased, but returned again and again with the
+delicious monotony that made it memorable and wove
+a spell round those who loved it. As he listened to it,
+Maurice fancied he could hear the breathing of the player,
+and he felt that she was listening, too, listening tensely
+for footsteps on the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare looked up at him with bright eyes. The
+boy's whole face was alive with a gay and mischievous
+happiness, as he turned the handle at the back of his
+clock slowly, slowly, till at last it would turn no more.
+Then there tinkled forth to join the "Pastorale" the clear,
+trilling melody of the "Tre Colori."</p>
+
+<p>The music in the room ceased abruptly. There was a
+rustling sound as the player moved. Then Hermione's
+voice, with something trembling through it that was half
+a sob, half a little burst of happy laughter, called out:</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, how dare you interrupt my concert?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora! Signora!" cried Gaspare, and, springing
+up, he darted into the sitting-room.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Maurice, though he lifted himself up quickly, stood
+where he was with his hand set hard against the wall of
+the house. He heard Gaspare kiss Hermione's hand.
+Then he heard her say:</p>
+
+<p>"But, but, Gaspare&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He took his hand from the wall with an effort. His
+feet seemed glued to the ground, but at last he was in
+the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>He felt her strong hands, strong and yet soft like all
+the woman, on his.</p>
+
+<p>"Cento di questi giorni!" she said. "Ah, but it is
+better than all the birthdays in the world!"</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to kiss her&mdash;not to please her, but for himself
+he wanted to kiss her&mdash;but he dared not. He felt
+that if his lips were to touch hers&mdash;she must know. To
+excuse his avoidance of the natural greeting he looked
+at Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"I know!" she whispered.    "You haven't forgotten!"</p>
+
+<p>She was alluding to that morning on the terrace when
+he came up from the fishing. They loosed their hands.
+Gaspare set the clock playing again.</p>
+
+<p>"What a beauty!" Hermione said, glad to hide her
+emotion for a moment till she and Maurice could be
+alone. "What a marvel! Where did you find it, Gaspare&mdash;at
+the fair?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora!"</p>
+
+<p>Solemnly he handed it, still playing brightly, to his
+padrona, just a little reluctantly, perhaps, but very gallantly.</p>
+
+<p>"It is for you, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"A present&mdash;oh, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>Again her voice was veiled. She put out her hand
+and touched the boy's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie! How sweetly it plays! You thought of
+me!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was a silence till the tune was finished. Then
+Maurice said:</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione, I don't know what to say. That we
+should be at the fair the day you arrived! Why&mdash;why
+didn't you tell me?   Why didn't you write?"</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't know, then!"</p>
+
+<p>The words came very quickly, very eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"Know! Didn't Lucrezia tell you that we had no
+idea?"</p>
+
+<p>"Poor Lucrezia! She's in a dreadful condition. I
+found her in the village."</p>
+
+<p>"No!" Maurice cried, thankful to turn the conversation
+from himself, though only for an instant. "I specially
+told her to stay here.  I specially&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but, poor thing, as you weren't expecting me!
+But I wrote, Maurice, I wrote a letter telling you everything,
+the hour we were coming&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It's Don Paolo!" exclaimed Gaspare, angrily. "He
+hides away the letters. He lets them lie sometimes in
+his office for months. To-morrow I will go and tell him
+what I think; I will turn out every drawer."</p>
+
+<p>"It is too bad!" Maurice said.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you never had it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione"&mdash;he stared at the open door&mdash;"you
+think we should have gone to the fair if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, I never thought so. I only wondered. It
+all seemed so strange."</p>
+
+<p>"It is too horrible!" Maurice said, with heavy emphasis.
+"And Artois&mdash;no rooms ready for him! What
+can he have thought?"</p>
+
+<p>"As I did, that there had been a mistake. What
+does it matter now? Just at the moment I was dreadfully&mdash;oh,
+dreadfully disappointed. I saw Gaspare at the
+fair.  And you saw me, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora. I ran all the way to the station, but the
+train had gone."</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't see you, Maurice.  Where were you?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but Maurice did not
+give him time.</p>
+
+<p>"I was there, too, in the fair."</p>
+
+<p>"But of course you weren't looking at the train?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not. And when Gaspare told me, it was
+too late to do anything. We couldn't get back in time,
+and the donkeys were tired, and so&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm glad you didn't hurry back. What good
+would it have done then?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a touch of constraint in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"You must have thought I should be in bed."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, we did."</p>
+
+<p>"And so I ought to be now. I believe I am tremendously
+tired, but&mdash;but I'm so tremendously something
+else that I hardly know."</p>
+
+<p>The constraint had gone.</p>
+
+<p>"The signora is happy because she is back in my
+country," Gaspare remarked, with pride and an air of
+shrewdness.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded his head. The faded roses shook above
+his ears.    Hermione smiled at him.</p>
+
+<p>"He knows all about it," she said. "Well, if we are
+ever to go to bed&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare looked from her to his padrone.</p>
+
+<p>"Buona notte, signora," he said, gravely. "Buona
+notte, signorino.    Buon riposo!"</p>
+
+<p>"Buon riposo!" echoed Hermione. "It is blessed to
+hear that again.    I do love the clock, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>The boy beamed at her and went reluctantly away to
+find the donkeys. At that moment Maurice would have
+given almost anything to keep him. He dreaded unspeakably
+to be alone with Hermione. But it had to
+be.    He must face it.    He must seem natural, happy.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I put the clock down?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>He went to her, took the clock, carried it to the
+writing-table, and put it down.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare was so happy to bring it to you."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He turned. He felt desperate. He came to Hermione
+and put out his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I feel so bad that we weren't here," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"That is it!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a sound of deep relief in her voice. Then
+she had been puzzled by his demeanor! He must be
+natural; but how? It seemed to him as if never in all
+his life could he have felt innocent, careless, brave.
+Now he was made of cowardice. He was like a dog
+that crawls with its belly to the floor. He got hold of
+Hermione's hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I feel&mdash;I feel horribly, horribly bad!"</p>
+
+<p>Speaking the absolute truth, his voice was absolutely
+sincere, and he deceived her utterly.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," she said, "I believe it's upset you so much
+that&mdash;that you are shy of me."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed happily.</p>
+
+<p>"Shy&mdash;of me!"</p>
+
+<p>He tried to laugh, too, and kissed her abruptly, awkwardly.
+All his natural grace was gone from him. But
+when he kissed her she did not know it; her lips clung
+to his with a tender passion, a fealty that terrified him.</p>
+
+<p>"She must know!" he thought. "She must feel the
+truth.    My lips must tell it to her."</p>
+
+<p>And when at last they drew away from each other
+his eyes asked her furiously a question, asked it of her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing. She dropped her eyes and reddened
+slowly, till she looked much younger than usual,
+strangely like a girl.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't&mdash;you haven't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>There was a sound of reserve in her voice, and yet a
+sound of triumph, too.    She looked up at him again.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you guess that I have something to tell you?"
+she said, slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"Something to tell me?" he repeated, dully.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He was so intent on himself, on his own evil-doing,
+that it seemed to him as if everything must have some
+connection with it.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," she said, quickly; "no, I see you weren't."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" he asked, but without real interest.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell you now," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare went by the window leading the donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>"Buona notte, signora!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a very happy voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Buona notte, Gaspare.    Sleep well."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice caught at the last words.</p>
+
+<p>"We must sleep," he said. "To-morrow we'll&mdash;we'll&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell each other everything.   Yes, to-morrow!"</p>
+
+<p>She put her arm through his.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice, if you knew how I feel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?" he said, trying to make his voice eager,
+buoyant.    "Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you knew how I've been longing to be back!
+And so often I've thought that I never should be here
+with you again, just in the way we were!"</p>
+
+<p>He cleared his throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is so difficult to repeat a great, an intense happiness,
+I think. But we will, we are repeating it, aren't
+we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"When I got to the station to-day, and&mdash;and you
+weren't there, I had a dreadful foreboding. It was foolish.
+The explanation of your not being there was so
+simple.    Of course I might have guessed it."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"But in the first moment I felt as if you weren't there
+because I had lost you forever, because you had been
+taken away from me forever. It was such an intense
+feeling that it frightened me&mdash;it frightened me horribly.
+Put your arm round me, Maurice. Let me feel what
+an idiot I have been!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He obeyed her and put his arm round her, and he felt
+as if his arm must tell her what she had not learned
+from his lips. And she thought that now he must
+know the truth she had not told him.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't think of dreadful things," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't any more. I don't think I could with you.
+To me you always mean the sun, light, and life, and all
+that is brave and beautiful!"</p>
+
+<p>He took his arm away from her.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, we must sleep, Hermione!" he said. "It's
+nearly dawn. I can almost see the smoke on Etna."</p>
+
+<p>He shut the French window and drew the bolt.</p>
+
+<p>She had gone into the bedroom and was standing by
+the dressing-table. She did not know why, but a great
+shyness had come upon her. It was like a cloud enveloping
+her. Never before had she felt like this with
+Maurice, not even when they were first married. She
+had loved him too utterly to be shy with him. Maurice
+was still in the sitting-room, fastening the shutters of the
+window. She heard the creak of wood, the clatter of
+the iron bar falling into the fastener. Now he would
+come.</p>
+
+<p>But he did not come. He was moving about in the
+room. She heard papers rustling, then the lid of the
+piano shut down. He was putting everything in order.</p>
+
+<p>This orderliness was so unusual in Maurice that it made
+a disagreeable impression upon her. She began to feel
+as if he did not want to come into the bedroom, as if
+he were trying to put off the moment of coming. She
+remembered that he had seemed shy of her. What had
+come to them both to-night? Her instinct moved her
+to break through this painful, this absurd constraint.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she called.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>His voice sounded odd to her, almost like the voice
+of some other man, some stranger.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you coming?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Hermione."</p>
+
+<p>But still he did not come.   After a moment, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's awfully hot to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>"After Africa it seems quite cool to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Does it? I've been&mdash;since you've been away I've
+been sleeping nearly always out-of-doors on the terrace."</p>
+
+<p>Now he came to the doorway and stood there. He
+looked at the white room, at Hermione. She had on
+a white tea-gown. It seemed to him that everything
+here was white, everything but his soul. He felt as if
+he could not come into this room, could not sleep here
+to-night, as if it would be a desecration. When he
+stood in the doorway the painful shyness returned to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you&mdash;would you rather sleep there to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not mean to say it. It was the last thing she
+wished to say. Yet she said it. It seemed to her that
+she was forced to say it.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's much cooler there."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"I could just put one or two rugs and cushions on
+the seat by the wall," he said. "I shall sleep like a
+top.   I'm awfully tired!"</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but the sun will soon be up, won't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;then I can come in."</p>
+
+<p>"All right."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll take the rugs from the sitting-room. I say&mdash;how's
+Artois?"</p>
+
+<p>"Much better, but he's still weak."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor chap!"</p>
+
+<p>"He'll ride up to-morrow on a donkey."</p>
+
+<p>"Good! I'm&mdash;I'm most awfully sorry about his
+rooms."</p>
+
+<p>"What does it matter? I've made them quite nice
+already.    He's perfectly comfortable."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad. It's all&mdash;it's all been such a pity&mdash;about
+to-day, I mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let's think of it! Don't let's think of it any
+more."</p>
+
+<p>A passionate sound had stolen into her voice. She
+moved a step towards him. A sudden idea had come
+to her, an idea that stirred within her a great happiness,
+that made a flame of joy spring up in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice, you&mdash;you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"You aren't vexed at my staying away so long?
+You aren't vexed at my bringing Emile back with
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, of course not," he said. "But&mdash;but I wish you
+hadn't gone away."</p>
+
+<p>And then he disappeared into the sitting-room, collected
+the rugs and cushions, opened the French window,
+and went out upon the terrace. Presently he
+called out:</p>
+
+<p>"I shall sleep as I am, Hermione, without undressing.
+I'm awfully done. Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night!" she called.</p>
+
+<p>There was a quiver in her voice. And yet that flame
+of happiness had not quite died down. She said to herself:</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't want me to know. He's too proud. But
+he has been a little jealous, perhaps." She remembered
+how Sicilian he was.</p>
+
+<p>"But I'll make him forget it all," she thought, eagerly.
+"To-morrow&mdash;to-morrow it will be all right. He's
+missed me, he's missed me!"</p>
+
+<p>That thought was very sweet to her. It seemed to
+explain all things; this constraint of her husband, which
+had reacted upon her, this action of his in preferring to
+sleep outside&mdash;everything. He had always been like a
+boy. He was like a boy now. He could not conceal
+his feelings. He did not doubt her. She knew that.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>
+But he had been a little jealous about her friendship
+for Emile.</p>
+
+<p>She undressed. When she was ready for bed she
+hesitated a moment. Then she put a white shawl
+round her shoulders and stole quickly out of the room.
+She came upon the terrace. The stars were waning.
+The gray of the dawn was in the sky towards the east.
+Maurice, stretched upon the rugs, with his face turned
+towards the terrace wall, was lying still. She went to
+him, bent down, and kissed him.</p>
+
+<p>"I love you," she whispered&mdash;"oh, so much!"</p>
+
+<p>She did not wait, but went away at once. When she
+was gone he put up his hand to his face. On his cheek
+there was a tear.</p>
+
+<p>"God forgive me!" he said to himself. "God forgive
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>His body was shaken by a sob.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>When the sun came up over the rim of the sea Maurice
+ceased from his pretence of sleep, raised himself on
+his elbow, then sat upright and looked over the ravine to
+the rocks of the Sirens' Isle. The name seemed to him
+now a fatal name, and everything connected with his
+sojourn in Sicily fatal. Surely there had been a malign
+spirit at work. In this early morning hour his brain,
+though unrefreshed by sleep, was almost unnaturally
+clear, feverishly busy. Something had met him when
+he first set foot in Sicily&mdash;so he thought now&mdash;had met
+him with a fixed and evil purpose. And that purpose
+had never been abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>Old superstitions, inherited perhaps from a long chain
+of credulous Sicilian ancestors, were stirring in him.
+He did not laugh at his idea, as a pure-blooded Englishman
+would have laughed. He pondered it. He cherished
+it.</p>
+
+<p>On his very first evening in Sicily the spirit had led
+him to the wall, had directed his gaze to the far-off
+light in the house of the sirens. He remembered how
+strangely the little light had fascinated his eyes, and
+his mind through his eyes, how he had asked what it
+was, how, when Hermione had called him to come in
+to sleep, he had turned upon the steps to gaze down on
+it once more. Then he had not known why he gazed.
+Now he knew. The spirit that had met him by the
+sea in Sicily had whispered to him to look, and he had
+obeyed because he could not do otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>He dwelt upon that thought, that he had obeyed be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>cause
+he had been obliged to obey. It was a palliative
+to his mental misery and his hatred of himself. The
+fatalism that is linked with superstition got hold upon
+him and comforted him a little. He had not been a
+free agent. He had had to do as he had done. Everything
+had been arranged so that he might sin. The
+night of the fishing had prepared the way for the night
+of the fair. If Hermione had stayed&mdash;but of course
+she had not stayed. The spirit that had kept him in
+Sicily had sent her across the sea to Africa. In the
+full flush of his hot-blooded youth, intoxicated by his
+first knowledge of the sun and of love, he had been left
+quite alone. Newly married, he had been abandoned
+by his wife for a good, even perhaps a noble, reason.
+Still, he had been abandoned&mdash;to himself and the keeping
+of that spirit. Was it any wonder that he had
+fallen? He strove to think that it was not. In the
+night he had cowered before Hermione and had been
+cruel with himself. Now, in the sunshine, he showed
+fight. He strove to find excuses for himself. If he
+did not find excuses he felt that he could not face the
+day, face Hermione in sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>And now that the spirit had led him thus far, surely
+its work was done, surely it would leave him alone. He
+tried to believe that.</p>
+
+<p>Then he thought of Maddalena.</p>
+
+<p>She was there, down there where the rising sun
+glittered on the sea. She surely was awake, as he was
+awake. She was thinking, wondering&mdash;perhaps weeping.</p>
+
+<p>He got up. He could not look at the sea any more.
+The name "House of the Sirens" suddenly seemed to
+him a terrible misnomer, now that he thought of Maddalena
+perhaps weeping by the sea.</p>
+
+<p>He had his revenge upon Salvatore, but at what a
+cost!</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore! The fisherman's face rose up before him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
+If he ever knew! Maurice remembered his sensation that
+already, before he had done the fisherman any wrong,
+the fisherman had condemned him. Now there was a
+reason for condemnation. He had no physical fear of
+Salvatore. He was not a man to be physically afraid
+of another man. But if Salvatore ever knew he might
+tell. He might tell Hermione. That thought brought
+with it to Maurice a cold as of winter. The malign spirit
+might still have a purpose in connection with him, might
+still be near him full of intention. He felt afraid of the
+Sicily he had loved. He longed to leave it. He thought
+of it as an isle of fear, where terrors walked in the midst
+of the glory of the sunshine, where fatality lurked beside
+the purple sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>He started. Hermione was on the steps of the sitting-room.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not sleeping!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>He felt as if she had been there reading all his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"And you!" she answered.</p>
+
+<p>"The sun woke me."</p>
+
+<p>He lied instinctively. All his life with her would be
+a lie now, could never be anything else&mdash;unless&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her hard and long in the eyes for the
+first time since they had met after her return. Suppose
+he were to tell her, now, at once, in the stillness, the
+wonderful innocence and clearness of the dawn! For
+a moment he felt that it would be an exquisite relief,
+a casting down of an intolerable burden. She had such
+a splendid nature. She loved sincerity as she loved
+God. To her it was the one great essential quality,
+whose presence or absence made or marred the beauty
+of a human soul. He knew that.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you look at me like that?" she said, coming
+down to him with the look of slow strength that was
+always characteristic of her.</p>
+
+<p>He dropped his eyes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. How do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"As if you had something to tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps&mdash;perhaps I have," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>He was on the verge, the very verge of confession.
+She put her arm through his. When she touched him
+the impulse waned, but it did not die utterly away.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell it me," she said. "I love to hear everything
+you tell me. I don't think you could ever tell me anything
+that I should not understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you&mdash;are you sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think so."</p>
+
+<p>"But"&mdash;he suddenly remembered some words of
+hers that, till then, he had forgotten&mdash;"but you had
+something to tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to hear it."</p>
+
+<p>He could not speak yet. Perhaps presently he would
+be able to.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go up to the top of the mountain," she answered.
+"I feel as if we could see the whole island from
+there. And up there we shall get all the wind of the
+morning."</p>
+
+<p>They turned towards the steep, bare slope and
+climbed it, while the sun rose higher, as if attending
+them. At the summit there was a heap of stones.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us sit here," Hermione said. "We can see
+everything from here, all the glories of the dawn."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>He was so intensely preoccupied by the debate within
+him that he did not remember that it was here, among
+these stones where they were sitting, that he had hidden
+the fragments of Hermione's letter from Africa telling
+him of her return on the day of the fair.</p>
+
+<p>They sat down with their faces towards the sea.
+The air up here was exquisitely cool. In the pellucid
+clearness of dawn the coast-line looked enchanted, fairy-like
+and full of delicate mystery. And its fading, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>
+far distance, was like a calling voice. Behind them the
+ranges of mountains held a few filmy white clouds, like
+laces, about their rugged peaks. The sea was a pale
+blue stillness, shot with soft grays and mauves and
+pinks, and dotted here and there with black specks that
+were the boats of fishermen.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione sat with her hands clasped round her knees.
+Her face, browned by the African sun, was intense with
+feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, at last, "I can tell you here."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the sea, the coast-line, then turned her
+head and gazed at the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>"We looked at them together," she continued&mdash;"that
+last evening before I went away. Do you remember,
+Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"From the arch. It is better up here. Always,
+when I am very happy or very sad, my instinct would
+be to seek a mountain-top. The sight of great spaces
+seen from a height teaches one, I think."</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not to be an egoist in one's joy; not to be a craven
+in one's sorrow. You see, a great view suggests the
+world, the vastness of things, the multiplicity of life.
+I think that must be it. And of course it reminds one,
+too, that one will soon be going away."</p>
+
+<p>"Going away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. 'The mountains will endure'&mdash;but we&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you mean death."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. What is it makes one think most of death
+when&mdash;when life, new life, is very near?"</p>
+
+<p>She had been gazing at the mountains and the sea,
+but now she turned and looked into his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you understand what I have to tell you?"
+she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head. He was still wondering whether
+he would dare to tell her of his sin. And he did not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>
+know. At one moment he thought that he could do
+it, at another that he would rather throw himself over
+the precipice of the mountain than do it.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand it at all."</p>
+
+<p>There was a lack of interest in his voice, but she did
+not notice it. She was full of the wonder of the morning,
+the wonder of being again with him, and the wonder
+of what she had to tell him.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice"&mdash;she put her hand on his&mdash;"the night I was
+crossing the sea to Africa I knew. All these days I have
+kept this secret from you because I could not write it.
+It seemed to me too sacred. I felt I must be with you
+when I told it. That night upon the sea I was very
+sad. I could not sleep. I was on deck looking always
+back, towards Sicily and you. And just when the
+dawn was coming I&mdash;I knew that a child was coming,
+too, a child of mine and yours."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent. Her hand pressed his, and now she
+was again looking towards the sea. And it seemed to
+him that her face was new, that it was already the face
+of a mother.</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing and he did not move. He looked
+down at the heap of stones by which they were sitting,
+and his eyes rested on a piece of paper covered with
+writing. It was a fragment of Hermione's letter to him.
+As he saw it something sharp and cold like a weapon
+made of ice, seemed to be plunged into him. He got
+up, pulling hard at her hand. She obeyed his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she said, as they stood together. "You
+look&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He had become pale. He knew it.</p>
+
+<p>"Hermione!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>He was actually panting as if he had been running.
+He moved a few steps towards the edge of the summit.
+She followed him.</p>
+
+<p>"You are angry that I didn't tell you! But&mdash;I
+wanted to say it. I wanted to&mdash;to&mdash;&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She lifted his hands to her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you for giving me a child," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Then tears came into his eyes and ran down over his
+cheeks. That he should be thanked by her&mdash;that
+scourged the genuine good in him till surely blood started
+under the strokes.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't thank me!" he said. "Don't do that! I
+won't have it!"</p>
+
+<p>His voice sounded angry.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't ever let you thank me for anything," he
+went on.    "You must understand that."</p>
+
+<p>He was on the edge of some violent, some almost
+hysterical outburst. He thought of Gaspare casting
+himself down in the boat that morning when he had
+feared that his padrone was drowned. So he longed to
+cast himself down and cry. But he had the strength
+to check his impulse. Only, the checking of it seemed
+to turn him for a moment into something made not of
+flesh and blood but of iron. And this thing of iron was
+voiceless.</p>
+
+<p>She knew that he was feeling intensely and respected
+his silence. But at last it began almost to frighten her.
+The boyish look she loved had gone out of his face. A
+stern man stood beside her, a man she had never seen
+before.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," she said, at length. "What is it? I think
+you are suffering."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but aren't you glad?   Surely you are glad?"</p>
+
+<p>To her the word seemed mean, poverty-stricken. She
+changed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Surely you are thankful?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he answered, at last. "I am thinking
+that I don't know that I am worthy to be a father."</p>
+
+<p>He himself had fixed a limit. Now, God was putting
+a period to his wild youth. And the heart&mdash;was that
+changed within him?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Too much was happening. The cup was being filled
+too full. A great longing came to him to get away, far
+away, and be alone. If it had been any other day he
+would have gone off into the mountains, by himself,
+have stayed out till night came, have walked, climbed,
+till he was exhausted. But to-day he could not do that.
+And soon Artois would be coming. He felt as if something
+must snap in brain or heart.</p>
+
+<p>And he had not slept. How he wished that he could
+sleep for a little while and forget everything. In sleep
+one knows nothing. He longed to be able to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand that," she said. "But you are worthy,
+my dear one."</p>
+
+<p>When she said that he knew that he could never tell
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"I must try," he muttered. "I'll try&mdash;from to-day."</p>
+
+<p>She did not talk to him any more. Her instinct told
+her not to. Almost directly they were walking down
+to the priest's house. She did not know which of them
+had moved first.</p>
+
+<p>When they got there they found Lucrezia up. Her
+eyes were red, but she smiled at Hermione. Then she
+looked at the padrone with alarm. She expected him
+to blame her for having disobeyed his orders of the day
+before. But he had forgotten all about that.</p>
+
+<p>"Get breakfast, Lucrezia," Hermione said. "We'll
+have it on the terrace. And presently we must have a
+talk. The sick signore is coming up to-day for collazione.
+We must have a very nice collazione, but
+something wholesome."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia went away to the kitchen thankfully. She
+had heard bad news of Sebastiano yesterday in the
+village. He was openly in love with the girl in the
+Lipari Isles. Her heart was almost breaking, but the
+return of the padrona comforted her a little. Now she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+had some one to whom she could tell her trouble, some
+one who would sympathize.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go and take a bath, Hermione," Maurice said.</p>
+
+<p>And he, too, disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione went to talk to Gaspare and tell him what
+to get in Marechiaro.</p>
+
+<p>When breakfast was ready Maurice came back looking
+less pale, but still unboyish. All the bright sparkle to
+which Hermione was accustomed had gone out of him.
+She wondered why. She had expected the change in
+him to be a passing thing, but it persisted.</p>
+
+<p>At breakfast it was obviously difficult for him to talk.
+She sought a reason for his strangeness. Presently she
+thought again of Artois. Could he be the reason? Or
+was Maurice now merely preoccupied by that great,
+new knowledge that there would soon be a third life
+mingled with theirs? She wondered exactly what he
+felt about that. He was really such a boy at heart despite
+his set face of to-day. Perhaps he dreaded the
+idea of responsibility. His agitation upon the mountain-top
+had been intense. Perhaps he was rendered
+unhappy by the thought of fatherhood. Or was it
+Emile?</p>
+
+<p>When breakfast was over, and he was smoking, she
+said to him:</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice, I want to ask you something."</p>
+
+<p>A startled look came into his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" he said, quickly.</p>
+
+<p>He threw his cigarette away and turned towards her,
+with a sort of tenseness that suggested to her a man
+bracing himself for some ordeal.</p>
+
+<p>"Only about Emile."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>He took another cigarette, and his attitude at once
+looked easier. She wondered why.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mind about Emile being here, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was nearly answering quickly that he was de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>lighted
+to welcome him. But a suddenly born shrewdness
+prevented him. To-day, like a guilty man, he was
+painfully conscious, painfully alert. He knew that
+Hermione was wondering about him, and realized that
+her question afforded him an opportunity to be deceptive
+and yet to seem quite natural and truthful. He could
+not be as he had been, to-day. The effort was far too
+difficult for him. Hermione's question showed him a
+plausible excuse for his peculiarity of demeanor and
+conduct.    He seized it.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it was very natural for you to bring him," he
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>He lit the cigarette.    His hand was trembling slightly.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but you had rather I hadn't brought him?"</p>
+
+<p>As Maurice began to act a part an old feeling returned
+to him, and almost turned his lie into truth.</p>
+
+<p>"You could hardly expect me to wish to have Artois
+with us here, could you, Hermione?" he said, slowly.</p>
+
+<p>She scarcely knew whether she were most pained or
+pleased. She was pained that anything she had done
+had clouded his happiness, but she was intensely glad
+to think he loved to be quite alone with her.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I felt that. But I felt, too, as if it would be cruel
+to stop short, unworthy in us."</p>
+
+<p>"In us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. You let me go to Africa. You might have
+asked me, you might even have told me, not to go. I
+did not think of it at the time. Everything went so
+quickly. But I have thought of it since. And, knowing
+that, realizing it, I feel that you had your part, a
+great part, in Emile's rescue. For I do believe, Maurice,
+that if I had not gone he would have died."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I am glad you went."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke perfunctorily, almost formally. Hermione
+felt chilled.</p>
+
+<p>"It seemed to me that, having begun to do a good
+work, it would be finer, stronger, to carry it quite through,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+to put aside our own desires and think of another who
+had passed through a great ordeal. Was I wrong, Maurice?
+Emile is still very weak, very dependent. Ought
+I to have said, 'Now I see you're not going to die, I'll
+leave you at once.' Wouldn't it have been rather selfish,
+even rather brutal?"</p>
+
+<p>His reply startled her.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you&mdash;have you ever thought of where we are?"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Where we are!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of the people we are living among?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I understand."</p>
+
+<p>He cleared his throat.</p>
+
+<p>"They're Sicilians. They don't see things as the
+English do," he said.</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence. Hermione felt a heat rush over
+her, over all her body and face. She did not speak,
+because, if she had, she might have said something
+vehement, even headstrong, such as she had never said,
+surely never would say, to Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I understand. It's not that," he added.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it couldn't be that," she said. "You needn't
+tell me."</p>
+
+<p>The hot feeling stayed with her. She tried to control
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"You surely can't mind what ignorant people out
+here think of an utterly innocent action!" she said, at
+last, very quietly.</p>
+
+<p>But even as she spoke she remembered the Sicilian
+blood in him.</p>
+
+<p>"You have minded it!" she said. "You do mind
+now."</p>
+
+<p>And suddenly she felt very tender over him, as she
+might have felt over a child. In his face she could not
+see the boy to-day, but his words set the boy, the inmost
+nature of the boy that he still surely was, before
+her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The sense of humor in her seemed to be laughing and
+wiping away a tear at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>She moved her chair close to his.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," she said. "Do you know that sometimes
+you make me feel horribly old and motherly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do I?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"You do to-day, and yet&mdash;do you know that I have
+been thinking since I came back that you are looking
+older, much older than when I went away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is that Artois?" he said, looking over the wall to
+the mountain-side beyond the ravine.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione got up, leaned upon the wall, and followed
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it must be. I told Gaspare to go to the
+hotel when he fetched the provisions in Marechiaro and
+tell Emile it would be best to come up in the cool.
+Yes, it is he, and Gaspare is with him! Maurice, you
+don't mind so very much?"</p>
+
+<p>She put her arm through his.</p>
+
+<p>"These people can't talk when they see how ill he
+looks. And if they do&mdash;oh, Maurice, what does it matter?
+Surely there's only one thing in the world that
+matters, and that is whether one can look one's own
+conscience in the face and say, 'I've nothing to be
+ashamed of!'"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice longed to get away from the touch of her arm.
+He remembered the fragment of paper he had seen
+among the stones on the mountain-side. He must go
+up there alone directly he had a moment of freedom.
+But now&mdash;Artois! He stared at the distant donkeys.
+His brain felt dry and shrivelled, his body both feverish
+and tired. How could he support this long day's
+necessities? It seemed to him that he had not the
+strength and resolution to endure them. And Artois was
+so brilliant! Maurice thought of him at that moment
+as a sort of monster of intellectuality, terrifying and repellent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think so?" Hermione said.</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say," he answered. "But I dare say, I suppose&mdash;very
+few of us can do that. We can't expect to
+be perfect, and other people oughtn't to expect it of us."</p>
+
+<p>His voice had changed. Before, it had been almost
+an accusing voice and insincere. Now it was surely a
+voice that pleaded, and it was absolutely sincere. Hermione
+remembered how in London long ago the humility
+of Maurice had touched her. He had stood out from
+the mass of conceited men because of his beauty and his
+simple readiness to sit at the feet of others. And surely
+the simplicity, the humility, still persisted beautifully
+in him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I should ever expect anything of you
+that you wouldn't give me," she said to him. "Anything
+of loyalty, of straightness, or of manhood. Often
+you seem to me a boy, and yet, I know, if a danger
+came to me, or a trouble, I could lean on you and you
+would never fail me. That's what a woman loves to
+feel when she has given herself to a man, that he knows
+how to take care of her, and that he cares to take care
+of her."</p>
+
+<p>Her body was touching his. He felt himself stiffen.
+The mental pain he suffered under the lash of her words
+affected his body, and his knowledge of the necessity
+to hide all that was in his mind caused his body to long
+for isolation, to shrink from any contact with another.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope," he said, trying to make his voice natural
+and simple&mdash;&mdash;"I hope you'll never be in trouble or in
+danger, Hermione."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I could mind very much if you were
+there, if I could just touch your hand."</p>
+
+<p>"Here they come!" he said. "I hope Artois isn't
+very tired with the ride. We ought to have had Sebastiano
+here to play the 'Pastorale' for him."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! Sebastiano!" said Hermione. "He's playing
+it for some one else in the Lipari Islands.    Poor Lu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>crezia!
+Maurice, I love Sicily and all things Sicilian. You
+know how much! But&mdash;but I'm glad you've got some
+drops of English blood in your veins. I'm glad you
+aren't all Sicilian."</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said. "Let us go to the arch and meet
+him."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>"So this is your Garden of Paradise?" Artois said.</p>
+
+<p>He got off his donkey slowly at the archway, and
+stood for a moment, after shaking them both by the
+hand, looking at the narrow terrace, bathed in sunshine
+despite the shelter of the awning, at the columns,
+at the towering rocks which dominated the grove of
+oak-trees, and at the low, white-walled cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"The garden from which you came to save my life,"
+he added.</p>
+
+<p>He turned to Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"I am grateful and I am ashamed," he said. "I was
+not your friend, monsieur, but you have treated me
+with more than friendship. I thank you in words now,
+but my hope is that some day I shall be given the opportunity
+to thank you with an act."</p>
+
+<p>He held out his hand again to Maurice. There had been
+a certain formality in his speech, but there was a warmth
+in his manner that was not formal. As Maurice held his
+hand the eyes of the two men met, and each took swift
+note of the change in the other.</p>
+
+<p>Artois's appearance was softened by his illness. In
+health he looked authoritative, leonine, very sure of himself,
+piercingly observant, sometimes melancholy, but
+not anxious. His manner, never blustering or offensive,
+was usually dominating, the manner of one who had
+the right to rule in the things of the intellect. Now he
+seemed much gentler, less intellectual, more emotional.
+One received, at a first meeting with him, the sensation
+rather of coming into contact with a man of heart than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>
+with a man of brains. Maurice felt the change at once,
+and was surprised by it. Outwardly the novelist was
+greatly altered. His tall frame was shrunken and
+slightly bent. The face was pale and drawn, the eyes
+were sunken, the large-boned body was frightfully thin
+and looked uncertain when it moved. As Maurice gazed
+he realized that this man had been to the door of death,
+almost over the threshold of the door.</p>
+
+<p>And Artois? He saw a change in the Mercury whom
+he had last seen at the door of the London restaurant,
+a change that startled him.</p>
+
+<p>"Come into our Garden of Paradise and rest," said
+Hermione. "Lean on my arm, Emile."</p>
+
+<p>"May I?" Artois asked of Maurice, with a faint smile
+that was almost pathetic.</p>
+
+<p>"Please do. You must be tired!"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione and Artois walked slowly forward to the
+terrace, arm linked in arm. Maurice was about to follow
+them when he felt a hand catch hold of him, a hand
+that was hot and imperative.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino, signorino, I must speak to you!"</p>
+
+<p>Startled, Maurice looked into the boy's flushed face.
+The great eyes searched him fiercely.</p>
+
+<p>"Put the donkeys in the stable," Maurice said. "I'll
+come."</p>
+
+<p>"Come behind the house, signorino. Ah, Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>The last exclamation was breathed out with an intensity
+that was like the intensity of despair. The
+boy's look and manner were tragic.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," Maurice said, "what&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>He saw Hermione turning towards him.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll come in a minute, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna!" repeated the boy. "Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>He held up his hands and let them drop to his sides.
+Then he muttered something&mdash;a long sentence&mdash;in dialect.
+His voice sounded like a miserable old man's.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;ah!"</p>
+
+<p>He called to the donkeys and drove them forward to
+the out-house. Maurice followed.</p>
+
+<p>What had happened? Gaspare had the manner, the
+look, of one confronted by a terror from which there was
+no escape. His eyes had surely at the same time rebuked
+and furiously pitied his master. What did they
+mean?</p>
+
+<p>"This is our Garden of Paradise!" Hermione was saying
+as Maurice came up to her and Artois. "Do you
+wonder that we love it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder that you left it." Artois replied.</p>
+
+<p>He was sunk in a deep straw chair, a chaise longue
+piled up with cushions, facing the great and radiant
+view. After he had spoken he sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think," he said, "that either of you really
+know that this is Eden. That knowledge has been reserved
+for the interloper, for me."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione sat down close to him. Maurice was standing
+by the wall, listening furtively to the noises from the
+out-house, where Gaspare was unsaddling the donkeys.
+Artois glanced at him, and was more sharply conscious
+of change in him. To Artois this place, after the long
+journey, which had sorely tried his feeble body, seemed
+an enchanted place of peace, a veritable Elysian Field
+in which the saddest, the most driven man must surely
+forget his pain and learn how to rest and to be joyful
+in repose. But he felt that his host, the man who had
+been living in paradise, who ought surely to have been
+learning its blessed lessons through sunlit days and
+starry nights, was restless like a man in a city, was anxious,
+was intensely ill at ease. Once, watching this
+man, Artois had thought of the messenger, poised on
+winged feet, radiantly ready for movement that would
+be exquisite because it would be obedient. This man
+still looked ready for flight, but for a flight how different!
+As Artois was thinking this Maurice moved.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me just for an instant!" he said. "I want
+to speak to Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>He saw now that Gaspare was taking into the cottage
+the provisions that had been carried up by the donkey
+from Marechiaro.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I told him to do something for me in the village,"
+he added, "and I want just to know&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at them, almost defiantly, as if he challenged
+them not to believe what he had said. Then,
+without finishing his sentence, he went quickly into the
+cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"You have chosen your garden well," Artois said to
+Hermione directly they were alone. "No other sea has
+ever given to me such an impression of tenderness and
+magical space as this; no other sea has surely ever had
+a horizon-line so distant from those who look as this."</p>
+
+<p>He went on talking about the beauty, leading her with
+him. He feared lest she might begin to speak about
+her husband.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Maurice had reached the mountain-side behind
+the house and was waiting there for Gaspare. He
+heard the boy's voice in the kitchen speaking to Lucrezia,
+angrily it seemed by the sound. Then the voice
+ceased and Gaspare appeared for an instant at the
+kitchen door, making violent motions with his arms
+towards the mountain. He disappeared. What did he
+want? What did he mean? The gestures had been imperative.
+Maurice looked round. A little way up the
+mountain there was a large, closed building, like a barn,
+built of stones. It belonged to a contadino, but Maurice
+had never seen it open, or seen any one going to or coming
+from it. As he stared at it an idea occurred to him.
+Perhaps Gaspare meant him to go and wait there, behind
+the barn, so that Lucrezia should not see or hear
+their colloquy. He resolved to do this, and went swiftly
+up the hill-side. When he was in the shadow of the
+building he waited. He did not know what was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>
+matter, what Gaspare wanted, but he realized that something
+had occurred which had stirred the boy to the
+depths. This something must have occurred while he
+was at Marechiaro. Before he had time mentally to
+make a list of possible events in Marechiaro, Maurice
+heard light feet running swiftly up the mountain, and
+Gaspare came round the corner, still with the look of
+tragedy, a wild, almost terrible look in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino," he began at once, in a low voice that
+was full of the pressure of an intense excitement. "Tell
+me! Where were you last night when we were making
+the fireworks go off?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice felt the blood mount to his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Close to where you left me," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore! Oh, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>It was almost a cry. The sweat was pouring down
+the boy's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Ma non &egrave; mia colpa! Non &egrave; mia colpa!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean? What has happened, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have seen Salvatore."</p>
+
+<p>His voice was more quiet now. He fixed his eyes
+almost sternly on his padrone, as if in the effort to read
+his very soul.</p>
+
+<p>"Well? Well, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was almost stammering now. He guessed&mdash;he
+knew what was coming.</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore came up to me just before I got to the
+village. I heard him calling, 'Stop!' I stood still.
+We were on the path not far from the fountain. There
+was a broken branch on the ground, a branch of olive.
+Salvatore said: 'Suppose that is your padrone, that
+branch there!' and he spat on it. He spat on it, signore,
+he spat&mdash;and he spat."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice knew now.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on!" he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And this time there was no uncertainty in his voice.
+Gaspare was breathing hard. His breast rose and
+fell.</p>
+
+<p>"I was going to strike him in the face, but he caught
+my hand, and then&mdash;Signorino, signorino, what have
+you done?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice rose. He began to look uncontrolled, distracted,
+wild, as if he might do some frantic thing.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!  Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice had him by the arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you?" panted the boy. "Why did you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then Salvatore knows?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice saw that any denial was useless.</p>
+
+<p>"He knows!  He knows!"</p>
+
+<p>If Maurice had not held Gaspare tightly the boy would
+have flung himself down headlong on the ground, to
+burst into one of those storms of weeping which swept
+upon him when he was fiercely wrought up. But Maurice
+would not let him have this relief.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! Listen to me! What is he going to do?
+What is Salvatore going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Santa Madonna!  Santa Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy rocked himself to and fro. He began to invoke
+the Madonna and the saints. He was beside himself,
+was almost like one mad.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare&mdash;in the name of God&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>"H'sh!"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the boy kept still. His face changed,
+hardened. His body became tense. With his hand
+still held up in a warning gesture, he crept to the edge
+of the barn and looked round it.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" Maurice whispered.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare stole back.</p>
+
+<p>"It is only Lucrezia. She is spreading the linen. I
+thought&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What is Salvatore going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Unless you go down to the sea to meet him this even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>ing,
+signorino, he is coming up here to-night to tell everything
+to the signora."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice went white.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall go," he said.  "I shall go down to the sea."</p>
+
+<p>"Madonna!  Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>"He won't come now? He won't come this morning?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice spoke almost breathlessly, with his hands on
+the boy's hands which streamed with sweat. Gaspare
+shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I told him if he came up I would meet him in the
+path and kill him."</p>
+
+<p>The boy had out a knife.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice put his arm round Gaspare's shoulder. At
+that moment he really loved the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Will he come?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only if you do not go."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall go."</p>
+
+<p>"I will come with you, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>"No.  I must go alone."</p>
+
+<p>"I will come with you!"</p>
+
+<p>A dogged obstinacy hardened his whole face, made
+even his shining eyes look cold, like stones.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, you are to stay with the signora. I may
+miss Salvatore going down. While I am gone he may
+come up here. The signora is not to speak with him.
+He is not to come to her."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare hesitated. He was torn in two by his dual
+affection, his dual sense of the watchful fidelity he owed
+to his padrone and to his padrona.</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene," he said, at last, in a half whisper.</p>
+
+<p>He hung down his head like one exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>"How will it finish?" he murmured, as if to himself.
+"How will it finish?"</p>
+
+<p>"I must go," Maurice said. "I must go now. Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"We must be careful, you and I, to-day. We must
+not let the signora, Lucrezia, any one suspect that&mdash;that
+we are not just as usual.  Do you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>The boy nodded.  His eyes now looked tired.</p>
+
+<p>"And try to keep a lookout, when you can, without
+drawing the attention of the signora. Salvatore might
+change his mind and come up. The signora is not to
+know. She is never to know. Do you think"&mdash;he
+hesitated&mdash;"do you think Salvatore has told any one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so."</p>
+
+<p>The boy was silent. Then he lifted his hands again
+and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!  Signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>And Maurice seemed to hear at that moment the voice
+of an accusing angel.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," he said, "I was mad. We men&mdash;we are
+mad sometimes. But now I must be sane. I must do
+what I can to&mdash;I must do what I can&mdash;and you must
+help me."</p>
+
+<p>He held out his hand. Gaspare took it. The grasp
+of it was strong, that of a man. It seemed to reassure
+the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"I will always help my padrone," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Then they went down the mountain-side.</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps very strange&mdash;Maurice thought it was&mdash;but
+he felt now less tired, less confused, more master of
+himself than he had before he had spoken with Gaspare.
+He even felt less miserable. Face to face with an immediate
+and very threatening danger, courage leaped up
+in him, a certain violence of resolve which cleared away
+clouds and braced his whole being. He had to fight.
+There was no way out. Well, then, he would fight.
+He had played the villain, perhaps, but he would not
+play the poltroon. He did not know what he was going
+to do, what he could do, but he must act, and act decisively.
+His wild youth responded to this call made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>
+upon it. There was a new light in his eyes as he went
+down to the cottage, as he came upon the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>Artois noticed it at once, was aware at once that in
+this marvellous peace to which Hermione had brought
+him there were elements which had nothing to do with
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>"What hast thou to do with peace? Turn thee behind
+me."</p>
+
+<p>These words from the Bible came into his mind as he
+looked into the eyes of his host, and he felt that Hermione
+and he were surely near to some drama of which
+they knew nothing, of which Hermione, perhaps, suspected
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice acted his part. The tonic of near danger gave
+him strength, even gave him at first a certain subtlety.
+From the terrace he could see far over the mountain
+flanks. As one on a tower he watched for the approach
+of his enemy from the sea, but he did not neglect his
+two companions. For he was fighting already. When
+he seemed natural in his cordiality to his guest, when
+he spoke and laughed, when he apologized for the misfortune
+of the previous day, he was fighting. The battle
+with circumstances was joined. He must bear himself
+bravely in it. He must not allow himself to be
+overwhelmed.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, there came presently a moment which
+brought with it a sense of fear.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione got up to go into the house.</p>
+
+<p>"I must see what Lucrezia is doing," she said. "Your
+collazione must not be a fiasco, Emile."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing could be a fiasco here, I think," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed happily.</p>
+
+<p>"But poor Lucrezia is not in paradise," she said.
+"Ah, why can't every one be happy when one is happy
+one's self? I always think of that when I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She did not finish her sentence in words. Her look<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span>
+at the two men concluded it. Then she turned and
+went into the house.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter with Lucrezia?" asked Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she&mdash;she's in love with a shepherd called Sebastiano."</p>
+
+<p>"And he's treating her badly?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid so. He went to the Lipari Isles, and he
+doesn't come back."</p>
+
+<p>"A girl there keeps him captive?"</p>
+
+<p>"It seems so."</p>
+
+<p>"Faithful women must not expect to have a perfect
+time in Sicily," Artois said.</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke he noticed that a change came in his
+companion's face. It was fleeting, but it was marked.
+It made Artois think:</p>
+
+<p>"This man understands Sicilian faithlessness in love."</p>
+
+<p>It made him, too, remember sharply some words of
+his own said long ago in London:</p>
+
+<p>"I love the South, but I distrust what I love, and I
+see the South in him."</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence between the two men. Heat was
+growing in the long summer day, heat that lapped them
+in the influence of the South. Africa had been hotter,
+but this seemed the breast of the South, full of glory
+and of languor, and of that strange and subtle influence
+which inclines the heart of man to passion and the body
+of man to yield to its desires. It was glorious, this
+wonderful magic of the South, but was it wholesome for
+Northern men? Was it not full of danger? As he looked
+at the great, shining waste of the sea, purple and gold,
+dark and intense and jewelled, at the outline of Etna,
+at the barbaric ruin of the Saracenic castle on the cliff
+opposite, like a cry from the dead ages echoing out of
+the quivering blue, at the man before him leaning against
+the blinding white wall above the steep bank of the
+ravine, Artois said to himself that the South was dangerous
+to young, full-blooded men, was dangerous, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>
+such a man as Delarey. And he asked himself the
+question, "What has this man been doing here in this
+glorious loneliness of the South, while his wife has been
+saving my life in Africa?" And a sense of reproach, almost
+of alarm, smote him. For he had called Hermione
+away. In the terrible solitude that comes near to the
+soul with the footfalls of death he had not been strong
+enough to be silent. He had cried out, and his friend
+had heard and had answered. And Delarey had been
+left alone with the sun.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you must feel as if I were your enemy,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>And as he spoke he was thinking, "Have I been this
+man's enemy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"I deprived you of your wife. You've been all alone
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"I made friends of the Sicilians."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice spoke lightly, but through his mind ran the
+thought, "What an enemy this man has been to me,
+without knowing it!"</p>
+
+<p>"They are easy to get on with," said Artois. "When
+I was in Sicily I learned to love them."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, love!" said Maurice, hastily.</p>
+
+<p>He checked himself.</p>
+
+<p>"That's rather a strong word, but I like them. They're
+a delightful race."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you found out their faults?"</p>
+
+<p>Both men were trying to hide themselves in their
+words.</p>
+
+<p>"What are their faults, do you think?" Maurice said.</p>
+
+<p>He looked over the wall and saw, far off on the path
+by the ravine, a black speck moving.</p>
+
+<p>"Treachery when they do not trust; sensuality, violence,
+if they think themselves wronged."</p>
+
+<p>"Are&mdash;are those faults? I understand them. They
+seem almost to belong to the sun."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Artois had not been looking at Maurice. The sound of
+Maurice's voice now made him aware that the speaker
+had turned away from him. He glanced up and saw his
+companion staring over the wall across the ravine. What
+was he gazing at?   Artois wondered.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the sun is perhaps partly responsible for them.
+Then you have become such a sun-worshipper that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, I don't say that," Maurice interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>He looked round and met Artois's observant eyes.
+He had dreaded having those eyes fixed upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"But I think&mdash;I think things done in such a place,
+such an island as this, shouldn't be judged too severely,
+shouldn't be judged, I mean, quite as we might judge
+them, say, in England."</p>
+
+<p>He looked embarrassed as he ended, and shifted his
+gaze from his companion.</p>
+
+<p>"I agree with you," Artois said.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice looked at him again, almost eagerly. An odd
+feeling came to him that this man, who unwittingly had
+done him a deadly harm, would be able to understand
+what perhaps no woman could ever understand, the
+tyranny of the senses in a man, their fierce tyranny in
+the sunlit lands. Had he been so wicked? Would
+Artois think so? And the punishment that was perhaps
+coming&mdash;did he deserve that it should be terrible? He
+wondered, almost like a boy. But Hermione was not
+with them. When she was there he did not wonder.
+He felt that he deserved lashes unnumbered.</p>
+
+<p>And Artois&mdash;he began to feel almost clairvoyant. The
+new softness that had come to him with the pain of the
+body, that had been developed by the blessed rest from
+pain that was convalescence, had not stricken his faculty
+of seeing clear in others, but it had changed, at any rate
+for a time, the sentiments that followed upon the exercise
+of that faculty. Scorn and contempt were less
+near to him than they had been. Pity was nearer. He
+felt now almost sure that Delarey had fallen into some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>
+trouble while Hermione was in Africa, that he was oppressed
+at this moment by some great uneasiness or
+even fear, that he was secretly cursing some imprudence,
+and that his last words were a sort of surreptitious plea
+for forgiveness, thrown out to the Powers of the air, to
+the Spirits of the void, to whatever shadowy presences
+are about the guilty man ready to condemn his sin.
+He felt, too, that he owed much to Delarey. In a
+sense it might be said that he owed to him his life.
+For Delarey had allowed Hermione to come to Africa,
+and if Hermione had not come the end for him, Artois,
+might well have been death.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to say something to you, monsieur,"
+he said. "It is rather difficult to say, because I do not
+wish it to seem formal, when the feeling that prompts
+it is not formal."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice was again looking over the wall, watching with
+intensity the black speck that was slowly approaching
+on the little path.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, monsieur?" he asked, quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"I owe you a debt&mdash;indeed I do. You must not
+deny it. Through your magnanimous action in permitting
+your wife to leave you, you, perhaps indirectly,
+saved my life. For, without her aid, I do not think I
+could have recovered. Of her nobility and devotion
+I will not, because I cannot adequately, speak. But I
+wish to say to you that if ever I can do you a service
+of any kind I will do it."</p>
+
+<p>As he finished Maurice, who was looking at him now,
+saw a veil over his big eyes. Could it&mdash;could it possibly
+be a veil of tears!</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to speak warmly, cordially. But his heart
+said to him: "You can do nothing for me now. It is
+all too late!"</p>
+
+<p>Yet the words and the emotion of Artois were some
+slight relief to him. He was able to feel that in this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>
+man he had no secret enemy, but, if need be, a
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>"You have a nice fellow as servant," Artois said, to
+change the conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare&mdash;yes. He's loyal. I intend to ask Hermione
+to let me take him to England with us."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, then added, with an anxious curiosity:</p>
+
+<p>"Did you talk to him much as you came up?"</p>
+
+<p>He wondered whether the novelist had noticed Gaspare's
+agitation or whether the boy had been subtle
+enough to conceal it.</p>
+
+<p>"Not very much. The path is narrow, and I rode
+in front. He sang most of the time, those melancholy
+songs of Sicily that came surely long ago across the sea
+from Africa."</p>
+
+<p>"They nearly always sing on the mountains when
+they are with the donkeys."</p>
+
+<p>"Dirges of the sun. There is a sadness of the sun
+as well as a joy."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>As Maurice answered, he thought, "How well I know
+that now!" And as he looked at the black figure drawing
+nearer in the sunshine it seemed to him that there
+was a terror in that gold which he had often worshipped.
+If that figure should be Salvatore! He strained his
+eyes. At one moment he fancied that he recognized
+the wild, free, rather strutting walk of the fisherman.
+At another he believed that his fear had played him a
+trick, that the movements of the figure were those of
+an old man, some plodding contadino of the hills.
+Artois wondered increasingly what he was looking at.
+A silence fell between them. Artois lay back in the
+chaise longue and gazed up at the blue, then at the section
+of distant sea which was visible above the rim of
+the wall though the intervening mountain land was
+hidden. It was a paradise up here. And to have it
+with the great love of a woman, what an experience that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>
+must be for any man! It seemed to him strange that
+such an experience had been the gift of the gods to
+their messenger, their Mercury. What had it meant to
+him? What did it mean to him now? Something had
+changed him. Was it that? In the man by the wall
+Artois did not see any longer the bright youth he remembered.
+Yet the youth was still there, the supple
+grace, the beauty, bronzed now by the long heats of
+the sun. It was the expression that had changed. In
+cities one sees anxious-looking men everywhere. In
+London Delarey had stood out from the crowd not only
+because of his beauty of the South, but because of his
+light-hearted expression, the spirit of youth in his eyes.
+And now here, in this reality that seemed almost like a
+dream in its perfection, in this reality of the South, there
+was a look of strain in his eyes and in his whole body.
+The man had contradicted his surroundings in London&mdash;now
+he contradicted his surroundings here.</p>
+
+<p>While Artois was thinking this Maurice's expression
+suddenly changed, his attitude became easier. He turned
+round from the wall, and Artois saw that the keen anxiety
+had gone out of his eyes. Gaspare was below with
+his gun pretending to look for birds, and had made a
+sign that the approaching figure was not that of Salvatore.
+Maurice's momentary sense of relief was so great
+that it threw him off his guard.</p>
+
+<p>"What can have been happening beyond the wall?"
+Artois thought.</p>
+
+<p>He felt as if a drama had been played out there and
+the d&eacute;nouement had been happy.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione came back at this moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor Lucrezia!" she said. "She's plucky, but Sebastiano
+is making her suffer horribly."</p>
+
+<p>"Here!" said Artois, almost involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>"It does seem almost impossible, I know."</p>
+
+<p>She sat down again near him and smiled at her husband.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You are coming back to health, Emile. And Maurice
+and I&mdash;well, we are in our garden. It seems wrong, terribly
+wrong, that any one should suffer here. But Lucrezia
+loves like a Sicilian. What violence there is in
+these people!"</p>
+
+<p>"England must not judge them."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" asked Hermione. "Something you
+two were talking about when I was in the kitchen?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice looked uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>"I was only saying that I think the sun&mdash;the South
+has an influence," he said, "and that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"An influence!" exclaimed Hermione. "Of course it
+has! Emile, you would have seen that influence at
+work if you had been with us on our first day in Sicily.
+Your tarantella, Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled again happily, but her husband did not
+answer her smile.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" said Artois. "You never told me
+in Africa."</p>
+
+<p>"The boys danced a tarantella here on the terrace to
+welcome us, and it drove Maurice so mad that he sprang
+up and danced too. And the strange thing was that he
+danced as well as any of them. His blood called him,
+and he obeyed the call."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at Artois to remind him of his words.</p>
+
+<p>"It's good when the blood calls one to the tarantella,
+isn't it?" she asked him. "I think it's the most wildly
+innocent expression of extreme joy in the world. And
+yet"&mdash;her expressive face changed, and into her prominent
+brown eyes there stole a half-whimsical, half-earnest
+look&mdash;"at the end&mdash;Maurice, do you know that I was
+almost frightened that day at the end?"</p>
+
+<p>"Frightened! Why?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a
+straw chair.</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<a href="images/gs07.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs07_th.jpg" width="400" height="271"
+alt="&quot;&#39;BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN&mdash;IN MY SICILIAN,&#39; SHE SAID, TENDERLY&quot;"
+title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">&quot;&#39;BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN&mdash;IN MY SICILIAN,&#39; SHE SAID, TENDERLY&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>
+other and laying his brown hands on the arms of the
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in
+the tarantella. Wasn't it absurd?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced
+so well that I seemed to see before me a pure-blooded
+Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"But I soon learned to delight in&mdash;in my Sicilian,"
+she said, tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely
+natural, that it did not occur to her that though
+she was with her husband and her most intimate friend
+the two men were really strangers to each other.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are
+back in London," Maurice said. There was a cold sound
+of determination in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have
+gained here," Hermione protested, half laughingly, half
+tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I
+don't think a Sicilian would be much good in England.
+We&mdash;we don't want romance there. We want cool-headed,
+practical men who can work, and who've no
+nonsense about them."</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche!
+And from you! Why, what has happened to you while
+I've been away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing.
+What should happen to me here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you&mdash;are you beginning to long for England and
+English ways?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it's time I began to do something," he said,
+resolutely. "I think I've had a long enough holiday."</p>
+
+<p>He was trying to put the past behind him. He was
+trying to rush into the new life, the life in which there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span>
+would be no more wildness, no more yielding to the hot
+impulses that were surely showered down out of the sun.
+Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already.
+It was fading away, sinking into its purple sea, sinking
+out of his sight with his wild heart of youth, while he,
+cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady life befitting
+an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties,
+of husband and father, with a money-making ambition
+and a stake in his country.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.</p>
+
+<p>But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice.
+Till now Maurice had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms,
+had even run before them, lighter-footed than she
+in the race towards the sunshine. It was difficult to accommodate
+herself to this abrupt change.</p>
+
+<p>"But don't let us think of going to-day," she added.
+"Remember&mdash;I have only just come back."</p>
+
+<p>"And I!" said Artois. "Be merciful to an invalid,
+Monsieur Delarey!"</p>
+
+<p>He spoke lightly, but he felt fully conscious now that
+his suspicion was well founded. Maurice was uneasy, unhappy.
+He wanted to get away from this peace that
+held no peace for him. He wanted to put something
+behind him. To a man like Artois, Maurice was a boy.
+He might try to be subtle, he might even be subtle&mdash;for
+him. But to this acute and trained observer of the
+human comedy he could not for long be deceptive.</p>
+
+<p>During his severe illness the mind of Artois had often
+been clouded, had been dispossessed of its throne by
+the clamor of the body's pain. And afterwards, when
+the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had
+been lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was
+delicious. But now it began to go again to its business.
+It began to work with the old rapidity that had for a
+time been lost. And as this power came back and was
+felt thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious
+man, he took alarm.    What affected or threatened De<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>larey
+must affect, threaten Hermione. Whether he were
+one with her or not she was one with him. The feeling
+of Artois towards the woman who had shown him such
+noble, such unusual friendship was exquisitely delicate
+and intensely strong. Unmingled with any bodily passion,
+it was, or so it seemed to him, the more delicate
+and strong on that account. He was a man who had an
+instinctive hatred of heroics. His taste revolted from
+them as it revolted from violence in literature. They
+seemed to him a coarseness, a crudity of the soul, and
+almost inevitably linked with secret falseness. But he
+was conscious that to protect from sorrow or shame the
+woman who had protected him in his dark hour he would
+be willing to make any sacrifice. There would be no
+limit to what he would be ready to do now, in this
+moment, for Hermione. He knew that, and he took
+the alarm. Till now he had been feeling curiosity about
+the change in Delarey.    Now he felt the touch of fear.</p>
+
+<p>Something had happened to change Maurice while Hermione
+had been in Africa. He had heard, perhaps, the
+call of the blood. All that he had said, and all that he
+had felt, on the night when he had met Maurice for the
+first time in London, came back to Artois. He had
+prophesied, vaguely perhaps. Had his prophecy already
+been fulfilled? In this great and shining peace of nature
+Maurice was not at peace. And now all sense of peace
+deserted Artois. Again, and fiercely now, he felt the
+danger of the South, and he added to his light words
+some words that were not light.</p>
+
+<p>"But I am really no longer an invalid," he said. "And
+I must be getting northward very soon. I need the
+bracing air, the Spartan touch of the cold that the
+Sybarite in me dreads.  Perhaps we all need them."</p>
+
+<p>"If you go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed,
+"you will make me feel as if it were degraded to
+wish to live anywhere except at Clapham Junction or
+the North Pole.  Let us be happy as we are, where we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span>
+are, to-day and&mdash;yes, call me weak if you like&mdash;and to-morrow!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice made no answer to this challenge, but Artois
+covered his silence, and kept the talk going on safe
+topics till Gaspare came to the terrace to lay the cloth
+for collazione.</p>
+
+<p>It was past noon now, and the heat was brimming up
+like a flood over the land. Flies buzzed about the
+terrace, buzzed against the white walls and ceilings of
+the cottage, winding their tiny, sultry horns ceaselessly,
+musicians of the sun. The red geraniums in the stone
+pots beneath the broken columns drooped their dry
+heads. The lizards darted and stopped, darted and
+stopped upon the wall and the white seats where the
+tiles were burning to the touch. There was no moving
+figure on the baked mountains, no moving vessel on the
+shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips of
+Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down
+and slain the fires of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth,
+arranging the pots of flowers, the glasses, forks, and
+knives upon it. In his face there was little vivacity.
+But now and then his great eyes searched the hot world
+that lay beneath them, and Artois thought he saw in
+them the watchfulness, the strained anxiety that had
+been in Maurice's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Some one must be coming," he thought. "Or they
+must be expecting some one to come, these two."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you ever have visitors here?" he asked, carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Visitors! Emile, why are we here? Do you anticipate
+a knock and 'If you please, ma'am, Mrs. and
+the Misses Watson'? Good Heavens&mdash;visitors on Monte
+Amato!"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, but he persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Never a contadino, or a shepherd, or"&mdash;he looked
+down at the sea&mdash;"or a fisherman with his basket of
+sarde?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Maurice moved in his chair, and Gaspare, hearing a
+word he knew, looked hard at the speaker.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we sometimes have the people of the hills to see
+us," said Hermione. "But we don't call them 'visitors.'
+As to fishermen&mdash;here they are!"</p>
+
+<p>She pointed to her husband and Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"But they eat all the fish they catch, and we never
+see the fin of even one at the cottage."</p>
+
+<p>Collazione was ready now. Hermione helped Artois
+up from his chaise longue, and they went to the table
+under the awning.</p>
+
+<p>"You must sit facing the view, Emile," Hermione
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"What a dining-room!" Artois exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Now he could see over the wall. His gaze wandered
+over the mountain-sides, travelled down to the land that
+lay along the edge of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been fishing much since I've been away,
+Maurice?" Hermione asked, as they began to eat.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes. I went several times. What wine do you
+like, Monsieur Artois?"</p>
+
+<p>He tried to change the conversation, but Hermione,
+quite innocently, returned to the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"They fish at night, you know, Emile, all along that
+coast by Isola Bella and on to the point there that looks
+like an island, where the House of the Sirens is."</p>
+
+<p>A tortured look went across Maurice's face. He had
+begun to eat, but now he stopped for a moment like a
+man suddenly paralyzed.</p>
+
+<p>"The House of the Sirens!" said Artois. "Then there
+are sirens here? I could well believe it. Have you
+seen them, Monsieur Maurice, at night, when you have
+been fishing?"</p>
+
+<p>He had been gazing at the coast, but now he turned
+towards his host.    Maurice began hastily to eat again.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid not. But we didn't look out for them.
+We were prosaic and thought of nothing but the fish."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And is there really a house down there?" said
+Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Hermione. "It used to be a ruin, but
+now it's built up and occupied. Gaspare"&mdash;she spoke
+to him as he was taking a dish from the table&mdash;"who is
+it lives in the Casa delle Sirene now? You told me, but
+I've forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>A heavy, obstinate look came into the boy's face,
+transforming it. The question startled him, and he
+had not understood a word of the conversation which
+had led up to it. What had they been talking about?
+He glanced furtively at his master. Maurice did not look
+at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Salvatore and Maddalena, signora," he answered,
+after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>Then he took the dish and went into the house.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter with Gaspare?" said Hermione.
+"I never saw him look like that before&mdash;quite ugly.
+Doesn't he like these people?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes," replied Maurice. "Why&mdash;why, they're
+quite friends of ours. We saw them at the fair only
+yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, why should Gaspare look like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Artois, who saw the discomfort of his host,
+"perhaps there is some family feud that you know
+nothing of. When I was in Sicily I found the people
+singularly subtle. They can gossip terribly, but they
+can keep a secret when they choose. If I had won the
+real friendship of a Sicilian, I would rather trust him
+with my secret than a man of any other race. They are
+not only loyal&mdash;that is not enough&mdash;but they are also
+very intelligent."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, they are both&mdash;the good ones," said Hermione.
+"I would trust Gaspare through thick and thin. If
+they were only as stanch in love as they can be in
+friendship!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare came out again with another course. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>
+ugly expression had gone from his face, but he still
+looked unusually grave.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, when the senses are roused they are changed
+beings," Artois said. "They hate and resent governance
+from outside, but their blood governs them."</p>
+
+<p>"Our blood governs us when the time comes&mdash;do you
+remember?"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had said the words before she remembered
+the circumstances in which they had been spoken and
+of whom they were said. Directly she had uttered them
+she remembered.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" Maurice asked, before Artois could
+reply.</p>
+
+<p>He had seen a suddenly conscious look in Hermione's
+face, and instantly he was aware of a feeling of jealousy
+within him.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" he repeated, looking quickly from
+one to the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Something I remember saying to your wife," Artois
+answered. "We were talking about human nature&mdash;a
+small subject, monsieur, isn't it?&mdash;and I think I expressed
+the view of a fatalist. At any rate, I did say
+that&mdash;that our blood governs us when the time comes."</p>
+
+<p>"The time?" Maurice asked.</p>
+
+<p>His feeling of jealousy died away, and was replaced
+by a keen personal interest unmingled with suspicions of
+another.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I confess it sometimes seems to me as if, when
+a certain hour strikes, a certain deed must be committed
+by a certain man or woman. It is perhaps their hour
+of madness. They may repent it to the day of their
+death. But can they in that hour avoid that deed?
+Sometimes, when I witness the tragic scenes that occur
+abruptly, unexpectedly, in the comedy of life, I am
+moved to wonder."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you should be very forgiving, Emile," Hermione
+said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And you?" he asked. "Are you, or would you be,
+forgiving?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice leaned forward on the table and looked at his
+wife with intensity.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so, but I don't think it would be for that&mdash;I
+mean because I thought the deed might not have been
+avoided. I think I should forgive because I pitied so,
+because I know how desperately unhappy I should be
+myself if I were to do a hateful thing, a thing that was
+exceptional, that was not natural to my nature as I had
+generally known it. When one really does love cleanliness,
+to have thrown one's self down deliberately in the
+mud, to see, to feel, that one is soiled from head to foot&mdash;that
+must be terrible. I think I should forgive because
+I pitied so.   What do you say, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>It was like a return to their talk in London at
+Caminiti's restaurant, when Hermione and Artois discussed
+topics that interested them, and Maurice listened
+until Hermione appealed to him for his opinion. But
+now he was more deeply interested than his companions.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about pitying
+and forgiving, but I expect you're right, Hermione."</p>
+
+<p>"How?"</p>
+
+<p>"In what you say about&mdash;about the person who's
+done the wrong thing feeling awful afterwards. And I
+think Monsieur Artois is right, too&mdash;about the hour of
+madness. I'm sure he is right. Sometimes an hour
+comes and one seems to forget everything in it. One
+seems not to be really one's self in it, but somebody else,
+and&mdash;and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he seemed to become aware that, whereas
+Hermione and Artois had been considering a subject
+impersonally, he was introducing the personal element
+into the conversation. He stopped short, looked quickly
+from Hermione to Artois, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"What I mean is that I imagine it's so, and that I've
+known fellows&mdash;in London, you know&mdash;who've done<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>
+such odd things that I can only explain it like that.
+They must have&mdash;well, they must have gone practically
+mad for the moment. You&mdash;you see what I mean,
+Hermione?"</p>
+
+<p>The question was uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I think we can control ourselves. If we
+couldn't, remorse would lose half its meaning. I could
+never feel remorse because I had been mad&mdash;horror,
+perhaps, but not remorse. It seems to me that remorse
+is our sorrow for our own weakness, the heart's cry of
+'I need not have done the hateful thing, and I did it,
+I chose to do it!' But I could pity, I could pity, and
+forgive because of my pity."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare came out with coffee.</p>
+
+<p>"And then, Emile, you must have a siesta," said
+Hermione. "This is a tiring day for you. Maurice and
+I will leave you quite alone in the sitting-room."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I could sleep," said Artois.</p>
+
+<p>He was feeling oddly excited, and attributed the
+sensation to his weak state of health. For so long he
+had been shut up, isolated from the world, that even
+this coming out was an event. He was accustomed to
+examine his feelings calmly, critically, to track them to
+their sources.    He tried to do so now.</p>
+
+<p>"I must beware of my own extra sensitiveness," he
+said to himself. "I'm still weak. I am not normal.
+I may see things distorted. I may exaggerate, turn
+the small into the great. At least half of what I think
+and feel to-day may come from my peculiar state."</p>
+
+<p>Thus he tried to raise up barriers against his feeling
+that Delarey had got into some terrible trouble during
+the absence of Hermione, that he was now stricken with
+remorse, and that he was also in active dread of something,
+perhaps of some Nemesis.</p>
+
+<p>"All this may be imagination," Artois thought, as
+he sipped his coffee.  But he said again:</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I could sleep.    I feel abnormally alive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>
+to-day. Do you know the sensation, as if one were too
+quick, as if all the nerves were standing at attention?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then our peace here does not soothe you?" Hermione
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"If I must be truthful&mdash;no," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>He met Maurice's restless glance.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I've had enough coffee," he added. "Coffee
+stimulates the nerves too much at certain times."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice finished his and asked for another cup.</p>
+
+<p>"He isn't afraid of being overstimulated," said Hermione.
+"But, Emile, you ought to sleep. You'll be
+dead tired this evening when you ride down."</p>
+
+<p>"This evening," Hermione had said. Maurice wondered
+suddenly how late Artois was going to stay at the
+cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, it will be cool," Artois said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Maurice said. "Towards five we get a little
+wind from the sea nearly always, even sooner sometimes.
+I&mdash;I usually go down to bathe about that
+time."</p>
+
+<p>"I must begin to bathe, too," Hermione said.</p>
+
+<p>"What&mdash;to-day!" Maurice said, quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no. Emile is here to-day."</p>
+
+<p>Then Artois did not mean to go till late. But he&mdash;Maurice&mdash;must
+go down to the sea before nightfall.</p>
+
+<p>"Unless I bathe," he said, trying to speak naturally&mdash;"unless
+I bathe I feel the heat too much at night. A
+dip in the sea does wonders for me."</p>
+
+<p>"And in such a sea!" said Artois. "You must have
+your dip to-day. I shall go directly that little wind
+you speak of comes. I told a boy to come up from the
+village at four to lead the donkey down."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Dreadful to be such a weakling, isn't it?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush. Don't talk, like that. It's all going away.
+Strength is coming. You'll soon be your old self. But
+you've got to look forward all the time."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Hermione spoke with a warmth, an energy that
+braced. She spoke to Artois, but Maurice, eager to grasp
+at any comfort, strove to take the words to himself.
+This evening the climax of his Sicilian tragedy must
+come. And then? Beyond, might there not be the
+calm, the happiness of a sane life? He must look forward,
+he would look forward.</p>
+
+<p>But when he looked, there stood Maddalena weeping.</p>
+
+<p>He hated himself. He loved happiness, he longed for
+it, but he knew he had lost his right to it, if any man
+ever has such a right. He had created suffering. How
+dared he expect, how dared he even wish, to escape from
+suffering?</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Emile," Hermione said, "you have really got
+to go in and lie down whether you feel sleepy or not.
+Don't protest. Maurice and I have hardly seen anything
+of each other yet.    We want to get rid of you."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke laughingly, and laughingly he obeyed her.
+When she had settled him comfortably in the sitting-room<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">she came out again to the terrace where her husband</span><br />
+was standing, looking towards the sea. She had
+a rug over her arm and was holding two cushions.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you and I might go down and take our
+siesta under the oak-trees, Maurice. Would you like
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>He was longing to get away, to go up to the heap of
+stones on the mountain-top and set a match to the
+fragments of Hermione's letter, which the dangerous
+wind might disturb, might bring out into the light of
+day. But he acquiesced at once. He would go later&mdash;if
+not this afternoon, then at night when he came back
+from the sea. They went down and spread the rug
+under the shadow of the oaks.</p>
+
+<p>"I used to read to Gaspare here," he said. "When
+you were away in Africa."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you read?"</p>
+
+<p>"The <i>Arabian Nights</i>."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She stretched herself on the rug.</p>
+
+<p>"To lie here and read the <i>Arabian Nights</i>! And you
+want to go away, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it's time to go. If I stayed too long here
+I should become fit for nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's true, I dare say. But&mdash;Maurice, it's so
+strange&mdash;I have a feeling as if you would always be in
+Sicily. I know it's absurd, and yet I have it. I feel
+as if you belonged to Sicily, and Sicily did not mean
+to part from you."</p>
+
+<p>"That can't be.    How could I stay here always?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know."</p>
+
+<p>"Unless," he said, as if some new thought had started
+suddenly into his mind&mdash;"unless I were&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped. He had remembered his sensation in
+the sea that gray morning of sirocco. He had remembered
+how he had played at dying.</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him and understood.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice&mdash;don't!    I&mdash;I can't bear that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not one of us can know," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I thought of that once," she said&mdash;"long ago,
+on the first night that we were here. I don't know why&mdash;but
+perhaps it was because I was so happy. I think
+it must have been that. I suppose, in this world, there
+must aways be dread in one's happiness, the thought
+it may stop soon, it may end. But why should it?
+Is God cruel? I think He wants us to be happy."</p>
+
+<p>"If he wants us&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And that we prevent ourselves from being happy.
+But we won't do that, Maurice&mdash;you and I&mdash;will we?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>"This world&mdash;nature&mdash;is so wonderfully beautiful, so
+happily beautiful. Surely we can learn to be happy,
+to keep happy in it. Look at that sky, that sea! Look
+at the plain over there by the foot of Etna, and the
+coast-line fading away, and Etna.   The God who created<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span>
+it all must have meant men to be happy in such a world.
+It isn't my brain tells me that, Maurice, it's my heart, my
+whole heart that you have made whole. And I know
+it tells the truth."</p>
+
+<p>Her words were terrible to him. The sound of a step,
+a figure standing before her, a few Sicilian words&mdash;and
+all this world in which she gloried would be changed
+for her. But she must not know. He felt that he
+would be willing to die to keep her ignorant of the
+truth forever.</p>
+
+<p>"Now we must try to sleep," he said, to prevent her
+from speaking any more of the words that were torturing
+him. "We must have our siesta. I had very little
+sleep last night."</p>
+
+<p>"And I had none at all.    But now&mdash;we're together."</p>
+
+<p>He arranged the cushion for her. They lay in soft
+shadow and could see the shining world. The distant
+gleams upon the sea spoke to her. She fancied them
+voices rising out of the dream of the waters, voices from
+the breast of nature that was the breast of God, saying
+that she was not in error, that God did mean men to
+be happy, that they could be happy if they would learn
+of Him.</p>
+
+<p>She watched those gleams until she fell asleep.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+
+<p>When Hermione woke it was four o'clock. She sat
+up on the rug, looked down over the mountain flank to
+the sea, then turned and saw her husband. He was
+lying with his face half buried in his folded arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice!" she said, softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he answered, lifting his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you weren't asleep!"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been asleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at her watch.</p>
+
+<p>"All this time! It's four. What a disgraceful siesta!
+But I was really tired after the long journey and the
+night."</p>
+
+<p>She stood up. He followed her example and threw
+the rug over his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Emile will think we've deserted him and aren't going
+to give him any tea."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>They began to walk up the track towards the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>"Maurice," Hermione said, presently, more thoroughly
+wide-awake now. "Did you get up while I was asleep?
+Did you begin to move away from me, and did I stop
+you, or was it a dream? I have a kind of vague recollection&mdash;or
+is it only imagination?&mdash;of stretching out
+my hand and saying, 'Don't leave me alone&mdash;don't
+leave me alone!'"</p>
+
+<p>"I moved a little," he answered, after a slight pause.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And you did stretch out your hand and murmur something."</p>
+
+<p>"It was that&mdash;'don't leave me alone.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps. I couldn't hear. It was such a murmur."</p>
+
+<p>"And you only moved a little? How stupid of me
+to think you were getting up to go away!"</p>
+
+<p>"When one is half asleep one has odd ideas often."</p>
+
+<p>He did not tell her that he had been getting up softly,
+hoping to steal away to the mountain-top and destroy
+the fragments of her letter, hidden there, while she slept.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't mind," he added, "if I go down to bathe
+this evening. I sha'n't sleep properly to-night unless
+I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course&mdash;go. But won't it be rather late after
+tea?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no. I've often been in at sunset."</p>
+
+<p>"How delicious the water must look then! Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I come with you? Shall I bathe, too? It
+would be lovely, refreshing, after this heat! It would
+wash away all the dust of the train!"</p>
+
+<p>Her face was glowing with the anticipation of pleasure.
+Every little thing done with him was an enchantment
+after the weeks of separation.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't think you'd better, Hermione," he answered,
+hastily. "I&mdash;you&mdash;there might be people. I&mdash;I
+must rig you up something first, a tent of some kind.
+Gaspare and I will do it. I can't have my wife&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"All right," she said.</p>
+
+<p>She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"How lucky you men are! You can do anything.
+And there's no fuss. Ah, there's poor Emile, patiently
+waiting!"</p>
+
+<p>Artois was  already  established once more in the
+chaise longue. He greeted them with a smile that was
+gentle, almost tender. Those evil feelings to which he
+had been a prey in London had died away. He loved<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span>
+now to see the happiness in Hermione's face. His illness
+had swept out his selfishness, and in it he had
+proved her affection. He did not think that he could
+ever be jealous of her again.</p>
+
+<p>"Sleeping all this time?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I was. I'm ashamed of myself. My hair is full of
+mountain-side, but you must forgive me, Emile. Ah,
+there's Lucrezia! Is tea ready, Lucrezia?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Then ask Gaspare to bring it."</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare&mdash;he isn't here, signora. But I'll bring it."</p>
+
+<p>She went away.</p>
+
+<p>"Where's Gaspare, I wonder?" said Hermione. "Have
+you seen him, Emile?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he's sleeping, too. He sleeps generally
+among the hens."</p>
+
+<p>She looked round the corner into the out-house.</p>
+
+<p>"No, he isn't there. Have you sent him anywhere,
+Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>"I? No. Where should I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I only thought you looked as if you knew where he
+was."</p>
+
+<p>"No. But he may have gone out after birds and
+forgotten the time. Here's tea!"</p>
+
+<p>These few words had renewed in Maurice the fever of
+impatience to get away and meet his enemy. This waiting,
+this acting of a part, this suspense, were almost
+unbearable. All the time that Hermione slept he had
+been thinking, turning over again and again in his mind
+the coming scene, trying to imagine how it would be,
+how violent or how deadly, trying to decide exactly
+what line of conduct he should pursue. What would
+Salvatore demand? What would he say or do? And
+where would they meet? If Salvatore waited for his
+coming they would meet at the House of the Sirens.
+And Maddalena? She would be there. His  heart<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span>
+sickened. He was ready to face a man&mdash;but not Maddalena.
+He thought of Gaspare's story of the fallen
+olive-branch upon which Salvatore had spat. It was
+strange to be here in this calm place with these two
+happy people, wife and friend, and to wonder what was
+waiting for him down there by the sea.</p>
+
+<p>How lonely our souls are!&mdash;something like that he
+thought. Circumstances were turning him away from
+his thoughtless youth. He had imagined it sinking
+down out of his sight into the purple sea, with the magic
+island in which it had danced the tarantella and heard
+the voice of the siren. But was it not leaving him,
+vanishing from him while still his feet trod the island
+and his eyes saw her legendary mountains?</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare, he knew, was on the watch. That was why
+he was absent from his duties. But the hour was at
+hand when he would be relieved. The evening was
+coming. Maurice was glad. He was ready to face even
+violence, but he felt that he could not for much longer
+endure suspense and play the quiet host and husband.</p>
+
+<p>Tea was over and Gaspare had not returned. The
+clock he had bought at the fair struck five.</p>
+
+<p>"I ought to be going," Artois said.</p>
+
+<p>There was reluctance in his voice. Hermione noticed
+it and knew what he was feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"You must come up again very soon," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, monsieur, come to-morrow, won't you?" Maurice
+seconded her.</p>
+
+<p>The thought of what was going to happen before to-morrow
+made it seem to him a very long way off.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione looked pleased.</p>
+
+<p>"I must not be a bore," Artois answered. "I must
+not remind you and myself of limpets. There are rocks
+in your garden which might suggest the comparison. I
+think to-morrow I ought to stay quietly in Marechiaro."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said Maurice. "Do come to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you very much. I can't pretend that I do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span>
+not wish to come. And, now that donkey-boy&mdash;has he
+climbed up, I wonder?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go and see," said Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>He was feverishly impatient to get rid of Artois. He
+hurried to the arch. A long way off, near the path that
+led up from the ravine, he saw a figure with a gun. He
+was not sure, but he was almost sure that it was Gaspare.
+It must be he. The gun made him look, indeed, a sentinel.
+If Salvatore came the boy would stop him, stop
+him, if need be, at the cost of his own life. Maurice felt
+sure of that, and realized the danger of setting such
+faithfulness and violence to be sentinel. He stood for
+a moment looking at the figure. Yes, he knew it now
+for Gaspare. The boy had forgotten tea-time, had forgotten
+everything, in his desire to carry out his padrone's
+instructions. The signora was not to know. She was
+never to know. And Salvatore might come. Very
+well, then, he was there in the sun&mdash;ready.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll never part from Gaspare," Maurice thought, as
+he looked and understood.</p>
+
+<p>He saw no other figure. The donkey-boy had perhaps
+forgotten his mission or had started late. Maurice
+chafed bitterly at the delay. But he could not well
+leave his guest on this first day of his coming to Monte
+Amato, more especially after the events of the preceding
+day. To do so would seem discourteous. He returned
+to the terrace ill at ease, but strove to disguise his restlessness.
+It was nearly six o'clock when the boy at last
+appeared. Artois at once bade Hermione and Maurice
+good-bye and mounted his donkey.</p>
+
+<p>"You will come to-morrow, then?" Maurice said to him
+at parting.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't the courage to refuse," Artois replied.
+"Good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>He had already shaken Maurice's hand, but now he
+extended his hand again.</p>
+
+<p>"It is good of you to make me so welcome," he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He paused, holding Maurice's hand in his. Both Hermione
+and Maurice thought he was going to say something
+more, but he glanced at her, dropped his host's hand,
+lifted his soft hat, and signed to the boy to lead the
+donkey away.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione and Maurice followed to the arch, and from
+there watched him riding slowly down till he was out of
+sight. Maurice looked for Gaspare, but did not see him.
+He must have moved into the shadow of the ravine.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear old Emile!" Hermione said. "He's been happy
+to-day. You've made him very happy, Maurice. Bless
+you for it!"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice said nothing. Now the moment had arrived
+when he could go he felt a strange reluctance to say
+good-bye to Hermione, even for a short time. So much
+might&mdash;must&mdash;happen before he saw her again that
+evening.</p>
+
+<p>"And you?" she said, at last, as he was silent. "Are
+you really going down to bathe? Isn't it too late?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no. I must have a dip. It will do me all the
+good in the world." He tried to speak buoyantly, but
+the words seemed to himself to come heavily from his
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you take Tito?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;no, I think I'll walk. I shall get down quicker,
+and I like going into the sea when I'm hot. I'll just
+fetch my bathing things."</p>
+
+<p>They walked back together to the house. Maurice
+wondered what had suddenly come to him. He felt
+horribly sad now&mdash;yet he wished to get the scene that
+awaited him over. He was longing to have it over.
+He went into the house, got his bathing-dress and towels,
+and came out again onto the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be a little late back, I suppose," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. It's six o'clock now. Shall we dine at half-past
+eight&mdash;or better say nine? That will give you
+plenty of time to come up quietly."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes.    Let's say nine."</p>
+
+<p>Still he did not move to go.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been happy to-day, Hermione?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, very&mdash;since this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Since?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes.   This morning I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"I was a little puzzled," she said, after a minute, with
+her usual frankness. "Tell me, Maurice&mdash;you weren't
+made unhappy by&mdash;by what I told you?"</p>
+
+<p>"About&mdash;about the child?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer with words, but he put his arms
+about her and kissed her, as he had not kissed her since
+she went away to Africa. She shut her eyes. Presently
+she felt the pressure of his arms relax.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm perfectly happy now," she said. "Perfectly
+happy."</p>
+
+<p>He moved away a step or two. His face was flushed,
+and she thought that he looked younger, that the boyish
+expression she loved had come back to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, Hermione," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Still he did not go. She thought that he had something
+more to say but did not know how to say it. She
+felt so certain of this that she said:</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Maurice?"</p>
+
+<p>"We shall come back to Sicily, I suppose, sha'n't we,
+some time or other?"</p>
+
+<p>"Surely. Many times, I hope."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose&mdash;one can never tell what will happen&mdash;suppose
+one of us were to die here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, soberly.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think it would be good to lie there where
+we lay this afternoon, under the oak-trees, in sight of
+Etna and the sea? I think it would. Good-bye,
+Hermione."</p>
+
+<p>He swung the bathing-dress and the towels up over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span>
+his shoulder and went away through the arch. She
+followed and watched him springing down the mountain-side.
+Just before he reached the ravine he turned and
+waved his hand to her. His movements, that last
+gesture, were brimful of energy and of life. He acted
+better then than he had that day upon the terrace.
+But the sense of progress, the feeling that he was going
+to meet fate in the person of Salvatore, quickened the
+blood within him. At last the suspense would be over.
+At last he would be obliged to play not the actor but the
+man. He longed to be down by the sea. The youth in
+him rose up at the thought of action, and his last farewell
+to Hermione, looking down to him from the arch,
+was bold and almost careless.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely had he got into the ravine before he met
+Gaspare. He stopped. The boy's face was aflame with
+expression as he stood, holding his gun, in front of his
+padrone.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" Maurice said to him.</p>
+
+<p>He held out his hand and grasped the boy's hot hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I sha'n't forget your faithful service," he said.
+"Thank you, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to say more, to find other and far different
+words. But he could not.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me come with you, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>The boy's voice was intensely, almost savagely,
+earnest.</p>
+
+<p>"No. You must stay with the signora."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to come with you."</p>
+
+<p>His great eyes were fastened on his padrone's face.</p>
+
+<p>"I have always been with you."</p>
+
+<p>"But you were with the signora first. You were her
+servant. You must stay with her now. Remember one
+thing, Gaspare&mdash;the signora is never to know."</p>
+
+<p>The boy nodded. His eyes still held Maurice. They
+glittered as if with leaping fires. That deep and passionate
+spirit of Sicilian loyalty, which is almost savage in its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span>
+intensity and heedless of danger, which is ready to go to
+hell with, or for, a friend or a master who is beloved and
+believed in, was awake in Gaspare, illuminated him at
+this moment. The peasant boy looked noble.</p>
+
+<p>"Mayn't I come with you, signorino?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," Maurice said, "I must leave some one with
+the padrona. Salvatore might come still. I may miss
+him going down. Whom can I trust to stop Salvatore,
+if he comes, but you? You see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>The boy seemed convinced, but he suffered and did
+not try to conceal it.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I must go," Maurice said.</p>
+
+<p>He shook Gaspare's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you got the revolver, signorino?" said the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"No. I am not going to fight with Salvatore."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know what Salvatore will do?"</p>
+
+<p>Maurice looked down upon the stones that lay on the
+narrow path.</p>
+
+<p>"My revolver can have nothing to do with Maddalena's
+father," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"That's how it is, Gaspare. Addio!"</p>
+
+<p>"Addio, signorino."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice went on down the path into the shadow of the
+trees. Presently he turned. Gaspare stood quite still,
+looking after him.</p>
+
+<p>"Signorino!" he called. "May I not come? I want
+to come with you."</p>
+
+<p>Maurice waved his hand towards the mountain-side.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to the signora," he called back. "And look out
+for me to-night. Addio, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy's "Addio!" came to him sadly through the
+gathering shadows of the evening.</p>
+
+<p>Presently Hermione, who was sitting alone on the
+terrace with a book in her lap which she was not reading,
+saw Gaspare walking listlessly through the archway<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>
+holding his gun. He came slowly towards her, lifted his
+hat, and was going on without a word, but she stopped
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Gaspare," she said, lightly, "you forgot us
+to-day. How was that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora?"</p>
+
+<p>Again she saw the curious, almost ugly, look of obstinacy,
+which she had already noticed, come into his face.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't remember about tea-time!"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora," he answered, "I am sorry."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her fixedly while he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry," he said again.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind," Hermione said, unable to blame him
+on this first day of her return. "I dare say you have
+got out of regular habits while I've been away. What
+have you been doing all the time?"</p>
+
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Niente."</p>
+
+<p>Again she wondered what was the matter with the
+boy to-day. Where were his life and gayety? Where
+was his sense of fun? He used to be always joking,
+singing. But now he was serious, almost heavy in
+demeanor.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," she said, jokingly, "I think you've all become
+very solemn without me. I am the old person of
+the party, but I begin to believe that it is I who keep you
+lively. I mustn't go away again."</p>
+
+<p>"No, signora," he answered, earnestly; "you must
+never go away from us again. You should never have
+gone away from us."</p>
+
+<p>The deep solemnity of his great eyes startled her. He
+put on his hat and went away round the angle of the
+cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"What can be the matter with him?" she thought.</p>
+
+<p>She remained sitting there on the terrace, wondering.
+Now she thought over things quietly, it struck her as
+strange the fact that she had left behind her in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span>
+priest's house three light-hearted people, and had come
+back to find Lucrezia drowned in sorrow, Gaspare solemn,
+even mysterious in his manner, and her husband&mdash;but
+here her thoughts paused, not labelling Maurice. At first
+he had puzzled her the most. But she thought she had
+found reasons for the change&mdash;a passing one, she felt
+sure&mdash;in him. He had secretly resented her absence,
+and, though utterly free from any ignoble suspicion of
+her, he had felt boyishly jealous of her friendship with
+Emile. That was very natural. For this was their
+honeymoon. She considered it their honeymoon prolonged,
+delightfully prolonged, beyond any fashionable
+limit. Lucrezia's depression was easily comprehensible.
+The change in her husband she accounted for; but now
+here was Gaspare looking dismal!</p>
+
+<p>"I must cheer them all up," she thought to herself.
+"This beautiful time mustn't end dismally."</p>
+
+<p>And then she thought of the inevitable departure.
+Was Maurice looking forward to it, desiring it? He had
+spoken that day as if he wished to be off. In London
+she had been able to imagine him in the South, in the
+highway of the sun. But now that she was here in
+Sicily she could not imagine him in London.</p>
+
+<p>"He is not in his right place there," she thought.</p>
+
+<p>Yet they must go, and soon. She knew that they
+were going, and yet she could not feel that they were
+going. What she had said under the oak-trees was true.
+In the spring her tender imagination had played softly
+with the idea of Sicily's joy in the possession of her son,
+of Maurice. Would Sicily part from him without an effort
+to retain him? Would Sicily let him go? She smiled
+to herself at her fancies. But if Sicily kept him, how
+would she keep him? The smile left her lips and her
+eyes as she thought of Maurice's suggestion. That would
+be too horrible. God would not allow that. And yet
+what tragedies He allowed to come into the lives of
+others.    She faced certain facts, as she sat there, facts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>
+permitted, or deliberately brought about by the Divine
+Will. The scourge of war&mdash;that sowed sorrows over a
+land as the sower in the field scatters seeds. She, like
+others, had sat at home and read of battles in which
+thousands of men had been killed, and she had grieved&mdash;or
+had she really grieved, grieved with her heart?
+She began to wonder, thinking of Maurice's veiled allusion
+to the possibility of his death. He was the spirit of
+youth to her. And all the boys slain in battle! Had
+not each one of them represented the spirit of youth to
+some one, to some woman&mdash;mother, sister, wife, lover?</p>
+
+<p>What were those women's feelings towards God?</p>
+
+<p>She wondered. She wondered exceedingly. And presently
+a terrible thought came into her mind. It was
+this. How can one forgive God if He snatches away the
+spirit of youth that one loves?</p>
+
+<p>Under the shadow of the oak-trees she had lain that
+day and looked out upon the shining world&mdash;upon the
+waters, upon the plains, upon the mountains, upon the
+calling coast-line and the deep passion of the blue.
+And she had felt the infinite love of God. When she had
+thought of God, she had thought of Him as the great
+Provider of happiness, as One who desired, with a heart
+too large and generous for the mere accurate conception
+of man, the joy of man.</p>
+
+<p>But Maurice was beside her then.</p>
+
+<p>Those whose lives had been ruined by great tragedies,
+when they looked out upon the shining world what must
+they think, feel?</p>
+
+<p>She strove to imagine. Their conception of God must
+surely be very different from hers.</p>
+
+<p>Once she had been almost unable to believe that God
+could choose her to be the recipient of a supreme happiness.
+But we accustom ourselves with a wonderful
+readiness to a happy fate. She had come back&mdash;she
+had been allowed to return to the Garden of Paradise.
+And this fact had given to her a confidence in life which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span>
+was almost audacious. So now, even while she imagined
+the sorrows of others, half strove to imagine what her
+own sorrows might be, her inner feeling was still one of
+confidence. She looked out on the shining world, and
+in her heart was the shining world. She looked out on
+the glory of the blue, and in her heart was the glory of
+the blue. The world shone for her because she had
+Maurice. She knew that. But there was light in it.
+There would always be light whatever happened to any
+human creature. There would always be the sun, the
+great symbol of joy. It rose even upon the battle-field
+where the heaps of the dead were lying.</p>
+
+<p>She could not realize sorrow to-day. She must see
+the sunlight even in the deliberate visions conjured up
+by her imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare did not reappear. For a long time she was
+alone. She watched the changing of the light, the
+softening of the great landscape as the evening approached.
+Sometimes she thought of Maurice's last
+words about being laid to rest some day in the shadows
+of the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea. When
+the years had gone, perhaps they would lie together in
+Sicily, wrapped in the final siesta of the body. Perhaps
+the unborn child, of whose beginning she was mystically
+conscious, would lay them to rest there.</p>
+
+<p>"Buon riposo." She loved the Sicilian good-night.
+Better than any text she would love to have those
+simple words written above her sleeping-place and his.
+"Buon riposo!"&mdash;she murmured the words to herself as
+she looked at the quiet of the hills, at the quiet of the
+sea. The glory of the world was inspiring, but the peace
+of the world was almost more uplifting, she thought.
+Far off, in the plain, she discerned tiny trails of smoke
+from Sicilian houses among the orange-trees beside the
+sea. The gold was fading. The color of the waters was
+growing paler, gentler, the color of the sky less passionate.
+The last point of the coast-line was only a shadow now,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span>
+scarcely that. Somewhere was the sunset, its wonder
+unseen by her, but realized because of this growing tenderness,
+that was like a benediction falling upon her from
+a distant love, intent to shield her and her little home
+from sorrow and from danger. Nature was whispering
+her "Buon riposo!" Her hushed voice spoke withdrawn
+among the mountains, withdrawn upon the
+spaces of the sea. The heat of the golden day was
+blessed, but after it how blessed was the cool of the dim
+night!</p>
+
+<p>Again she thought that the God who had placed man
+in the magnificent scheme of the world must have intended
+and wished him to be always happy there. Nature
+seemed to be telling her this, and her heart was convinced
+by Nature, though the story of the Old Testament
+had sometimes left her smiling or left her wondering.
+Men had written a Bible. God had written a
+Bible, too. And here she read its pages and was made
+strong by it.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione started and turned her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Lucrezia! What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"What time is it, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione looked at her watch.</p>
+
+<p>"Nearly eight o'clock. An hour still before supper."</p>
+
+<p>"I've got everything ready."</p>
+
+<p>"To-night we've only cold things, haven't we? You
+made us a very nice collazione. The French signore
+praised your cooking, and he's very particular, as French
+people generally are. So you ought to be proud of yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia smiled, but only for an instant. Then she
+stood with an anxious face, twisting her apron.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes? What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Would you mind&mdash;may I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why, Lucrezia, are you afraid of me? I've certainly
+been away too long!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, signora, but&mdash;" Tears hung in her eyes.
+"Will you let me go away if I promise to be back by
+nine?"</p>
+
+<p>"But you can't go to Marechiaro in&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signora. I only want to go to the mountain
+over there under Castel Vecchio. I want to go to the
+Madonna."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione took one of the girl's hands.</p>
+
+<p>"To the Madonna della Rocca?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"I understand."</p>
+
+<p>"I have a candle to burn to the Madonna. If I go
+now I can be back before nine."</p>
+
+<p>She stood gazing pathetically, like a big child, at her
+padrona.</p>
+
+<p>"Lucrezia," Hermione said, moved to a great pity by
+her own great happiness, "would you mind if I came, too?
+I think I should like to say a prayer for you to-night.
+I am not a Catholic, but my prayer cannot hurt you."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia suddenly forgot distinctions, threw her arms
+round Hermione, and began to sob.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, you must be brave!"</p>
+
+<p>She smoothed the girl's dark hair gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you got your candle?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si."</p>
+
+<p>She showed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go quickly, then. Where's Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>"Close to the house, signora, on the mountain. One
+cannot speak with him to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so. But he is terrible to-day!"</p>
+
+<p>So Lucrezia had noticed Gaspare's strangeness, too,
+even in the midst of her sorrow!</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" Hermione called.</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>She called louder.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora!"</p>
+
+<p>The voice came from somewhere behind the house.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going for a walk with Lucrezia. We shall be
+back at nine. Tell the padrone if he comes."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>The two women set out without seeing Gaspare. They
+walked in silence down the mountain-path. Lucrezia
+held her candle carefully, like one in a procession. She
+was not sobbing now. There were no tears in her eyes.
+The companionship and the sympathy of her padrona
+had given her some courage, some hope, had taken away
+from her the desolate feeling, the sensation of abandonment
+which had been torturing her. And then she had
+an almost blind faith in the Madonna della Rocca. And
+the padrona was going to pray, too. She was not a
+Catholic, but she was a lady and she was good. The
+Madonna della Rocca must surely be influenced by her
+petition.</p>
+
+<p>So Lucrezia plucked up a little courage. The activity
+of the walk helped her. She knew the solace of
+movement. And perhaps, without being conscious of
+it, she was influenced by the soft beauty of the evening,
+by the peace of the hills. But as they crossed the
+ravine they heard the tinkle of bells, and a procession of
+goats tripped by them, following a boy who was twittering
+upon a flute. He was playing the tune of the
+tarantella, that tune which Hermione associated with
+careless joy in the sun. He passed down into the
+shadows of the trees, and gradually the airy rapture of
+his fluting and the tinkle of the goat-bells died away
+towards Marechiaro. Then Hermione saw tears rolling
+down over Lucrezia's brown cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"He can't play it like Sebastiano, signora!" she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>The little tune had brought back all her sorrow.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps we shall soon hear Sebastiano play it again,"
+said Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>They began to climb upward on the far side of the ravine
+towards the fierce silhouette of the Saracenic castle
+on the height. Beneath the great crag on which it was
+perched was the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca.
+Night was coming now, and the little lamp before the
+shrine shone gently, throwing a ray of light upon the
+stones of the path. When they reached it, Lucrezia
+crossed herself, and they stood together for a moment
+looking at the faded painting of the Madonna, almost
+effaced against its rocky background. Within the glass
+that sheltered it stood vases of artificial flowers, and on
+the ledge outside the glass were two or three bunches of
+real flowers, placed there by peasants returning to their
+homes in Castel Vecchio from their labors in the vineyards
+and the orchards. There were also two branches
+with clustering, red-gold oranges lying among the flowers.
+It was a strange, wild place. The precipice of rock,
+which the castello dominated, leaned slightly forward
+above the head of the Madonna, as if it meditated overwhelming
+her. But she smiled gently, as if she had no
+fear of it, bending down her pale eyes to the child who
+lay upon her girlish knees. Among the bowlders, the
+wild cactus showed its spiked leaves, and in the daytime
+the long black snakes sunned themselves upon the
+stones.</p>
+
+<p>To Hermione this lonely and faded Madonna, smiling
+calmly beneath the savagely frowning rock upon which
+dead men had built long years ago a barbarous fastness,
+was touching in her solitude. There was something
+appealing in her frailness, in her thin, an&aelig;mic calm.
+How long had she been here? How long would she
+remain? She was fading away, as things fade in the
+night. Yet she had probably endured for years, would
+still be here for years to come, would be here to receive
+the wild flowers of peasant children, the prayers of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span>
+peasant lovers, the adoration of the poor, who, having
+very little here, put their faith in far-off worlds, where
+they will have harvests surely without reaping in the
+heat of the sun, where they will have good wine without
+laboring in the vineyards, where they will be able to rest
+without the thought coming to them, "If to-day I rest,
+to-morrow I shall starve."</p>
+
+<p>As Hermione looked at the painting lit by the little
+lamp, at the gifts of the flowers and the fruit, she began
+to feel as if indeed a woman dwelt there, in that niche
+of the crag, as if a heart were there, a soul to pity, an
+ear to listen.</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia knelt down quietly, lit her candle, turned it
+upside down till the hot wax dripped onto the rock and
+made a foundation for it, then stuck it upright, crossed
+herself silently, and began to pray. Her lips moved
+quickly. The candle-flame flickered for a moment, then
+burned steadily, sending its thin fire up towards the
+evening star. After a moment Hermione knelt down
+beside her.</p>
+
+<p>She had never before prayed at a shrine. It was
+curious to be kneeling under this savage wall of rock
+above which the evening star showed itself in the clear
+heaven of night. She looked at the star and at the
+Madonna, then at the little bunches of flowers, and at
+Lucrezia's candle. These gifts of the poor moved her
+heart. Poverty giving is beautiful. She thought that,
+and was almost ashamed of the comfort of her life. She
+wished she had brought a candle, too. Then she bent
+her head and began to pray that Sebastiano might remember
+Lucrezia and return to her. To make her
+prayer more earnest, she tried to realize Lucrezia's sorrow
+by putting herself in Lucrezia's place, and Maurice
+in Sebastiano's. It was such a natural effort as people
+make every day, every hour. If Maurice had forgotten
+her in absence, had given his love to another, had not
+cared to return to her! If she were alone now in Sicily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span>
+while he was somewhere else, happy with some one
+else!</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the wildness of this place where she knelt
+became terrible to her. She felt the horror of solitude,
+of approaching darkness. The outlines of the rocks and
+of the ruined castle looked threatening, alarming. The
+pale light of the lamp before the shrine and of Lucrezia's
+votive candle drew to them not only the fluttering night-moths,
+but the spirits of desolation and of hollow grief
+that dwell among the waste places and among the hills.
+Night seemed no more beneficent, but dreary as a spectre
+that came to rob the world of all that made it beautiful.
+The loneliness of deserted women encompassed her.
+Was there any other loneliness comparable to it?</p>
+
+<p>She felt sure that there was not, and she found herself
+praying not only for Lucrezia, but for all women who
+were sad because they loved, for all women who were
+deserted by those whom they loved, or who had lost
+those whom they loved.</p>
+
+<p>At first she believed that she was addressing her
+prayer to the Madonna della Rocca, the Blessed Virgin
+of the Rocks, whose pale image was before her. But
+presently she knew that her words, the words of her lips
+and the more passionate words of her heart, were going
+out to a Being before whom the sun burned as a lamp
+and the moon as a votive taper. She was thinking of
+women, she was praying for women, but she was no
+longer praying to a woman. It seemed to her as if she
+was so ardent a suitor that she pushed past the Holy
+Mother of God into the presence of God Himself. He
+had created women. He had created the love of women.
+To Him she would, she must, appeal.</p>
+
+<p>Often she had prayed before, but never as now, never
+with such passion, with such a sensation of personally
+pleading. The effort of her heart was like the effort of
+womanhood. It seemed to her&mdash;and she had no feeling
+that this was blasphemous&mdash;as if God knew, understood,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>
+everything of the world He had created except perhaps
+this&mdash;the inmost agony some women suffer, as if she,
+perhaps, could make Him understand this by her prayer.
+And she strove to recount this agony, to make it clear to
+God.</p>
+
+<p>Was it a presumptuous effort? She did not feel that
+it was. And now she felt selfless. She was no more
+thinking of herself, was no longer obliged to concentrate
+her thoughts and her imagination upon herself and the
+one she loved best. She had passed beyond that, as she
+had passed beyond the Madonna della Rocca. She was
+the voice and the heart not of a woman, but of woman
+praying in the night to the God who had made woman
+and the night.</p>
+
+<p>From behind a rock Gaspare watched the two praying
+women. He had not forgotten his padrone's words,
+and when Hermione and Lucrezia set off from the cottage
+he had followed them, faithful to his trust. Intent
+upon their errand, they had not seen him. His step was
+light among the stones, and he had kept at a distance.
+Now he stood still, gazing at them as they prayed.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare did not believe in priests. Very few Sicilians
+do. An uncle of his was a priest's son, and he had other
+reasons, quite sufficient to his mind, for being incredulous
+of the sanctity of those who celebrated the mass to which
+he seldom went. But he believed in God, and he believed
+superstitiously in the efficacy of the Madonna and
+in the powers of the saints. Once his little brother had
+fallen dangerously ill on the festa of San Giorgio, the
+santo patrono of Castel Vecchio. He had gone to the
+festa, and had given all his money, five lire, to the saint
+to heal his brother. Next day the child was well. In
+misfortune he would probably utter a prayer, or burn a
+candle, himself. That Lucrezia might think that she
+had reason to pray he understood, though he doubted
+whether the Madonna and all the saints could do much
+for the reclamation of his friend Sebastiano. But why<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>
+should the padrona kneel there out-of-doors sending up
+such earnest petitions? She was not a Catholic. He
+had never seen her pray before. He looked on with
+wonder, presently with discomfort, almost with anger.
+To-night he was what he would himself have called
+"nervoso," and anything that irritated his already
+strung-up nerves roused his temper. He was in anxiety
+about his padrone, and he wanted to be back at the
+priest's house, he wanted to see his padrone again at the
+earliest possible moment. The sight of his padrona
+committing an unusual action alarmed him. Was she,
+then, afraid as he was afraid? Did she know, suspect
+anything? His experience of women was that whenever
+they were in trouble they went for comfort and advice
+to the Madonna and the saints.</p>
+
+<p>He grew more and more uneasy. Presently he drew
+softly a little nearer. It was getting late. Night had
+fallen. He must know the result of the padrone's interview
+with Salvatore, and he could not leave the padrona.
+Well, then&mdash;! He crept nearer and nearer till at last he
+was close to the shrine and could see the Madonna smiling.
+Then he crossed himself and said, softly:</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione did not hear him. She was wrapped in the
+passion of her prayer.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!"</p>
+
+<p>He bent forward and touched her on the shoulder.
+She started, turned her head, and rose to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>She looked startled. This abrupt recall to the world
+confused her for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! What is it? The padrone?"</p>
+
+<p>He took off his cap.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, do you know how late it is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has the padrone come back?"</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia was on her feet, too. The tears were in her
+eyes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Scusi, signora!" said Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione began to look more natural.</p>
+
+<p>"Has the padrone come back and sent you for us?"</p>
+
+<p>"He did not send me, signora. It was getting dark.
+I thought it best to come. But I expect he is back. I
+expect he is waiting for us now."</p>
+
+<p>"You came to guard me?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled. She liked his watchfulness.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the time?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at her watch.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it is nine already! We must hurry. Come,
+Lucrezia!"</p>
+
+<p>They went quickly down the path.</p>
+
+<p>They did not talk as they went. Gaspare led the way.
+It was obvious that he was in great haste. Sometimes
+he forgot that the padrona was not so light-footed as he
+was, and sprang on so swiftly that she called to him to
+wait. When at last they came in sight of the arch
+Hermione and Lucrezia were panting.</p>
+
+<p>"The padrone will&mdash;forgive us&mdash;when&mdash;he&mdash;sees how
+we have&mdash;hurried," said Hermione, laughing at her own
+fatigue. "Go on, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>She stood for a moment leaning against the arch.</p>
+
+<p>"And you go quickly, Lucrezia, and get the supper.
+The padrone&mdash;will be&mdash;hungry after his bath."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia went off to the back of the house. Then
+Hermione drew a long breath, recovered herself, and
+walked to the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare met her with flaming eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"The padrone is not here, signora. The padrone has
+not come back!"</p>
+
+<p>He stood and stared at her.</p>
+
+<p>It was not yet very dark. They stood in a sort of soft
+obscurity in which all objects could be seen, not with
+sharp clearness, but distinctly.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure, Gaspare?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora! The padrone has not come back. He
+is not here."</p>
+
+<p>The boy's voice sounded angry, Hermione thought.
+It startled her. And the way he looked at her startled
+her too.</p>
+
+<p>"You have looked in the house? Maurice!" she called.
+"Maurice!"</p>
+
+<p>"I say the padrone is not here, signora!"</p>
+
+<p>Never before had Gaspare spoken to Hermione like
+this, in a tone almost that she ought to have resented.
+She did not resent it, but it filled her with a creeping
+uneasiness.</p>
+
+<p>"What time is it? Nearly half-past nine. He ought
+to be here by now."</p>
+
+<p>The boy nodded, keeping his flaming eyes on her.</p>
+
+<p>"I said nine to give him lots of time to get cool, and
+change his clothes, and&mdash;it's very odd."</p>
+
+<p>"I will go down to the sea, signora. A rivederci."</p>
+
+<p>He swung round to go, but Hermione caught his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"No; don't go. Wait a moment, Gaspare. Don't
+leave me like this!"</p>
+
+<p>She detained him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, what's the matter? What&mdash;what are you
+afraid of?"</p>
+
+<p>Instantly there came into his face the ugly, obstinate
+look she had already noticed, and wondered at, that day.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you afraid of, Gaspare?" she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Her voice vibrated with a strength of feeling that as
+yet she herself scarcely understood.</p>
+
+<p>"Niente!" the boy replied, doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but then"&mdash;she laughed&mdash;"why shouldn't
+the padrone be a few minutes late? It would be absurd
+to go down. You might miss him on the way."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare said nothing. He stood there with his arms
+hanging and the ugly look still on his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Mightn't you? Mightn't you, Gaspare, if he came
+up by Marechiaro?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>They stood there in silence for a minute. Hermione
+broke it.</p>
+
+<p>"He&mdash;you know how splendidly the padrone swims,"
+she said.    "Don't you, Gaspare?"</p>
+
+<p>The boy said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, why don't you answer when I speak to
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I've got nothing to say, signora."</p>
+
+<p>His tone was almost rude. At that moment he nearly
+hated Hermione for holding him by the arm. If she
+had been a man he would have struck her off and gone.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" she said, but not angrily.</p>
+
+<p>Her instinct told her that he was obliged to be utterly
+natural just then under the spell of some violent feeling.
+She knew he loved his padrone. The feeling must be
+one of anxiety. But it was absurd to be so anxious.
+It was ridiculous, hysterical. She said to herself that it
+was Gaspare's excitement that was affecting her. She
+was catching his mood.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Gaspare," she said, "we must just wait.
+The padrone will be here in a minute. Perhaps he has
+come up by Marechiaro. Very likely he has looked in at
+the hotel to see how the sick signore is after his day up
+here. That is it, I feel sure."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him for agreement and met his stern
+and flaming eyes, utterly unmoved by what she had said,
+utterly unconvinced. At this moment she could not
+deny that this untrained, untutored nature had power
+over hers.    She let go his arm and sat down by the wall.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us wait out here for a minute," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signora."</p>
+
+<p>He stood there quite still, but she felt as if in this unnatural
+stillness there was violent movement, and she
+looked away from him. It was fully night now. She
+gazed down at the ravine. By that way Maurice would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span>
+come, unless he really had gone to Marechiaro to see
+Artois. She had suggested to Gaspare that this might
+be the reason of Maurice's delay, but she knew that she
+did not think it was. Yet what other reason could there
+be? He swam splendidly. She said that to herself. She
+kept on saying it. Why?</p>
+
+<p>Slowly the minutes crept by. The silence around
+them was intense, yet she felt no calm, no peace in it.
+Like the stillness of Gaspare it seemed to be violent. It
+began to frighten her. She began to wish for movement,
+for sound.    Presently a light shone in the cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!    Signora!"</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia's voice was calling.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Supper is quite ready, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"The signore has not come back yet. He is a little
+late."</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia came to the top of the steps.</p>
+
+<p>"Where can the signore be, signora?" she said. "It
+only takes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice died suddenly away. Hermione looked
+quickly at Gaspare, and saw that he was gazing ferociously
+at Lucrezia as if to bid her be silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" Hermione said, suddenly getting up.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;it's odd the signore's not coming."</p>
+
+<p>The boy answered nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps&mdash;perhaps there really has been an&mdash;an accident."</p>
+
+<p>She tried to speak lightly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think he would keep me waiting like this
+if&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I will go down to the sea," the boy said. "Signora,
+let me go down to the sea!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a fury of pleading in his voice. Hermione
+hesitated, but only for a moment.    Then she answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you shall go. Stop, Gaspare!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He had moved towards the arch.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm coming with you."</p>
+
+<p>"You, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You cannot come! You are not to come!"</p>
+
+<p>He was actually commanding her&mdash;his padrona.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not to come, signora!" he repeated, violently.</p>
+
+<p>"But I am coming," she said.</p>
+
+<p>They stood facing each other. It was like a battle,
+Gaspare's manner, his words, the tone in which they
+were spoken&mdash;all made her understand that there was
+some sinister terror in his soul. She did not ask what
+it was. She did not dare to ask. But she said again:</p>
+
+<p>"I am coming with you, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>He stared at her and knew that from that decision
+there was no appeal. If he went she would accompany
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us wait here, signora," he said. "The padrone
+will be coming presently. We had better wait here."</p>
+
+<p>But now she was as determined on activity as before
+she had been&mdash;or seemed&mdash;anxious for patience.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going," she answered. "If you like to let me
+go alone you can."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke very quietly, but there was a thrill in her
+voice. The boy saw it was useless just then to pit his
+will against hers. He dropped his head, and the ugly
+look came back to his face, but he made no reply.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall be back very soon, Lucrezia. We are going
+a little way down to meet the padrone. Come, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>She spoke to him gently, kindly, almost pleadingly.
+He made an odd sound. It was not a word, nor was it
+a sob. She had never heard anything like it before.
+It seemed to her to be like a smothered outcry of a heart
+torn by some acute emotion.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" she said. "We shall meet him. We
+shall meet him in the ravine!"</p>
+
+<p>Then they set out. As she was going, Hermione cast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span>
+a look down towards the sea. Always at this hour,
+when night had come, a light shone there, the light in
+the siren's house. To-night that little spark was not
+kindled.    She saw only the darkness.    She stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," she said, "there's no light!"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora?"</p>
+
+<p>She pointed over the wall.</p>
+
+<p>"There's no light!" she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>This little fact&mdash;she did not know why&mdash;frightened
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, I am going!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" she said. "Give me your hand to help
+me down the path.    It's so dark.    Isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>She put out her hand.    The boy's hand was cold.</p>
+
+<p>They set out towards the sea.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>They did not talk as they went down the steep mountain-side,
+but when they reached the entrance of the ravine
+Gaspare stopped abruptly and took his cold hand
+away from his padrona's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora," he said, almost in a whisper. "Let me go
+alone!"</p>
+
+<p>They were under the shade of the trees here and it was
+much darker than upon the mountain-side. Hermione
+could not see the boy's face plainly. She came close up
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you want to go alone?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Without knowing it, she, too, spoke in an under-voice.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you are afraid of?" she added.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "you are.   Your hand is quite cold."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go alone, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Gaspare. There is nothing to be afraid of, I
+believe. But if&mdash;if there should have been an accident,
+I ought to be there. The padrone is my husband, remember."</p>
+
+<p>She went on and he followed her.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had spoken firmly, even almost cheerfully,
+to comfort the boy, whose uneasiness was surely greater
+than the occasion called for. So many little things may
+happen to delay a man. And Maurice might really have
+made the d&eacute;tour to Marechiaro on his way home. If he
+had, then they would miss him by taking this path
+through the ravine. Hermione knew that, but she did
+not hesitate to take it.    She could not remain inactive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span>
+to-night. Patience was out of her reach. It was only
+by making a strong effort that she had succeeded in
+waiting that short time on the terrace. Now she could
+wait no longer. She was driven. Although she had not
+yet sincerely acknowledged it to herself, fear was gradually
+taking possession of her, a fear such as she had
+never yet known or even imagined.</p>
+
+<p>She had never yet known or imagined such a fear.
+That she felt. But she had another feeling, contradictory,
+surely. It began to seem to her as if this fear,
+which was now coming upon her, had been near her for a
+long time, ever since the night when she knew that she
+was going to Africa. Had she not even expressed it to
+Maurice?</p>
+
+<p>Those beautiful days and nights of perfect happiness&mdash;can
+they ever come again? Had she not thought that
+many times? Was it not the voice of this fear which
+had whispered those words, and others like them, to her
+mind? And had there not been omens? Had there not
+been omens?</p>
+
+<p>She heard Gaspare's feet behind her in the ravine, and
+it seemed to her that she could tell by the sound of them
+upon the many little loose stones that he was wild with
+impatience, that he was secretly cursing her for obliging
+him to go so slowly. Had he been alone he would have
+sped down with a rapidity almost like that of travelling
+light. She was strong, active. She was going fast.
+Instinctively she went fast. But she was a woman, not
+a boy.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help it, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>She was saying that mentally, saying it again and
+again, as she hurried onward.</p>
+
+<p>Had there not been omens?</p>
+
+<p>That last letter of hers, whose loss had prevented Maurice
+from meeting her on her return, from welcoming her!
+When she had reached the station of Cattaro, and had
+not seen him upon the platform, she had felt "I have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span>
+lost him." Afterwards, directly almost, she had laughed
+at the feeling as absurd. But she had had it. And
+then, when at last he had come, she had been moved to
+suggest that he might like to sleep outside upon the
+terrace. And he had agreed to the suggestion. They
+had not resumed their old, sweet relation of husband and
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>Had there not been omens?</p>
+
+<p>And only an hour ago, scarcely that, not that, she
+had knelt before the Madonna della Rocca and she had
+prayed, she had prayed passionately for deserted women,
+for women who loved and who had lost those whom they
+loved.</p>
+
+<p>The fear was upon her fully now, and she fully knew
+that it was. Why had she prayed for lonely, deserted
+women? What had moved her to such a prayer?</p>
+
+<p>"Was I praying for myself?"</p>
+
+<p>At that thought a physical weakness came to her,
+and she felt as if she could not go on. By the side of
+the path, growing among pointed rocks, there was a
+gnarled olive-tree, whose branches projected towards
+her. Before she knew what she was doing she had
+caught hold of one and stood still. So suddenly she had
+stopped that Gaspare, unprepared, came up against her
+in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora! What is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice was surely angry. For a moment she thought
+of telling him to go on alone, quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing&mdash;only&mdash;I've walked so fast. Wait one
+minute!"</p>
+
+<p>She felt the agony of his impatience, and it seemed
+to her that she was treating him very cruelly to-night.</p>
+
+<p>"You know, Gaspare," she said, "it's not easy for
+women&mdash;this rough walking, I mean. We've got our
+skirts."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed. How unnatural, how horrible her laugh<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span>
+sounded in the darkness! He did not say any more.
+She knew he was wondering why she had laughed like
+that. After a moment she let go the branch. But her
+legs were trembling, and she stumbled when she began
+to walk on.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, you are tired already. You had better
+let me go alone."</p>
+
+<p>For the first time she told him a lie.</p>
+
+<p>"I should be afraid to wait here all by myself in the
+night," she said.    "I couldn't do that."</p>
+
+<p>"Who would come?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should be frightened."</p>
+
+<p>She thought she saw him look at her incredulously in
+the dark, but was not sure.</p>
+
+<p>"Be kind to me to-night, Gaspare!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>She felt a sudden passionate need of gentleness, of
+support, a woman's need of sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you?" she added.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>His voice sounded shocked, she thought; but in a
+moment, when they came to an awkward bit of the
+path, he put his hand under her arm, and very carefully,
+almost tenderly, helped her over it. Tears rushed
+into her eyes. For such a small thing she was crying!
+She turned her head so that Gaspare should not see,
+and tried to control her emotion. That terrible question
+kept on returning to her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Was I praying for myself when I prayed at the
+shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was gifted, or cursed, with imagination,
+and as she never made use of her imaginative faculty
+in any of the arts, it was, perhaps, too much at the service
+of her own life. In happiness it was a beautiful
+handmaid, helping her to greater joy, but in unhappy,
+or in only anxious moments, it was, as it usually is, a
+cursed thing. It stood at her elbow, then, like a demon
+full of suggestions that were terrible.   With an inven<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span>tiveness
+that was diabolic it brought vividly before her
+scenes to shake the stoutest courage. It painted the
+future black. It showed her the world as a void. And
+in that void she was as something falling, falling, yet
+reaching nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Now it was with her in the ravine, and as she asked
+questions, terrible questions, it gave her terrible answers.
+And it reminded her of other omens&mdash;it told her these
+facts were really omens&mdash;which till now she had not
+thought of.</p>
+
+<p>Why had both she and Maurice been led to think and
+to speak of death to-day?</p>
+
+<p>Upon the mountain-top the thought of death had
+come to her when she looked at the glory of the dawn.
+She had said to Maurice, "'The mountains will endure'&mdash;but
+we!" Of course it was a truism, such a thing as
+she might say at any time when she was confronted by
+the profound stability of nature. Thousands of people
+had said much the same thing on thousands of occasions.
+Yet now the demon at her elbow whispered to her that
+the remark had had a peculiar significance. She had
+even said, "What is it makes one think most of death
+when&mdash;when life, new life, is very near?"</p>
+
+<p>Existence is made up of loss and gain. New beings
+rush into life day by day and hour by hour. Birth is
+about us, but death is about us too. And when we are
+given something, how often is something also taken
+from us! Was that to be her fate?</p>
+
+<p>And Maurice&mdash;he had been led to speak of death, afterwards,
+just as he was going away to the sea. She recalled
+his words, or the demon whispered them over to
+her:</p>
+
+<p>"'One can never tell what will happen&mdash;suppose one
+of us were to die here? Don't you think it would be
+good to lie there where we lay this afternoon, under the
+oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea? I think it
+would."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They were his very last words, his who was so full of
+life, who scarcely ever seemed to realize the possibility
+of death. All through the day death had surely been
+in the air about them. She remembered her dream, or
+quasi-dream. In it she had spoken. She had muttered
+an appeal, "Don't leave me alone!" and at another time
+she had tried to realize Maurice in England and had failed.
+She had felt as if Sicily would never let him go. And
+when she had spoken her thought he had hinted that
+Sicily could only keep him by holding him in arms of
+earth, holding him in those arms that keep the body of
+man forever.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was ordained that her Sicilian should never
+leave the island that he loved. In all their Sicilian days
+how seldom had she thought of their future life together
+in England! Always she had seen herself with Maurice in
+the south. He had seemed to belong to the south, and
+she had brought him to the south. And now&mdash;would
+the south let him go? The thought of the sirens of
+legend flitted through her mind. They called men to
+destruction. She imagined them sitting among the
+rocks near the Casa della Sirene, calling&mdash;calling to her
+Sicilian.</p>
+
+<p>Long ago, when she first knew him well and loved his
+beauty, she had sometimes thought of him as a being
+of legend. She had let her fancy play about him tenderly,
+happily. He had been Mercury, Endymion, a
+dancing faun, Cupid vanishing from Psyche as the dawn
+came. And now she let a cruel fancy have its will for
+a moment. She imagined the sirens calling among the
+rocks, and Maurice listening to their summons, and going
+to his destruction. The darkness of the ravine helped
+the demon who hurried with her down the narrow path,
+whispering in her ears. But though she yielded for a
+time to the nightmare spell, common-sense had not utterly
+deserted her, and presently it made its voice heard.
+She began to say to herself that in giving way to such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span>
+fantastic fears she was being unworthy of herself, almost
+contemptible. In former times she had never
+been a foolish woman or weak. She had, on the contrary,
+been strong and sensible, although unconventional
+and enthusiastic. Many people had leaned upon her,
+even strong people. Artois was one. And she had
+never yet failed any one.</p>
+
+<p>"I must not fail myself," she suddenly thought. "I
+must not be a fool because I love."</p>
+
+<p>She loved very much, and she had been separated
+from her lover very soon. Her eagerness to return to
+him had been so intense that it had made her afraid.
+Yet she had returned, been with him again. Her fear
+in Africa that they would perhaps never be together
+again in their Sicilian home had been groundless. She
+remembered how it had often tormented her, especially
+at night in the dark. She had passed agonizing hours,
+for no reason. Her imagination had persecuted her.
+Now it was trying to persecute her more cruelly. Suddenly
+she resolved not to let it have its way. Why was
+she so frightened at a delay that might be explained in
+a moment and in the simplest manner? Why was she
+frightened at all?</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare's foot struck a stone and sent it flying down
+the path past her.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! it had been Gaspare. His face, his manner, had
+startled her, had first inclined her to fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come up beside me.    There's room now."</p>
+
+<p>The boy joined her.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," she continued, "do you know that when
+we meet the padrone, you and I, we shall look like two
+fools?"</p>
+
+<p>"Meet the padrone?" he repeated, sullenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. He'll laugh at us for rushing down like this.
+He'll think we've gone quite mad."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Silence was the only response she had.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't he?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Gaspare!" she exclaimed. "Don't&mdash;don't be
+like this to-night. Do you know that you are frightening
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter with you? What has been the
+matter with you all day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Niente."</p>
+
+<p>His voice was hard, and he fell behind again.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione knew that he was concealing something
+from her. She wondered what it was. It must be
+something surely in connection with his anxiety. Her
+mind worked rapidly. Maurice&mdash;the sea&mdash;bathing&mdash;Gaspare's
+fear&mdash;Maurice and Gaspare had bathed together
+often while she had been in Africa.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," she said.    "Walk beside me&mdash;I wish it."</p>
+
+<p>He came up reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>"You've bathed with the padrone lately?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Many times?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever noticed that he was tired in the sea,
+or afterwards, or that bathing seemed to make him ill
+in any way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tired, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know there's a thing, in English we call it cramp.
+Sometimes it seizes the best swimmers. It's a dreadful
+pain, I believe, and the limbs refuse to move. You've
+never&mdash;when he's been swimming with you, the padrone
+has never had anything of that kind, has he? It wasn't
+that which made you frightened this evening when he
+didn't come?"</p>
+
+<p>She had unwittingly given the boy the chance to
+save her from any worse suspicion. With Sicilian
+sharpness he seized it.    Till now he had been in a di<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span>lemma,
+and it was that which had made him sullen, almost
+rude. His position was a difficult one. He had
+to keep his padrone's confidence. Yet he could not&mdash;physically
+he could not&mdash;stay on the mountain when he
+knew that some tragedy was probably being enacted,
+or had already been enacted by the sea. He was devoured
+by an anxiety which he could not share and
+ought not to show because it was caused by the knowledge
+which he was solemnly pledged to conceal. This
+remark of Hermione gave him a chance of shifting it
+from the shoulders of the truth to the shoulders of a lie.
+He remembered the morning of sirocco, his fear, his passion
+of tears in the boat. The memory seemed almost to
+make the lie he was going to tell the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora.    It was that."</p>
+
+<p>His voice was no longer sullen.</p>
+
+<p>"The padrone had an attack like that?"</p>
+
+<p>Again the terrible fear came back to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, it was one morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Used you to bathe in the morning?"</p>
+
+<p>A hot flush came in Gaspare's face, but Hermione did
+not see it in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"Once we did, signora.    We had been fishing."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on.    Tell me!"</p>
+
+<p>Then Gaspare related the incident of his padrone's
+sinking in the sea. Only he made Maurice's travesty appear
+a real catastrophe. Hermione listened with painful
+attention. So Maurice had nearly died, had been into
+the jaws of death, while she had been in Africa! Her
+fears there had been less ill-founded than she had thought.
+A horror came upon her as she heard Gaspare's story.</p>
+
+<p>"And then, signora, I cried," he ended.    "I cried."</p>
+
+<p>"You cried?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I never could stop crying again."</p>
+
+<p>How different from an English boy's reticence was
+this frank confession! and yet what English boy was
+ever more manly than this mountain lad?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;but then you saved the padrone's life! God
+bless you!"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had stopped, and she now put her hand
+on Gaspare's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signora, there were two of us. We had the
+boat."</p>
+
+<p>"But"&mdash;another thought came to her&mdash;"but, Gaspare,
+after such a thing as that, how could you let the
+padrone go down to bathe alone?"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare, a moment before credited with a faithful
+action, was now to be blamed for a faithless one. For
+neither was he responsible, if strict truth were to be
+regarded. But he had insisted on saving his padrone
+from the sea when it was not necessary. And he knew
+his own faithfulness and was secretly proud of it, as a
+good woman knows and is proud of her honor. He had
+borne the praise therefore. But one thing he could not
+bear, and that was an imputation of faithlessness in
+his stewardship.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not my fault, signora!" he cried, hotly. "I
+wanted to go. I begged to go, but the padrone would
+not let me."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione, peering in the darkness, thought she saw
+the ugly look come again into the boy's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"He wished me to stay with you. He said: 'Stay
+with the padrona, Gaspare. She will be all alone.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Did he? Well, Gaspare, it is not your fault. But
+I never thought it was. You know that."</p>
+
+<p>She had heard in his voice that he was hurt.</p>
+
+<p>"Come! We must go on!"</p>
+
+<p>Her fear was now tangible. It had a definite form,
+and with every moment it grew greater in the night,
+towering over her, encompassing her about. For she had
+hoped to meet Maurice coming up the ravine, and, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span>
+each moment that went by, her hope of hearing his footstep
+decreased, her conviction that something untoward
+must have occurred grew more solid. Only once was
+her terror abated. When they were not far from the
+mouth of the ravine Gaspare suddenly seized her arm
+from behind.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! What is it?" she said, startled.</p>
+
+<p>He held up one hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Zitta!" he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione listened, holding her breath. It was a
+silent night, windless and calm. The trees had no
+voices, the watercourse was dry, no longer musical with
+the falling stream. Even the sea was dumb, or, if it
+were not, murmured so softly that these two could not
+hear it where they stood. And now, in this dark silence,
+they heard a faint sound. It was surely a foot-fall upon
+stones. Yes, it was.</p>
+
+<p>By the fierce joy that burst up in her heart Hermione
+measured her previous fear.</p>
+
+<p>"It's he! It's the padrone!"</p>
+
+<p>She put her face close to Gaspare's and whispered the
+words. He nodded. His eyes were shining.</p>
+
+<p>"Andiamo!" he whispered back.</p>
+
+<p>With a boy's impetuosity he wished to rush on and
+meet the truant pilgrim from the sea, but Hermione
+held him back. She could not bear to lose that sweet
+sound, the foot-fall on the stones, coming nearer every
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Let's wait for him here! Let's give him a
+surprise."</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene!"</p>
+
+<p>His body was quivering with suppressed movement.
+But they waited. The step was slow, or so it seemed to
+Hermione as she listened again, like the step of a tired
+man. Maurice seldom walked like that, she thought.
+He was light-footed, swift. His actions were ardent as
+were his eyes. But it must be he! Of course it was he!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span>
+He was languid after a long swim, and was walking slowly
+for fear of getting hot. That must be it. The walker
+drew nearer, the crunch of the stones was louder under
+his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't the padrone!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare had spoken. All the light had gone out of
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Si!    Si!    It is he!"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione contradicted him.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signora.    It is a contadino."</p>
+
+<p>Her joy was failing. Although she contradicted Gaspare,
+she began to feel that he was right. This step
+was heavy, weary, an old man's step. It could not be
+her Mercury coming up to his home on the mountain.
+But still she waited. Presently there detached itself
+from the darkness a faint figure, bent, crowned with a
+long Sicilian cap.</p>
+
+<p>"Andiamo!"</p>
+
+<p>This time she did not keep Gaspare back. Without
+a word they went on. As they came to the figure it
+stopped. She did not even glance at it, but as she went
+by it she heard an old, croaky voice say:</p>
+
+<p>"Benedicite!"</p>
+
+<p>Never before had the Sicilian greeting sounded horrible
+in her ears. She did not reply to it. She could
+not. And Gaspare said nothing. They hastened on
+in silence till they reached the high-road by Isola Bella,
+the road where Maurice had met Maddalena on the morning
+of the fair.</p>
+
+<p>It was deserted. The thick white dust upon it looked
+ghastly at their feet. Now they could hear the faint
+and regular murmur of the oily sea by which the fishermen's
+boats were drawn up, and discern, far away on
+the right, the serpentine lights of Cattaro.</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you go to bathe?" Hermione asked, always
+speaking in a hushed voice. "Here, by Isola
+Bella?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She looked down at the rocks of the tiny island, at
+the dimness of the spreading sea. Till now she had
+always gloried in its beauty, but to-night it looked to
+her mysterious and cruel.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"Where then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Farther on&mdash;a little. I will go."</p>
+
+<p>His voice was full of hesitation. He did not know
+what to do.</p>
+
+<p>"Please, signora, stay here. Sit on the bank by the
+line. I will go and be back in a moment. I can run.
+It is better. If you come we shall take much longer."</p>
+
+<p>"Go, Gaspare!" she said. "But&mdash;stop&mdash;where do
+you bathe exactly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite near, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"In that little bay underneath the promontory where
+the Casa delle Sirene is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes there and sometimes farther on by the
+caves. A rivederla!"</p>
+
+<p>The white dust flew up from the road as he disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione did not sit down on the bank. She had
+never meant to wait by Isola Bella, but she let him go
+because what he had said was true, and she did not
+wish to delay him. If anything serious had occurred
+every moment might be valuable. After a short pause
+she followed him. As she walked she looked continually
+at the sea. Presently the road mounted and she came
+in sight of the sheltered bay in which Maurice had heard
+Maddalena's cry when he was fishing. A stone wall
+skirted the road here. Some twenty feet below was
+the railway line laid on a bank which sloped abruptly
+to the curving beach. She leaned her hands upon the
+wall and looked down, thinking she might see Gaspare.
+But he was not there. The dark, still sea, protected by
+the two promontories, and by an islet of rock in the
+middle of the bay, made no sound here. It lay motion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span>less
+as a pool in a forest under the stars. To the left
+the jutting land, with its turmoil of jagged rocks, was a
+black mystery. As she stood by the wall, Hermione
+felt horribly lonely, horribly deserted. She wished she
+had not let Gaspare go. Yet she dreaded his return.
+What might he have to tell her? Now that she was
+here by the sea she felt how impossible it was for Maurice
+to have been delayed upon the shore. For there
+was no one here. The fishermen were up in the village.
+The contadini had long since left their work. No one
+passed upon the road. There was nothing, there could
+have been nothing to keep a man here. She felt as if
+it were already midnight, the deepest hour of darkness
+and of silence.</p>
+
+<p>As she took her hands from the wall, and turned to
+go on up the hill to the point which commanded the
+open sea and the beginning of the Straits of Messina,
+she was terrified. Suspicion was hardening into certainty.
+Something dreadful must have happened to
+Maurice.</p>
+
+<p>Her legs had begun to tremble again. All her body
+felt weak and incapable, like the body of an old person
+whose life was drawing to an end. The hill, not very
+steep, faced her like a precipice, and it seemed to her
+that she would not be able to mount it. In the road
+the deep dust surely clung to her feet, refusing to let
+her lift them. And she felt sick and contemptible, no
+longer her own mistress either physically or mentally.
+The voices within her that strove to whisper commonplaces
+of consolation, saying that Maurice had gone to
+Marechiaro, or that he had taken another path home, not
+the path from Isola Bella, brought her no comfort.
+The thing within her soul that knew what she, the human
+being containing it, did not know, told her that
+her terror had its reason, that she was not suffering in
+this way without cause. It said, "Your terror is justified."</p>
+
+<p class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<a href="images/gs08.jpg">
+<img src="images/gs08_th.jpg" width="400" height="272"
+alt="&quot;SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE CAVES WHERE THE FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN THE
+DAWN&quot;"
+title="Click to enlarge." /></a>
+<span class="caption">&quot;SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE CAVES WHERE THE FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN THE
+DAWN&quot;</span>
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At last she was at the top of the hill, and could see
+vaguely the shore by the caves where the fishermen had
+slept in the dawn. To her right was the path which
+led to the wall of rock connecting the Sirens' Isle with
+the main-land. She glanced at it, but did not think of
+following it. Gaspare must have followed the descending
+road. He must be down there on that beach searching,
+calling his padrone's name, perhaps. She began
+to descend slowly, still physically distressed. True to
+her fixed idea that if there had been a disaster it must
+be connected with the sea, she walked always close
+to the wall, and looked always down to the sea.
+Within a short time, two or three minutes, she came
+in sight of the lakelike inlet, a miniature fiord which
+lay at the feet of the woods where hid the Casa delle
+Sirene. The water here looked black like ebony. She
+stared down at it and saw a boat lying on the shore.
+Then she gazed for a moment at the trees opposite from
+which always, till to-night, had shone the lamp which she
+and Maurice had seen from the terrace. All was dark.
+The thickly growing trees did not move. Secret and
+impenetrable seemed to her the hiding-place they made.
+She could scarcely imagine that any one lived among
+them. Yet doubtless the inhabitants of the Casa delle
+Sirene were sleeping quietly there while she wandered
+on the white road accompanied by her terror.</p>
+
+<p>She had stopped for a minute, and was just going to
+walk on, when she heard a sound that, though faint
+and distant, was sharp and imperative. It seemed to
+her to be a violent beating on wood, and it was followed
+by the calling of a voice. She waited. The sound died
+away. She listened, straining her ears. In this absolutely
+still night sound travelled far. At first she had
+no idea from what direction came this noise which had
+startled her. But almost immediately it was repeated,
+and she knew that it must be some one striking violently
+and repeatedly upon wood&mdash;probably a wooden door.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then again the call rang out. This time she recognized,
+or thought she recognized, Gaspare's voice raised
+angrily, fiercely, in a summons to someone. She looked
+across the ebon water at the ebon mass of the trees on
+its farther side, and realized swiftly that Gaspare must
+be there. He had gone to the only house between the
+two bathing-places to ask if its inhabitants had seen
+anything of the padrone.</p>
+
+<p>This seemed to her to be a very natural and intelligent
+action, and she waited eagerly and watched, hoping to
+see a light shine out as Salvatore&mdash;yes, that had been
+the name told to her by Gaspare&mdash;as Salvatore got up
+from sleep and came to open. He might know something,
+know at least at what hour Maurice had left the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>Again came the knocking and the call, again&mdash;four,
+five times. Then there was a long silence. Always the
+darkness reigned, unbroken by the earth-bound star, the
+light she looked for. The silence began to seem to her
+interminable. At first she thought that perhaps Gaspare
+was having a colloquy with the owner of the house,
+was learning something of Maurice. But presently she
+began to believe that there could be no one in the house,
+and that he had realized this. If so, he would have to
+return either to the road or the beach. She could see
+no boat moored to the shore opposite. He would come
+by the wall of rock, then, unless he swam the inlet. She
+went back a little way to a point from which dimly she
+saw the wall, and waited there a few minutes. Surely
+it would be dangerous to traverse that wall on such a
+dark night! Now, to her other fear was added fear for
+Gaspare. If an accident were to happen to him! Suddenly
+she hastened back to the path which led from
+the high-road along the spit of cultivated land to the
+wall, turned from the road, traversed the spit, and went
+down till she stood at the edge of the wall. She looked
+at the black rock, the black sea that lay motionless far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span>
+down on either side of it. Surely Gaspare would not
+venture to come this way. It seemed to her that to
+do so would mean death, or, if not that, a dangerous
+fall into the sea&mdash;and probably there were rocks below,
+hidden under the surface of the water. But Gaspare
+was daring. She knew that. He was as active as a
+cat and did not know the meaning of fear for his own
+safety. He might&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Out of the darkness on the land beyond the wall,
+something came, the form of some one hurrying.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>The form stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora! What are you doing here? Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, don't come this way! You are not to come
+this way."</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you here, signora? I told you to wait for
+me by Isola Bella."</p>
+
+<p>The startled voice was hard.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not to cross the wall. I won't have it."</p>
+
+<p>"The wall&mdash;it is nothing, signora. I have crossed it
+many times. It is nothing for a man."</p>
+
+<p>"In the day, perhaps, but at night&mdash;don't, Gaspare&mdash;d'you
+hear me?&mdash;you are not&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped, holding her breath, for she saw him coming
+lightly, poised on bare feet, straight as an arrow,
+and balancing himself with his out-stretched arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"</p>
+
+<p>She had shrieked out. Just as he was midway Gaspare
+had looked down at the sea&mdash;the open sea on the
+far side of the wall. Instantly his foot slipped, he lost
+his balance and fell. She thought he had gone, but he
+caught the wall with his hands, hung for a moment
+suspended above the sea, then raised himself, as a gymnast
+does on a parallel bar, slowly till his body was
+above the wall. Then&mdash;Hermione did not know how&mdash;he
+was beside her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She caught hold of him with both hands. She felt
+furiously angry.</p>
+
+<p>"How dare you disobey me?" she said, panting and
+trembling.    "How dare you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But his eyes silenced her. She broke off, staring at
+him. All the healthy color had left his face. There
+was a leaden hue upon it.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare&mdash;are you&mdash;you aren't hurt&mdash;you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go, signora!    Let me go!"</p>
+
+<p>She let him go instantly.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?    Where are you going?"</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to the beach.</p>
+
+<p>"To the boat. There's&mdash;down there in the water&mdash;there's
+something in the water!"</p>
+
+<p>"Something?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait in the road."</p>
+
+<p>He rushed away from her, and she heard him saying:
+"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"&mdash;crying it out as
+he ran.</p>
+
+<p>Something in the water! She felt as if her heart stood
+still for a century, then at last beat again somewhere
+up in her throat, choking her. Something&mdash;could Gaspare
+have seen what? She moved on a step. One of her
+feet was on the wall, the other still on the firm earth.
+She leaned down and tried to look over into the sea beyond,
+the sea close to the wall. But her head swam.
+Had she not moved back hastily, obedient to an imperious
+instinct of self-preservation, she would have
+fallen. She sat down, there where she had been standing,
+and dropped her face into her hands close to her
+knees, and kept quite still. She felt as if she were in
+a train going through a tunnel. Her ears were full of
+a roaring clamor. How long she sat and heard tumult
+she did not know. When she looked up the night seemed
+to her to be much darker than before, intensely
+dark. Yet all the stars were there in the sky. No
+clouds had come to hide them.    She tried to get up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span>
+quickly, but there was surely something wrong with
+her body. It would not obey her will at first. Presently
+she lay down, turned over on her side, put both
+hands on the ground, and with an effort, awkward as
+that of a cripple, hoisted herself up and stood on her
+feet. Gaspare had said, "Wait in the road." She
+must find the road. That was what she must do.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait in the road&mdash;wait in the road." She kept on
+saying that to herself. But she could not remember for
+a moment where the road was. She could only think of
+rock, of water black like ebony. The road was white.
+She must look for something white. And when she
+found it she must wait. Presently, while she thought
+she was looking, she found that she was walking in the
+dust. It flew up into her nostrils, dry and acrid. Then
+she began to recover herself and to realize more clearly
+what she was doing.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know yet. She knew nothing yet. The
+night was dark, the sea was dark. Gaspare had only
+cast one swift glance down before his foot had slipped.
+It was impossible that he could have seen what it was
+that was there in the water. And she was always inclined
+to let her imagination run riot. God isn't cruel.
+She had said that under the oak-trees, and it was true.
+It must be true.</p>
+
+<p>"I've never done God any harm," she was saying to
+herself now. "I've never meant to. I've always tried
+to do the right thing. God knows that! God wouldn't
+be cruel to me."</p>
+
+<p>In this moment all the subtlety of her mind deserted
+her, all that in her might have been called "cleverness."
+She was reduced to an extraordinary simplicity like
+that of a child, or a very instinctive, uneducated person.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I'm bad," she thought. "And God&mdash;He
+isn't bad. He wouldn't wish to hurt me. He
+wouldn't wish to kill me."</p>
+
+<p>She was walking on mechanically while she thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span>
+this, but presently she remembered again that Gaspare
+had told her to wait in the road. She looked over the
+wall down to the narrow strip of beach that edged the
+inlet between the main-land and the Sirens' Isle. The
+boat which she had seen there was gone. Gaspare had
+taken it. She stood staring at the place where the boat
+had been. Then she sought a means of descending to
+that strip of beach. She would wait there. A little
+lower down the road some of the masonry of the wall
+had been broken away, perhaps by a winter flood, and
+at this point there was a faint track, trodden by fishermen's
+feet, leading down to the line. Hermione got over
+the wall at this point and was soon on the beach, standing
+almost on the spot where Maurice had stripped off
+his clothes in the night to seek the voice that had cried
+out to him in the darkness. She waited here. Gaspare
+would presently come back. His arms were strong. He
+could row fast. She would only have to wait a few
+minutes. In a few minutes she would know. She
+strained her eyes to catch sight of the boat rounding
+the promontory as it returned from the open sea. At
+first she stood, but presently, as the minutes went by
+and the boat did not come, her sense of physical weakness
+returned and she sat down on the stones with her
+feet almost touching the water.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare knows now," she thought. "I don't know,
+but Gaspare knows."</p>
+
+<p>That seemed to her strange, that any one should know
+the truth of this thing before she did. For what did it
+matter to any one but her? Maurice was hers&mdash;was so
+absolutely hers that she felt as if no one else had any
+concern in him. He was Gaspare's padrone. Gaspare
+loved him as a Sicilian may love his padrone. Others
+in England, too, loved him&mdash;his mother, his father. But
+what was any love compared with the love of the one
+woman to whom he belonged. His mother had her husband.
+Gaspare&mdash;he was a boy. He would love some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span>
+girl presently; he would marry. No, she was right. The
+truth about that "something in the water" only concerned
+her. God's dealing with this creature of his to-night
+only really mattered to her.</p>
+
+<p>As she waited, pressing her hands on the stones and
+looking always at the point of the dark land round
+which the boat must come, a strange and terrible feeling
+came to her, a feeling that she knew she ought to
+drive out of her soul, but that she was powerless to expel.</p>
+
+<p>She felt as if at this moment God were on His trial
+before her&mdash;before a poor woman who loved.</p>
+
+<p>"If God has taken Maurice from me," she thought,
+"He is cruel, frightfully cruel, and I cannot love Him.
+If He has not taken Maurice from me, He is the God
+who is love, the God I can, I must worship!"</p>
+
+<p>Which God was he?</p>
+
+<p>The vast scheme of the world narrowed; the wide
+horizons vanished. There was nothing beyond the limit
+of her heart. She felt, as almost all believing human
+beings feel in such moments, that God's attention was
+entirely concentrated upon her life, that no other claimed
+His care, begged for His pity, demanded His tenderness
+because hers was so intense.</p>
+
+<p>Did God wish to lose her love? Surely not! Then
+He could not commit this frightful act which she feared.
+He had not committed it.</p>
+
+<p>A sort of relief crept through her as she thought this.
+Her agony of apprehension was suddenly lessened, was
+almost driven out.</p>
+
+<p>God wants to be loved by the beings He has created.
+Then He would not deliberately, arbitrarily destroy a
+love already existing in the heart of one of them&mdash;a love
+thankful to Him, enthusiastically grateful for happiness
+bestowed by Him.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the darkness of the point there came out of
+the dimness of the night that brooded above the open
+sea a moving darkness, and Hermione heard the splash<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span>
+of oars in the calm water. She got up quickly. Now
+her body was trembling again. She stared at the boat
+as if she would force it to yield its secret to her eyes.
+But that was only for an instant. Then her ears seemed
+to be seeking the truth, seeking it from the sound of the
+oars in the water!</p>
+
+<p>There was no rhythmic regularity in the music they
+made, no steadiness, no&mdash;no&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>She listened passionately, instinctively bending down
+her head sideways. It seemed to her that she was listening
+to a drunken man rowing. Now there was a quick
+beating of the oars in the water, then silence, then a
+heavy splash as if one of the oars had escaped from an
+uncertain hand, then some uneven strokes, one oar
+striking the water after the other.</p>
+
+<p>"But Gaspare is a contadino," she said to herself,
+"not a fisherman. Gaspare is a contadino and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" she called out. "Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>The boat stopped midway in the mouth of the inlet.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! Is it you?"</p>
+
+<p>She saw a dark figure standing up in the boat.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, is it you?" she cried, more loudly.</p>
+
+<p>"Si."</p>
+
+<p>Was it Gaspare's voice? She did not recognize it.
+Yet the voice had answered "Yes." The boat still remained
+motionless on the water midway between shore
+and shore. She did not speak again; she was afraid to
+speak. She stood and stared at the boat and at the
+motionless figure standing up in it. Why did not he
+row in to land? What was he doing there? She stared
+at the boat and at the figure standing in it till she could
+see nothing. Then she shut her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" she called, keeping her eyes shut. "What
+are you doing? Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>There was no reply.</p>
+
+<p>She opened her eyes, and now she could see the boat
+again and the rower.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" she cried, with all her strength, to the
+black figure. "Why don't you row to the shore? Why
+don't you come to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Vengo!"</p>
+
+<p>Loudly the word came to her, loudly and sullenly as
+if the boy were angry with her, almost hated her. It
+was followed by a fierce splash of oars. The boat shot
+forward, coming straight towards her. Then suddenly
+the oars ceased from moving, the dark figure of the
+rower fell down in a heap, and she heard cries, like cries
+of despair, and broken exclamations, and then a long
+sound of furious weeping.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare! Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was strangled in her throat and died away.</p>
+
+<p>"And then, signora, I cried&mdash;I cried!"</p>
+
+<p>When had Gaspare said that to her? And why had
+he cried?</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>It came from her lips in a whisper almost inaudible
+to herself.</p>
+
+<p>Then she rushed forward into the dark water.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Late that night Dr. Marini, the doctor of the commune
+of Marechiaro, was roused from sleep in his house
+in the Corso by a violent knocking on his street door.
+He turned over in his bed, muttered a curse, then lay
+still for a moment and listened. The knocking was renewed
+more violently. Evidently the person who stood
+without was determined to gain admission. There was
+no help for it. The good doctor, who was no longer
+young, dropped his weary legs to the floor, walked across
+to the open window, and thrust his head out of it. A
+man was standing below.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it? What do you want?" said the doctor,
+in a grumbling voice. "Is it another baby? Upon my
+word, these&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Signor Dottore, come down, come down instantly!
+The signore of Monte Amato, the signore of the Casa
+del Prete has had an accident. You must come at once.
+I will go to fetch a donkey."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor leaned farther out of the window.</p>
+
+<p>"An accident! What&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>But the man, a fisherman of Marechiaro, was already
+gone, and the doctor saw only the narrow, deserted
+street, black with the shadows of the tall houses.</p>
+
+<p>He drew in quickly and began to dress himself with
+some expedition. An accident, and to a forestiere!
+There would be money in this case. He regretted his
+lost sleep less now and cursed no more, though he
+thought of the ride up into the mountains with a good
+deal of self-pity. It was no joke to be a badly paid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span>
+Sicilian doctor, he thought, as he tugged at his trousers
+buttons, and fastened the white front that covered the
+breast of his flannel shirt, and adjusted the cuffs which
+he took out of a small drawer. Without lighting a
+candle he went down-stairs, fumbled about, and found
+his case of instruments. Then he opened the street
+door and waited, yawning on the stone pavement. In
+two or three minutes he heard the tripping tip-tap of a
+donkey's hoofs, and the fisherman came up leading a
+donkey apparently as disinclined for a nocturnal flitting
+as the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Giuseppe, it's you, is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, Signor Dottore!"</p>
+
+<p>"What's this accident?"</p>
+
+<p>The fisherman looked grave and crossed himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, signore, it is terrible! They say the poor signore
+is dead!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dead!" exclaimed the doctor, startled. "You said
+is was an accident. Dead you say now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, he is dead beyond a doubt. I was going to
+the fishing when I heard dreadful cries in the water by
+the inlet&mdash;you know, by Salvatore's terreno!"</p>
+
+<p>"In the water?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. I went down quickly and I found Gaspare,
+the signore's&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know&mdash;I know!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare in a boat with the padrone lying at the bottom,
+and the signora standing up to her middle in the
+sea."</p>
+
+<p>"Z't! z't!" exclaimed the doctor, "the signora in the
+sea! Is she mad?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signor Dottore, how do I know? I brought the
+boat to shore. Gaspare was like one crazed. Then we
+lifted the signore out upon the stones. Oh, he is dead,
+Signor Dottore; dead beyond a doubt. They had found
+him in the sea&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"They?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare&mdash;under the rocks between Salvatore's terreno
+and the main-land. He had all his clothes on. He
+must have been there in the dark&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why should he go in the dark?"</p>
+
+<p>"How do I know, Signor Dottore?&mdash;and have fallen,
+and struck his head against the rocks. For there was
+a wound and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The body should not have been moved from where
+it lay till the Pretore had seen it. Gaspare should have
+left the body."</p>
+
+<p>"But perhaps the povero signore is not really dead,
+after all! Madonna! How&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Come! come! we must not delay! One minute! I
+will get some lint and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He disappeared into the house. Almost directly he
+came out again with a package under his arm and a
+long, black cigar lighted in his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Take these, Giuseppe! Carry them carefully. Now
+then!"</p>
+
+<p>He hoisted himself onto the donkey.</p>
+
+<p>"A-ah! A-ah!"</p>
+
+<p>They set off, the fisherman walking on naked feet beside
+the donkey.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we have to go down to the sea?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, Signor Dottore. There were others on the road,
+Antonio and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The rest of you going to the boats&mdash;I know. Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"And the signora would have him carried up to Monte
+Amato."</p>
+
+<p>"She could give directions?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. She ordered everything. When she
+came out of the sea she was all wet, the poor signora,
+but she was calm. I called the others. When they saw
+the signore they all cried out. They knew him. Some
+of them had been to the fishing with him. Oh, they
+were sorry! They all began to speak and to try to&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Diavolo! They could only make things worse! If<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span>
+the breath of life was in the signore's body they would
+drive it out. Per Dio!"</p>
+
+<p>"But the signora stopped them. She told them to
+be silent and to carry the signore up to the Casa del
+Prete. Signore, she&mdash;the povera signora&mdash;she took his
+head in her hands. She held his head and she never
+cried, not a tear!"</p>
+
+<p>The man brushed his hand across his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Povera signora! Povera signora!" murmured the
+doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"And she comforted Gaspare, too!" Giuseppe added.
+"She put her arm round him and told him to be brave,
+and help her. She made him walk by her and put his
+hand under the padrone's shoulder. Madonna!"</p>
+
+<p>They turned away from the village into a narrow
+path that led into the hills.</p>
+
+<p>"And I came to fetch you, Signor Dottore. Perhaps
+the povero signore is not really dead. Perhaps you can
+save him, Signor Dottore!"</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?" replied the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>He had let his cigar go out and did not know it.</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?" he repeated, mechanically.</p>
+
+<p>Then they went on in silence&mdash;till they reached the
+shoulder of the mountain under Castel Vecchio. From
+here they could see across the ravine to the steep slope
+of Monte Amato. Upon it, high up, a light shone, and
+presently a second light detached itself from the first,
+moved a little way, and then was stationary.</p>
+
+<p>Giuseppe pointed.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, Signor Dottore! They have carried the poor
+signore up."</p>
+
+<p>The second light moved waveringly back towards the
+first.</p>
+
+<p>"They are carrying him into the house, Signor Dottore.
+Madonna! And all this to happen in the night!"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor nodded without speaking. He was watching
+the lights up there in that lonely place. He was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span>
+a man of strong imagination, and was accustomed to
+look on misery, the misery of the poor. But to-night he
+felt a certain solemnity descend upon him as he rode by
+these dark by-paths up into the bosom of the hills.
+Perhaps part of this feeling came from the fact that his
+mission had to do with strangers, with rich people from
+a distant country who had come to his island for pleasure,
+and who were now suddenly involved in tragedy in
+the midst of their amusement. But also he had a certain
+sense of personal sympathy. He had known Hermione
+on her former visit to Sicily and had liked her;
+and though this time he had seen scarcely anything of
+her he had seen enough to be aware that she was very
+happy with her young husband. Maurice, too, he had
+seen, full of the joy of youth and of bounding health.
+And now all that was put out, if Giuseppe's account
+were true.    It was a pity, a sad pity.</p>
+
+<p>The donkey crossed the mouth of the ravine, and
+picked its way upward carefully amid the loose stones.
+In the ravine a little owl hooted twice.</p>
+
+<p>"Giuseppe!" said the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"The signora has been away, hasn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si signore.    In Africa."</p>
+
+<p>"Nursing that sick stranger. And now directly she
+comes back here's this happening to her!    Per Dio!"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody must have looked on the povera signora
+with the evil-eye, Signor Dottore."</p>
+
+<p>Giuseppe crossed himself.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems so," the doctor replied, gravely.</p>
+
+<p>He was almost as superstitious as the contadini among
+whom he labored.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, Signor Dottore!"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor looked up. At the arch stood a figure
+holding a little lamp. Almost immediately, two more
+figures appeared behind it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Il dottore!    Ecco il dottore!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a murmur of voices in the dark. As the
+donkey came up the excited fishermen crowded round,
+all speaking at once.</p>
+
+<p>"He is dead, Signor Dottore. The povero signore is
+dead!"</p>
+
+<p>"Let the Signor Dottore come to him, Beppe! What
+do you know?    Let the&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure enough he is dead! Why, he must have been
+in the water a good hour. He is all swollen with the
+water and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It is his head, Signor Dottore! If it had not been
+for his coming against the rocks he would not have been
+hurt. Per Dio, he can swim like a fish, the povero signorino.
+I have seen him swim.    Why, even Peppino&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The signora wants us all to go away, Signor Dottore.
+She begs us to go and leave her alone with the povero
+signore!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare is in such a state! You would not know
+him. And the povera signora, she is all dripping wet.
+She has been into the sea, and now she has carried the
+head of the povero signore all the way up the mountain.
+She would not let any one&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A succession of cries came out of the darkness, hysterical
+cries that ended in prolonged sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>"That is Lucrezia!" cried one of the fishermen.
+"Madonna!    That is Lucrezia!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia!    Mamma mia!"</p>
+
+<p>Their voices were loud in the night. The doctor pushed
+his way between the men and came onto the terrace
+in front of the steps that led into the sitting-room.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare was standing there alone. His face was almost
+unrecognizable. It looked battered, puffy, and
+inflamed, as if he had been drinking and fighting. There
+were no tears in his eyes now, but long, violent sobs
+shook his body from time to time, and his blistered lips
+opened and shut mechanically with each sob.    He stared<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span>
+dully at the doctor, but did not say a word, or move to
+get out of the way.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" said the doctor.    "Where is the padrona?"</p>
+
+<p>The boy sobbed and sobbed, always in the same dry
+and terribly mechanical way.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" repeated the doctor, touching him. "Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>"E' morto!" the boy suddenly cried out, in a loud
+voice.</p>
+
+<p>And he flung himself down on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor felt a thrill of cold in his veins. He went
+up the steps into the little sitting-room. As he did so
+Hermione came to the door of the bedroom. Her dripping
+skirts clung about her. She looked quite calm.
+Without greeting the doctor she said, quietly:</p>
+
+<p>"You heard what Gaspare said?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora, ma&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stopped, staring at her. He began to feel
+almost dazed. The fishermen had followed him and
+stood crowding together on the steps and staring into
+the room.</p>
+
+<p>"He is dead.    I am sorry you came all this way."</p>
+
+<p>They stood there facing one another. From the
+kitchen came the sound of Lucrezia's cries. Hermione
+put her hands up to her ears.</p>
+
+<p>"Please&mdash;please&mdash;oh, there should be a little silence
+here now!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time there was a sound of something like
+despair in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me come in, signora!" stammered the doctor.
+"Let me come in and examine him."</p>
+
+<p>"He is dead."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but let me.    I must!"</p>
+
+<p>"Please come in," she said.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor turned round to the fishermen.</p>
+
+<p>"Go, one of you, and make that girl keep quiet," he
+said, angrily.    "Take her away  out of the house<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span>&mdash;directly!
+Do you hear? And the rest of you stay
+outside, and don't make a sound."</p>
+
+<p>The fishermen slunk a little way back into the darkness,
+while Giuseppe, walking on the toes of his bare feet,
+and glancing nervously at the furniture and the pictures
+upon the walls, crossed the room and disappeared into
+the kitchen. Then the doctor laid down his cigar on a
+table and went into the bedroom whither Hermione had
+preceded him.</p>
+
+<p>There was a lighted candle on the white chest of
+drawers. The window and the shutters of the room
+were closed against the glances of the fishermen. On
+one of the two beds&mdash;Hermione's&mdash;lay the body of a
+man dripping with water. The doctor took the candle
+in his hand, went to this bed and leaned down, then set
+down the candle at the bedhead and made a brief examination.
+He found at once that Gaspare had spoken
+the truth. This man had been dead for some time.
+Nevertheless, something&mdash;he scarcely knew what&mdash;kept
+the doctor there by the bed for some moments before
+he pronounced his verdict. Never before had he felt so
+great a reluctance to speak the simple words that would
+convey a great truth. He fingered his shirt-front uneasily,
+and stared at the body on the bed and at the
+wet sheets and pillows. Meanwhile, Hermione had sat
+down on a chair near the door that opened into what
+had been Maurice's dressing-room, and folded her hands
+in her lap. The doctor did not look towards her, but he
+felt her presence painfully. Lucrezia's cries had died
+away, and there was complete silence for a brief space
+of time.</p>
+
+<p>The body on the bed was swollen, but not very much,
+the face was sodden, the hair plastered to the head, and
+on the left temple there was a large wound, evidently,
+as the doctor had seen, caused by the forehead striking
+violently against a hard, resisting substance. It was
+not the sea alone which had killed this man.    It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span>
+the sea and the rock in the sea. He had fallen, been
+stunned and then drowned. The doctor knew the place
+where he had been found. The explanation of the
+tragedy was very simple&mdash;very simple.</p>
+
+<p>While the doctor was thinking this, and fingering his
+shirt-front mechanically, and bracing himself to turn
+towards the quiet woman in the chair, he heard a loud,
+dry noise in the sitting-room, then in the bedroom.
+Gaspare had come in, and was standing at the foot of
+the bed, sobbing and staring at the doctor with hopeless
+eyes, that yet asked a last question, begged desperately
+for a lie.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>The woman in the chair whispered to him. He took
+no notice.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>She got up and crossed over to the boy, and took one
+of his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no use," she said. "Perhaps he is happy."</p>
+
+<p>Then the boy began to cry passionately. Tears poured
+out of his eyes while he held his padrona's hand.
+The doctor got up.</p>
+
+<p>"He is dead, signora," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"We knew it," Hermione replied.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the doctor for a minute. Then she
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stood by the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Scusi, signora," he said, "but&mdash;but will you take
+him into the next room?"</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to Gaspare, who shivered as he wept.</p>
+
+<p>"I must make a further examination."</p>
+
+<p>"Why? You see that he is dead."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but&mdash;there are certain formalities."</p>
+
+<p>He stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Formalities!" she said. "He is dead."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. But&mdash;but the authorities will have to be in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span>formed.
+I am very sorry. I should wish to leave everything
+undisturbed."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean? Gaspare! Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;according to the law, our law, the body should
+never have been moved. It should have been left where
+it was found until&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We could not leave him in the sea."</p>
+
+<p>She still spoke quite quietly, but the doctor felt as if
+he could not go on.</p>
+
+<p>"Since it is done&mdash;" he began.</p>
+
+<p>He pulled himself together with an effort.</p>
+
+<p>"There will have to be an inquiry, signora&mdash;the cause
+of death will have to be ascertained."</p>
+
+<p>"You see it. He was coming from the island. He
+fell and was drowned. It is very simple."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, no doubt. Still, there must be an inquiry.
+Gaspare will have to explain&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at the weeping boy, then at the woman
+who stood there holding the boy's hand in hers.</p>
+
+<p>"But that will be for to-morrow," he muttered, fingering
+his shirt-front and looking down. "That will be for
+to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>As he went out he added:</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, do not remain in your wet clothes."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;oh, thank you. They do not matter."</p>
+
+<p>She did not follow him into the next room. As he
+went down the steps to the terrace the sound of Gaspare's
+passionate weeping followed him into the night.</p>
+
+<p>When the doctor was on the donkey and was riding
+out through the arch, after a brief colloquy with the
+fishermen and with Giuseppe, whom he had told to remain
+at the cottage for the rest of the night, he suddenly
+remembered the cigar which he had left upon the table,
+and he pulled up.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Signor Dottore?" said one of the fishermen.</p>
+
+<p>"I've left something, but&mdash;never mind. It does not
+matter."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He rode on again.</p>
+
+<p>"It does not matter," he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>He was thinking of the English signora standing beside
+the bed in her wet skirts and holding the hand of
+the weeping boy.</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time in his life that he had ever sacrificed
+a good cigar.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered why he did so now, but he did not care
+to return just then to the Casa del Prete.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Hermione longed for quiet, for absolute silence.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed strange to her that she still longed for anything&mdash;strange
+and almost horrible, almost inhuman.
+But she did long for that, to be able to sit beside her
+dead husband and to be undisturbed, to hear no voice
+speaking, no human movement, to see no one. If it
+had been possible she would have closed the cottage
+against every one, even against Gaspare and Lucrezia.
+But it was not possible. Destiny did not choose that
+she should have this calm, this silence. It had seemed
+to her, when fear first came upon her, as if no one but
+herself had any real concern with Maurice, as if her love
+conferred upon her a monopoly. This monopoly had
+been one of joy. Now it should be one of sorrow. But
+now it did not exist. She was not weeping for Maurice.
+But others were. She had no one to go to. But others
+came to her, clung to her. She could not rid herself of
+the human burden.</p>
+
+<p>She might have been selfish, determined, she might
+have driven the mourners out. But&mdash;and that was
+strange, too&mdash;she found herself pitying them, trying to
+use her intellect to soothe them.</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia was terrified, almost like one assailed suddenly
+by robbers, terrified and half incredulous. When
+her hysteria subsided she was at first unbelieving.</p>
+
+<p>"He cannot be really dead, signora!" she sobbed to
+Hermione. "The povero signorino. He was so gay!
+He was so&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She talked and talked, as Sicilians do when face to
+face with tragedy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She recalled Maurice's characteristics, his kindness, his
+love of climbing, fishing, bathing, his love of the sun&mdash;all
+his love of life.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione had to listen to the story with that body
+lying on her bed.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare's grief was speechless, but needed comfort
+more. There was an element in it of fury which Hermione
+realized without rightly understanding. She
+supposed it was the fury of a boy from whom something
+is taken by one whom he cannot attack.</p>
+
+<p>For God is beyond our reach.</p>
+
+<p>She could not understand the conflict going on in the
+boy's heart and mind.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that this death was probably no natural
+death, but a murder.</p>
+
+<p>Neither Maddalena nor her father had been in the
+Casa delle Sirene when he knocked upon the door in the
+night. Salvatore had sent Maddalena to spend the
+night with relations in Marechiaro, on the pretext that
+he was going to sail to Messina on some business. And
+he had actually sailed before Gaspare's arrival on the
+island. But Gaspare knew that there had been a meeting,
+and he knew what the Sicilian is when he is wronged.
+The words "vengeance is mine!" are taken in Sicily by
+each wronged man into his own mouth, and Salvatore
+was notoriously savage and passionate.</p>
+
+<p>As the first shock of horror and despair passed away
+from Gaspare he was devoured, as by teeth, devoured
+by the desire to spring upon Salvatore and revenge the
+death of his padrone. But the padrone had laid a
+solemn injunction upon him. Solemn, indeed, it seemed
+to the boy now that the lips which had spoken were
+sealed forever. The padrona was never to know. If he
+obeyed his impulse, if he declared the vendetta against
+Salvatore, the padrona would know. The knife that
+spilled the murderer's blood would give the secret to the
+world&mdash;and to the padrona.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tremendous that night was the conflict in the boy's
+soul. He would not leave Hermione. He was like the
+dog that creeps to lie at the feet of his sorrowing mistress.
+But he was more than that. For he had his
+own sorrow and his own fury. And he had the battle
+with his own instincts.</p>
+
+<p>What was he going to do?</p>
+
+<p>As he began to think, really to think, and to realize
+things, he knew that after such a death the authorities
+of Marechiaro, the Pretore and the Cancelliere, would
+proceed to hold a careful examination into the causes
+of death. He would be questioned. That was certain.
+The opportunity would be given him to denounce Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>And was he to keep silence? Was he to act for Salvatore,
+to save Salvatore from justice? He would not
+have minded doing that, he would have wished to do it,
+if afterwards he could have sprung upon Salvatore and
+buried his knife in the murderer of his padrone.</p>
+
+<p>But&mdash;the padrona? She was not to know. She was
+never to know. And she had been the first in his life.
+She had found him, a poor, ragged little boy working
+among the vines, and she had given him new clothes
+and had taken him into her home and into her confidence.
+She had trusted him. She had remembered
+him in England. She had written to him from far
+away, telling him to prepare everything for her and the
+padrone when they were coming.</p>
+
+<p>He began to sob violently again, thinking of it all, of
+how he had ordered the donkeys to fetch the luggage
+from the station, of how&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>Hermione again put her hand on his. She was sitting
+near the bed on which the body was lying between dry
+sheets. For she had changed them with Gaspare's assistance.
+Maurice still wore the clothes which had been
+on him in the sea. Giuseppe, the fisherman, had ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span>plained
+to Hermione that she must not interfere with
+the body till it had been visited by the authorities, and
+she had obeyed him. But she had changed the sheets.
+She scarcely knew why. Now the clothes had almost
+dried on the body, and she did not see any more the
+stains of water. One sheet was drawn up over the
+body, to the chin. The matted dark hair was visible
+against the pillow, and had made her think several
+times vaguely of that day after the fishing when she had
+watched Maurice taking his siesta. She had longed for
+him to wake then, for she had known that she was going
+to Africa, that they had only a few hours together before
+she started. It had seemed almost terrible to her,
+his sleeping through any of those hours. And now he
+was sleeping forever. She was sitting there waiting for
+nothing, but she could not realize that yet. She felt
+as if she must be waiting for something, that something
+must presently occur, a movement in the bed, a&mdash;she
+scarcely knew what.</p>
+
+<p>Presently the clock Gaspare had brought from the
+fair chimed, then played the "Tre Colori." Lucrezia
+had set it to play that evening when she was waiting for
+the padrone to return from the sea.</p>
+
+<p>When he heard the tinkling tune Gaspare lifted his
+head and listened till it was over. It recalled to him
+all the glories of the fair. He saw his padrone before
+him. He remembered how he had decorated Maurice
+with flowers, and he felt as if his heart would break.</p>
+
+<p>"The povero signorino! the povero signorino!" he
+cried, in a choked voice. "And I put roses above his ears!
+Si, signora, I did! I said he should be a real Siciliano!"</p>
+
+<p>He began to rock himself to and fro. His whole body
+shook, and his face had a frantic expression that suggested
+violence.</p>
+
+<p>"I put roses above his ears!" he repeated. "That
+day he was a real Siciliano!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare&mdash;Gaspare&mdash;hush! Don't! Don't!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She held his hand and went on speaking softly.</p>
+
+<p>"We must be quiet in here. We must remember to
+be quiet. It isn't our fault, Gaspare. We did all we
+could to make him happy. We ought to be glad of
+that. You did everything you could, and he loved you
+for it. He was happy with us. I think he was. I
+think he was happy till the very end. And that is something
+to be glad of. Don't you think he was very
+happy here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signora!" the boy whispered, with twitching lips.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad I came back in time," Hermione said, looking
+at the dark hair on the pillow. "It might have happened
+before, while I was away. I'm glad we had one
+more day together."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, as she said that, something in the mere
+sound of the words seemed to reveal more clearly to her
+heart what had befallen her, and for the first time she
+began to cry and to remember. She remembered all
+Maurice's tenderness for her, all his little acts of kindness.
+They seemed to pass rapidly in procession through
+her mind on their way to her heart. Not one surely was
+absent. How kind to her he had always been! And he
+could never be kind to her again. And she could never
+be kind to him&mdash;never again.</p>
+
+<p>Her tears went on falling quietly. She did not sob
+like Gaspare. But she felt that now she had begun to
+cry she would never be able to stop again; that she
+would go on crying till she, too, died.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare looked up at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora!" he said. "Signora!"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he got up, as if to go out of the room, out
+of the house. The sight of his padrona's tears had
+driven him nearly mad with the desire to wreak vengeance
+upon Salvatore. For a moment his body seemed
+to get beyond his control. His eyes saw blood, and his
+hand darted down to his belt, and caught at the knife
+that was there, and drew it out. When Hermione saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span>
+the knife she thought the boy was going to kill himself
+with it. She sprang up, went swiftly to Gaspare, and
+put her hand on it over his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, what are you doing?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment his face was horrible in its savagery.
+He opened his mouth, still keeping his grasp on the
+knife, which she tried to wrest from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Lasci andare! Lasci andare!" he said, beginning to
+struggle with her.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Gaspare."</p>
+
+<p>"Allora&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He paused with his mouth open.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment he was on the very verge of a revelation
+of the truth. He was on the point of telling
+Hermione that he was sure that the padrone had been
+murdered, and that he meant to avenge the murder.
+Hermione believed that for the moment he was mad,
+and was determined to destroy himself in her presence.
+It was useless to pit her strength against his. In a physical
+struggle she must be overcome. Her only chance
+was to subdue him by other means.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," she said, quickly, breathlessly, pointing
+to the bed. "Don't you think the padrone would have
+wished you to take care of me now? He trusted you.
+I think he would. I think he would rather you were
+with me than any one else in the whole world. You
+must take care of me. You must take care of me. You
+must never leave me!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy looked at her. His face changed, grew
+softer.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got nobody now," she added. "Nobody but
+you."</p>
+
+<p>The knife fell on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>In that moment Gaspare's resolve was taken. The
+battle within him was over. He must protect the
+padrona. The padrone would have wished it. Then
+he must let Salvatore go.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He bent down and kissed Hermione's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Lei non piange!" he muttered. "Forse Dio la aiuter&agrave;."</p>
+
+<p>In the morning, early, Hermione left the body for
+the first time, went into the dressing-room, changed her
+clothes, then came back and said to Gaspare:</p>
+
+<p>"I am going a little way up the mountain, Gaspare.
+I shall not be long. No, don't come with me. Stay
+with him. Are you dreadfully tired?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signora."</p>
+
+<p>"We shall be able to rest presently," she said.</p>
+
+<p>She was thinking of the time when they would take
+Maurice from her. She left Gaspare sitting near the bed,
+and went out onto the terrace. Lucrezia and Gaspare,
+both thoroughly tired out, were sleeping soundly. She
+was thankful for that. Soon, she knew, she would have
+to be with people, to talk, to make arrangements. But
+now she had a short spell of solitude.</p>
+
+<p>She went slowly up the mountain-side till she was
+near the top. Then she sat down on a rock and looked
+out towards the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The world was not awake yet, although the sun was
+coming. Etna was like a great phantom, the waters at
+its foot were pale in their tranquillity. The air was
+fresh, but there was no wind to rustle the leaves of the
+oak-trees, upon whose crested heads Hermione gazed
+down with quiet, tearless eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She had a strange feeling of being out of the world,
+as if she had left it, but still had the power to see it.
+She wondered if Maurice felt like that.</p>
+
+<p>He had said it would be good to lie beneath those oak-trees
+in sight of Etna and the sea. How she wished that
+she could lay his body there, alone, away from all other
+dead. But that was impossible, she supposed. She remembered
+the doctor's words. What were they going
+to do? She did not know anything about Italian procedure
+in such an event. Would they take him away?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span>
+She had no intention of trying to resist anything, of
+offering any opposition. It would be useless, and besides
+he had gone away. Already he was far off. She
+did not feel, as many women do, that so long as they
+are with the body of their dead they are also with the
+soul. She would like to keep the dear body, to have it
+always near to her, to live close to the spot where it was
+committed to the earth. But Maurice was gone. Her
+Mercury had winged his way from her, obedient to a
+summons that she had not heard. Always she had
+thought of him as swift, and swiftly, without warning,
+he had left her. He had died young. Was that wonderful?
+She thought not. No; age could have nothing
+to say to him, could hold no commerce with him.
+He had been born to be young and never to be anything
+else. It seemed to her now strange that she had not
+felt this, foreseen that it must be so. And yet, only
+yesterday, she had imagined a far future, and their child
+laying them in the ground of Sicily, side by side, and
+murmuring "Buon riposo" above their mutual sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Their child! A life had been taken from her. Soon
+a life would be given to her. Was that what is called
+compensation? Perhaps so. Many strange thoughts,
+come she could not tell why, were passing through her
+mind as she sat upon this height in the dawn. The
+thought of compensation recalled to her the Book of
+Job. Everything was taken from Job; not only his
+flocks and his herds, but his sons and his daughters.
+And then at the last he was compensated. He was
+given new flocks and herds and new sons and daughters.
+And it was supposed to be well with Job. If it was well
+with Job, then Job had been a man without a heart.</p>
+
+<p>Never could she be compensated for this loss, which
+she was trying to realize, but which she would not be
+able to realize until the days went by, and the nights,
+the days and the nights of the ordinary life, when tragedy
+was supposed to be over and done with, and people<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span>
+would say, and no doubt sincerely believe, that she was
+"getting accustomed" to her loss.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking of Job led her on to think of God's dealings
+with His creatures.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione was a woman who clung to no special
+religion, but she had always, all her life, had a very
+strong personal consciousness of a directing Power in
+the world, had always had an innate conviction that
+this directing Power followed with deep interest the life
+of each individual in the scheme of His creation. She
+had always felt, she felt now, that God knew everything
+about her and her life, was aware of all her feelings, was
+constantly intent upon her.</p>
+
+<p>He was intent. But was He kindly or was He cruelly
+intent?</p>
+
+<p>Surely He had been dreadfully cruel to her!</p>
+
+<p>Only yesterday she had been wondering what bereaved
+women felt about God. Now she was one of these women.</p>
+
+<p>"Was Maurice dead?" she thought&mdash;"was he already
+dead when I was praying before the shrine of the Madonna
+della Rocca?"</p>
+
+<p>She longed to know. Yet she scarcely knew why she
+longed. It was like a strange, almost unnatural curiosity
+which she could not at first explain to herself.
+But presently her mind grew clearer and she connected
+this question with that other question&mdash;of God and
+what He really was, what He really felt towards His
+creatures, towards her.</p>
+
+<p>Had God allowed her to pray like that, with all her
+heart and soul, and then immediately afterwards deliberately
+delivered her over to the fate of desolate
+women, or had Maurice been already dead? If that were
+so, and it must surely have been so, for when she prayed
+it was already night, she had been led to pray for herself
+ignorantly, and God had taken away her joy before He had
+heard her prayer. If He had heard it first He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span>
+surely could not have dealt so cruelly with her&mdash;so
+cruelly! No human being could have, she thought,
+even the most hard-hearted.</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps God was not all-powerful.</p>
+
+<p>She remembered that once in London she had asked
+a clever and good clergyman if, looking around upon
+the state of things in the world, he was able to believe
+without difficulty that the world was governed by an
+all-wise, all-powerful, and all-merciful God. And his
+reply to her had been, "I sometimes wonder whether
+God is all-powerful&mdash;yet." She had not pursued the
+subject, but she had not forgotten this answer; and she
+thought of it now.</p>
+
+<p>Was there a conflict in the regions beyond the world
+which was the only one she knew? Had an enemy done
+this thing, an enemy not only of hers, but of God's, an
+enemy who had power over God?</p>
+
+<p>That thought was almost more terrible than the
+thought that God had been cruel to her.</p>
+
+<p>She sat for a long time wondering, thinking, but not
+praying. She did not feel as if she could ever pray any
+more. The world was lighted up by the sun. The sea
+began to gleam, the coast-line to grow more distinct, the
+outlines of the mountains and of the Saracenic Castle
+on the height opposite to her more hard and more barbaric
+against the deepening blue. She saw smoke coming
+from the mouth of Etna, sideways, as if blown towards
+the sea. A shepherd boy piped somewhere below
+her. And still the tune was the tarantella. She listened
+to it&mdash;the tarantella. So short a time ago Maurice
+had danced with the boys upon the terrace! How can
+such life be so easily extinguished? How can such joy
+be not merely clouded but utterly destroyed? A moment,
+and from the body everything is expelled; light
+from the eyes, speech from the lips, movement from the
+limbs, joy, passion from the heart. How can such a
+thing be?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The little shepherd boy played on and on. He was
+nearer now. He was ascending the slope of the mountain,
+coming up towards heaven with his little happy
+tune. She heard him presently among the oak-trees
+immediately below her, passing almost at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>To Hermione the thin sound of the reed-flute always
+had suggested Arcady. Even now it suggested Arcady&mdash;the
+Arcady of the imagination: wide soft airs, blue
+skies and seas, eternal sunshine and delicious shade,
+and happiness where is a sweet noise of waters and of
+birds, a sweet and deep breathing of kind and bounteous
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>And that little boy with the flute would die. His
+foot might slip now as he came upward, and no more
+could he play souls into Arcady!</p>
+
+<p>The tune wound away to her left, like a gay and careless
+living thing that was travelling ever upward, then
+once more came towards her. But now it was above
+her. She turned her head and she saw the little player
+against the blue. He was on a rock, and for a moment
+he stood still. On his head was a long woollen cap,
+hanging over at one side. It made Hermione think of
+the woollen cap she had seen come out of the darkness
+of the ravine as she waited with Gaspare for the padrone.
+Against the blue, standing on the gray and sunlit rock,
+with the flute at his lips, and his tiny, deep-brown fingers
+moving swiftly, he looked at one with the mountain
+and yet almost unearthly, almost as if the blue had
+given birth to him for a moment, and in a moment
+would draw him back again into the womb of its wonder.
+His goats were all around him, treading delicately
+among the rocks. As Hermione watched he turned and
+went away into the blue, and the tarantella went away
+into the blue with him.</p>
+
+<p>Her Sicilian and his tarantella, the tarantella of his
+joy in Sicily&mdash;they had gone away into the blue.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at it, deep, quivering, passionate, intense;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span>
+thousands and thousands of miles of blue! And she
+listened as she looked; listened for some far-off tarantella,
+for some echo of a fainting tarantella, that might
+be a message to her, a message left on the sweet air of
+the enchanted island, telling her where the winged feet
+of her beloved one mounted towards the sun.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Giuseppe came to fetch Hermione from the mountain.
+He had a note in his hand and also a message to
+give. The authorities were already at the cottage; the
+Pretore of Marechiaro with his Cancelliere, Dr. Marini
+and the Maresciallo of the Carabinieri.</p>
+
+<p>"They have come already?" Hermione said. "So soon?"</p>
+
+<p>She took the note.    It was from Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a boy waiting, signora," said Giuseppe.
+"Gaspare is with the Signor Pretore."</p>
+
+<p>She opened Emile's note.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I cannot write anything except this&mdash;do you wish me to
+come?&mdash;E."</p></div>
+
+<p>"Do I wish him to come?" she thought.</p>
+
+<p>She repeated the words mentally several times, while
+the fisherman stood by her, staring at her with sympathy.
+Then she went down to the cottage.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Marini met her on the terrace. He looked embarrassed.
+He was expecting a terrible scene.</p>
+
+<p>"Signora," he said, "I am very sorry, but&mdash;but I am
+obliged to perform my duty."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said.    "Of course.    What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"As there is a hospital in Marechiaro&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"The autopsy of the body must take place there.
+Otherwise I could have&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You have come to take him away," she said. "I
+understand.    Very well."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But they could not take him away, these people. For
+he was gone; he had gone away into the blue.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor looked relieved, though surprised, at her
+apparent nonchalance.</p>
+
+<p>"I am very sorry, signora," he said&mdash;"very sorry."</p>
+
+<p>"Must I see the Pretore?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid so, signora. They will want to ask you
+a few questions. The body ought not to have been
+moved from the place where&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We could not leave him in the sea," she said, as she
+had said in the night.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no.    You will only just have to say&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I will tell them what I know. He went down to bathe."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. But the Pretore will want to know why he
+went to Salvatore's terreno."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose he bathed from there. He knew the people
+in the Casa delle Sirene, I believe."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke indifferently. It seemed to her so utterly
+useless, this inquiry by strangers into the cause of her
+sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>"I must just write something," she added.</p>
+
+<p>She went up the steps into the sitting-room. Gaspare
+was there with three men&mdash;the Pretore, the Cancelliere
+and the Maresciallo. As she came in the strangers
+turned and saluted her with grave politeness, all
+looking earnestly at her with their dark eyes. But Gaspare
+did not look at her. He had the ugly expression
+on his face that Hermione had noticed the day before.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you please allow me to write a line to a friend?"
+Hermione said. "Then I shall be ready to answer your
+questions."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, signora," said the Pretore; "we are very
+sorry to disturb you, but it is our duty."</p>
+
+<p>He had gray hair and a dark mustache, and his black
+eyes looked as if they had been varnished.</p>
+
+<p>Hermione went to the writing-table, while the men
+stood in silence filling up the little room.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What shall I say?" she thought.</p>
+
+<p>She heard the boots of the Cancelliere creak as he
+shifted his feet upon the floor. The Maresciallo cleared
+his throat.  There was a moment of hesitation. Then
+he went to the steps and spat upon the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't come yet," she wrote, slowly.</p>
+
+<p>Then she turned round.</p>
+
+<p>"How long will your inquiry take, do you think,
+signore?" she asked of the Pretore. "When will&mdash;when
+can the funeral take place?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora, I trust to-morrow. I hope&mdash;I do not suppose
+there will be any reason to suspect, after what Dr.
+Marini has told us and we have seen, that the death was
+anything but an accident&mdash;an accident which we all most
+deeply grieve for."</p>
+
+<p>"It was an accident."</p>
+
+<p>She stood by the table with the pen in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose&mdash;I suppose he must be buried in the
+Campo Santo?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you wish to convey the body to England, signora?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no. He loved Sicily. He wished to stay always
+here, I think, although&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She broke off.</p>
+
+<p>"I could never take him away from Sicily. But there
+is a place here&mdash;under the oak-trees. He was very fond
+of it."</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare began to sob, then controlled himself with a
+desperate effort, turned round and stood with his face
+to the wall.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose, if I could buy a piece of land there, it
+could not be permitted&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the Pretore.</p>
+
+<p>"I am very sorry, signora, such a thing could not possibly
+be allowed. If the body is buried here it must be
+in the Campo Santo."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She turned to the table and wrote after "Don't come
+yet":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"They are taking him away now to the hospital in the village.
+I shall come down. I think the funeral will be to-morrow.
+They tell me he must be buried in the Campo Santo. I
+should have liked him to lie here under the oak-trees."</p>
+
+<p>
+"<span class="smcap">Hermione.</span>"<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>When Artois read this note tears came into his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>No event in his life had shocked him so much as the
+death of Delarey.</p>
+
+<p>It had shocked both his intellect and his heart. And
+yet his intellect could hardly accept it as a fact. When,
+early that morning, one of the servants of the H&ocirc;tel
+Regina Margherita had rushed into his room to tell him,
+he had refused to believe it. But then he had seen the
+fishermen, and finally Dr. Marini. And he had been
+obliged to believe. His natural impulse was to go to
+his friend in her trouble as she had come to him in his.
+But he checked it. His agony had been physical. Hers
+was of the affections, and how far greater than his had
+ever been! He could not bear to think of it. A great
+and generous indignation seized him, an indignation
+against the catastrophes of life. That this should be
+Hermione's reward for her noble unselfishness roused
+in him something that was like fury; and then there followed
+a more torturing fury against himself.</p>
+
+<p>He had deprived her of days and weeks of happiness.
+Such a short span of joy had been allotted to her, and
+he had not allowed her to have even that. He had
+called her away. He dared not trust himself to write
+any word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do
+so would be a hideous irony, and he sent the line in
+pencil which she had received. And then he walked up
+and down in his little sitting-room, raging against himself,
+hating himself.</p>
+
+<p>In his now bitterly acute consideration of his friend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span>ship
+with Hermione he realized that he had always been
+selfish, always the egoist claiming rather than the generous
+donor. He had taken his burdens to her, not
+weakly, for he was not a weak man, but with a desire
+to be eased of some of their weight. He had always
+been calling upon her for sympathy, and she had always
+been lavishly responding, scattering upon him the wealth
+of her great heart.</p>
+
+<p>And now he had deprived her of nearly all the golden
+time that had been stored up for her by the decree of
+the Gods, of God, of Fate, of&mdash;whatever it was that
+ruled, that gave and that deprived.</p>
+
+<p>A bitterness of shame gripped him. He felt like a
+criminal. He said to himself that the selfish man is a
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>"She will hate me," he said to himself. "She must.
+She can't help it."</p>
+
+<p>Again the egoist was awake and speaking within him.
+He realized that immediately and felt almost a fear of
+this persistence of character. What is the use of cleverness,
+of clear sight into others, even of genius, when the
+self of a man declines to change, declines to be what is
+not despicable?</p>
+
+<p>"Mon Dieu!" he thought, passionately. "And even
+now I must be thinking of my cursed self!"</p>
+
+<p>He was beset by an intensity of desire to do something
+for Hermione. For once in his life his heart, the
+heart she believed in and he was inclined to doubt or to
+despise, drove him as it might have driven a boy, even
+such a one as Maurice. It seemed to him that unless he
+could do something to make atonement he could never
+be with Hermione again, could never bear to be with
+her again.    But what could he do?</p>
+
+<p>"At least," he thought, "I may be able to spare her
+something to-day. I may be able to arrange with these
+people about the funeral, about all the practical things
+that are so frightful a burden to the living who have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span>
+loved the dead, in the last moments before the dead are
+given to the custody of the earth."</p>
+
+<p>And then he thought of the inquiry, of the autopsy.
+Could he not help her, spare her perhaps, in connection
+with them?</p>
+
+<p>Despite his weakness of body he felt feverishly active,
+feverishly desirous to be of practical use. If he could
+do something he would think less, too; and there were
+thoughts which seemed furtively trying to press themselves
+forward in the chambers of his mind, but which,
+as yet, he was, also furtively, pushing back, striving to
+keep in the dark place from which they desired to
+emerge.</p>
+
+<p>Artois knew Sicily well, and he knew that such a
+death as this would demand an inquiry, might raise
+suspicions in the minds of the authorities of Marechiaro.
+And in his own mind?</p>
+
+<p>He was a mentally courageous man, but he longed
+now to leave Marechiaro, to leave Sicily at once, carrying
+Hermione with him. A great dread was not actually
+with him, but was very near to him.</p>
+
+<p>Presently something, he did not know what, drew
+him to the window of his bedroom which looked out
+towards the main street of the village. As he came to
+it he heard a dull murmur of voices, and saw the Sicilians
+crowding to their doors and windows, and coming out
+upon their balconies.</p>
+
+<p>The body of Maurice was being borne to the hospital
+which was at the far end of the town. As soon as he
+realized that, Artois closed his window. He could not
+look with the curious on that procession. He went back
+into his sitting-room, which faced the sea. But he felt
+the procession going past, and was enveloped in the
+black wonder of death.</p>
+
+<p>That he should be alive and Delarey dead! How extraordinary
+that was!  For he had been close to death,
+so close that it would have seemed quite natural to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span>
+him to die. Had not Hermione come to him, he thought,
+he would almost, at the crucial stage in his illness, have
+preferred to die. It would have been a far easier, far
+simpler act than the return to health and his former
+powers. And now he stood here alive, looking at the
+sea, and Delarey's dead body was being carried to the
+hospital.</p>
+
+<p>Was the fact that he was alive the cause of the fact
+that Delarey was dead? Abruptly one of those furtive
+thoughts had leaped forward out of its dark place and
+challenged him boldly, even with a horrible brutality.
+Too late now to try to force it back. It must be faced,
+be dealt with.</p>
+
+<p>Again, and much more strongly than on the previous
+day, Artois felt that in Hermione's absence the Sicilian
+life of the dead man had not run smoothly, that there
+had been some episode of which she knew nothing, that
+he, Artois, had been right in his suspicions at the cottage.
+Delarey had been in fear of something, had been
+on the watch. When he had sat by the wall he had
+been tortured by some tremendous anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>He had gone down to the sea to bathe. That was
+natural enough. And he had been found dead under
+a precipice of rock in the sea. The place was a dangerous
+one, they said. A man might easily fall from the
+rock in the night.    Yes; but why should he be there?</p>
+
+<p>That thought now recurred again and again to the
+mind of Artois. Why had Delarey been at the place
+where he had met his death? The authorities of Marechiaro
+were going to inquire into that, were probably
+down at the sea now. Suppose there had been some
+tragic episode? Suppose they should find out what it
+was?</p>
+
+<p>He saw Hermione in the midst of her grief the central
+figure of some dreadful scandal, and his heart sickened.</p>
+
+<p>But then he told himself that perhaps he was being
+led by his imagination. He had thought that possible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span>
+yesterday. To-day, after what had occurred, he thought
+it less likely. This sudden death seemed to tell him that
+his mind had been walking in the right track. Left
+alone in Sicily, Delarey might have run wild. He might
+have gone too far. This death might be a vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>Artois was deeply interested in all human happenings,
+but he was not a vulgarly curious man. He was not
+curious now, he was only afraid for Hermione. He
+longed to protect her from any further grief. If there
+were a dreadful truth to know, and if, by knowing it,
+he could guard her more efficiently, he wished to know
+it. But his instinct was to get her away from Sicily at
+once, directly the funeral was over and the necessary
+arrangements could be made. For himself, he would
+rather go in ignorance. He did not wish to add to the
+heavy burden of his remorse.</p>
+
+<p>There came at this moment a knock at his door.</p>
+
+<p>"Avanti!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>The waiter of the hotel came in.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore," he said. "The poor signora is here."</p>
+
+<p>"In the hotel?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. They have taken the body of the
+signore to the hospital. Everybody was in the street
+to see it pass. And now the poor signora has come
+here. She has taken the rooms above you on the little
+terrace."</p>
+
+<p>"The signora is going to stay here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. They say, if the Signor Pretore allows
+after the inquiry is over, the funeral will be to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>Artois looked at the man closely. He was a young
+fellow, handsome and gentler-looking than are most Sicilians.
+Artois wondered what the people of Marechiaro
+were saying. He knew how they must be gossiping on
+such an occasion. And then it was summer, when they
+have little or nothing to do, no forestieri to divide their
+attentions and to call their ever-ready suspicions in
+various directions. The minds of the whole community<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span>
+must undoubtedly be fixed upon this tragic episode and
+its cause.</p>
+
+<p>"If the Pretore allows?" Artois said. "But surely
+there can be no difficulty? The poor signore fell from
+the rock and was drowned."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>The man stood there. Evidently he was anxious to
+talk.</p>
+
+<p>"The Signor Pretore has gone down to the place now,
+signore, with the Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. They
+have taken Gaspare with them."</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!"</p>
+
+<p>Artois thought of this boy, Maurice's companion during
+Hermione's absence.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. Gaspare has to show them the exact
+place where he found the poor signore."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose the inquiry will soon be over?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but what is there to do? Whom can they inquire
+of? It was a lonely place, wasn't it? No one
+was there."</p>
+
+<p>"Chi lo sa?"</p>
+
+<p>"If there had been any one, surely the signore would
+have been rescued at once? Did not every one here love
+the signore? He was like one of you, wasn't he, one of
+the Sicilians?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. Maddalena has been crying about the
+signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, the daughter of Salvatore, the fisherman,
+who lives at the Casa delle Sirene."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!"</p>
+
+<p>Artois paused; then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Were she and her&mdash;Salvatore is her father, you
+say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her father, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"Were they at the Casa delle Sirene yesterday?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Artois spoke quietly, almost carelessly, as if merely
+to say something, but without special intention.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena was here in the town with her relations.
+And they say Salvatore is at Messina. This morning
+Maddalena went home. She was crying. Every one
+saw her crying for the signore."</p>
+
+<p>"That is very natural if she knew him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, signore, she knew him. Why, they were all
+at the fair of San Felice together only the day before."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, of course, she would cry."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>The man put his hand on the door.</p>
+
+<p>"If the signora wishes to see me at any time I am
+here," said Artois. "But, of course, I shall not disturb
+her. But if I can do anything to help her&mdash;about the
+funeral, for instance&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The signora is giving all the directions now. The
+poor signore is to be buried in the high part of the Campo
+Santo by the wall. Those who are not Catholics are
+buried there, and the poor signore was not a Catholic.
+What a pity!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Ferdinando."</p>
+
+<p>The man went out slowly, as if he were reluctant to
+stop the conversation.</p>
+
+<p>So the villagers were beginning to gossip already!
+Ferdinando had not said so, but Artois knew his Sicily
+well enough to read the silences that had made significant
+his words. Maddalena had been crying for the
+signore. Everybody had seen Maddalena crying for
+the signore. That was enough. By this time the village
+would be in a ferment, every woman at her door
+talking it over with her next-door neighbor, every man
+in the Piazza, or in one of the wine-shops.</p>
+
+<p>Maddalena&mdash;a Sicilian girl&mdash;weeping, and Delarey's
+body found among the rocks at night in a lonely place
+close to her cottage. Artois divined something of the
+truth  and hated himself the more.    The blood, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span>
+Sicilian blood in Delarey, had called to him in the sunshine
+when he was left alone, and he had, no doubt,
+obeyed the call. How far had he gone? How strongly
+had he been governed? Probably Artois would never
+know. Long ago he had prophesied, vaguely perhaps,
+still he had prophesied. And now had he not engineered
+perhaps the fulfilment of his own prophecy?</p>
+
+<p>But at all costs Hermione must be spared any knowledge
+of that fulfilment.</p>
+
+<p>He longed to go to her and to guard her door against
+the Sicilians. But surely in such a moment they would
+not speak to her of any suspicions, of any certainties,
+even if they had them. She would surely be the last
+person to hear anything, unless&mdash;he thought of the "authorities"&mdash;of
+the Pretore, the Cancelliere, the Maresciallo,
+and suddenly it occurred to him to ride down to
+the sea. If the inquiry had yielded any terrible result
+he might do something to protect Hermione. If not,
+he might be able to prepare her. She must not receive
+any coarse shock from these strangers in the midst of
+her agony.</p>
+
+<p>He got his hat, opened his door, and went quietly
+down-stairs. He did not wish to see Hermione before
+he went. Perhaps he would return with his mind relieved
+of its heaviest burden, and then at least he could
+meet her eyes without a furtive guilt in his.</p>
+
+<p>At the foot of the stairs he met Ferdinando.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you get me a donkey, Ferdinando?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want a boy. Just get me a donkey, and I
+shall go for a short ride. You say the signora has not
+asked for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"If she does, explain to her that I have gone out, as
+I did not like to disturb her."</p>
+
+<p>Hermione might think him heartless to go out riding
+at such a time. He would risk that. He would risk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span>
+anything to spare her the last, the nameless agony that
+would be hers if what he suspected were true, and she
+were to learn of it, to know that all these people round
+her knew it.</p>
+
+<p>That Hermione should be outraged, that the sacredness
+of her despair should be profaned, and the holiness
+of her memories utterly polluted&mdash;Artois felt he would
+give his life willingly to prevent that.</p>
+
+<p>When the donkey came he set off at once. He had
+drawn his broad-brimmed hat down low over his pale
+face, and he looked neither to right nor left, as he was
+carried down the long and narrow street, followed by
+the searching glances of the inhabitants, who, as he
+had surmised, were all out, engaged in eager conversation,
+and anxiously waiting for the return of the Pretore
+and his assistants, and the announcement of the result
+of the autopsy. His appearance gave them a fresh
+topic to discuss. They fell upon it like starveling dogs
+on a piece of offal found in the gutter.</p>
+
+<p>Once out of the village, Artois felt a little safer, a little
+easier; but he longed to be in the train with Hermione,
+carrying her far from the chance of that most cruel fate
+in life&mdash;the fate of disillusion, of the loss of holy belief
+in the truth of one beloved.</p>
+
+<p>When presently he reached the high-road by Isola
+Bella he encountered the fisherman, Giuseppe, who had
+spent the night at the Casa del Prete.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to see the place where the poor
+signore was found, signore?" asked the man.</p>
+
+<p>"Si," said Artois. "I was his friend. I wish to see
+the Pretore, to hear how it happened. Can I? Are
+they there, he and the others?"</p>
+
+<p>"They are in the Casa delle Sirene, signore. They
+are waiting to see if Salvatore comes back this morning
+from Messina."</p>
+
+<p>"And his daughter?    Is she there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. But she knows nothing. She was in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span>
+the village.    She can only cry.    She is crying for the
+poor signore."</p>
+
+<p>Again that statement. It was becoming a refrain in
+the ears of Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare is angry with her," added the fisherman.
+"I believe he would like to kill her."</p>
+
+<p>"It makes him sad to see her crying, perhaps," said
+Artois.    "Gaspare loved the signore."</p>
+
+<p>He saluted the fisherman and rode on. But the man
+followed and kept by his side.</p>
+
+<p>"I will take you across in a boat, signore," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie."</p>
+
+<p>Artois struck the donkey and made it trot on in the
+dust.</p>
+
+<p>Giuseppe rowed him across the inlet and to the far
+side of the Sirens' Isle, from which the little path wound
+upward to the cottage. Here, among the rocks, a boat
+was moored.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, signore!" cried Giuseppe. "Salvatore has
+come back from Messina!    Here is his boat!"</p>
+
+<p>Artois felt a pang of anxiety, of regret. He wished
+he had been there before the fisherman had returned.
+As he got out of the boat he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Did Salvatore know the signore well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. The poor signore used to go out fishing
+with Salvatore. They say in the village that he
+gave Salvatore much money."</p>
+
+<p>"The signore was generous to every one."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. But he did not give donkeys to every
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"Donkeys?    What do you mean, Giuseppe?"</p>
+
+<p>"He gave Salvatore a donkey, a fine donkey. He
+bought it at the fair of San Felice."</p>
+
+<p>Artois said no more. Slowly, for he was still very
+weak, and the heat was becoming fierce as the morning
+wore on, he walked up the steep path and came to the
+plateau before the Casa delle Sirene.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A group of people stood there: the Pretore, the Cancelliere,
+the Maresciallo, Gaspare, and Salvatore. They
+seemed to be in strong conversation, but directly Artois
+appeared there was a silence, and they all turned and
+stared at him as if in wonder. Then Gaspare came forward
+and took off his hat.</p>
+
+<p>The boy looked haggard with grief, and angry and
+obstinate, desperately obstinate.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore," he said. "You know my padrone! Tell
+them&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But the Pretore interrupted him with an air of importance.</p>
+
+<p>"It is my duty to make an inquiry," he said. "Who
+is this signore?"</p>
+
+<p>Artois explained that he was an intimate friend of
+the signora and had known her husband before his marriage.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come to hear if you are satisfied, as no doubt
+you are, Signor Pretore," he said, "that this terrible
+death was caused by an accident. The poor signora
+naturally wishes that this necessary business should be
+finished as soon as possible. It is unavoidable, I know,
+but it can only add to her unhappiness. I am sure,
+signore, that you will do your best to conclude the inquiry
+without delay. Forgive me for saying this. But
+I know Sicily, and know that I can always rely on the
+chivalry of Sicilian gentlemen where an unhappy lady
+is concerned."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke intentionally with a certain pomp, and held
+his hat in his hand while he was speaking.</p>
+
+<p>The Pretore looked pleased and flattered.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, Signor Barone," he said. "Certainly.
+We all grieve for the poor signora."</p>
+
+<p>"You will allow me to stay?" said Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"I see no objection," said the Pretore.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at the Cancelliere, a small, pale man, with
+restless eyes and a pointed chin that looked like a weapon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Niente, niente!" said the Cancelliere, obsequiously.</p>
+
+<p>He was reading Artois with intense sharpness. The
+Maresciallo, a broad, heavily built man, with an enormous
+mustache, uttered a deep "Buon giorno, Signor
+Barone," and stood calmly staring. He looked like a
+magnificent bull, with his short, strong brown neck,
+and low-growing hair that seemed to have been freshly
+crimped. Gaspare stood close to Artois, as if he felt
+that they were allies and must keep together. Salvatore
+was a few paces off.</p>
+
+<p>Artois glanced at him now with a carefully concealed
+curiosity. Instantly the fisherman said:</p>
+
+<p>"Povero signorino! Povero signorino! Mamma mia!
+and only two days ago we were all at the fair together!
+And he was so generous, Signor Barone." He moved
+a little nearer, but Artois saw him glance swiftly at
+Gaspare, like a man fearful of violence and ready to
+repel it. "He paid for everything. We could all keep
+our soldi in our pockets. And he gave Maddalena a
+beautiful blue dress, and he gave me a donkey. Dio
+mio! We have lost a benefactor. If the poor signorino
+had lived he would have given me a new boat.
+He had promised me a boat. For he would come
+fishing with me nearly every day. He was like a compare&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore stopped abruptly. His eyes were again on
+Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"And you say," began the Pretore, with a certain
+heavy pomposity, "that you did not see the signore at
+all yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore. I suppose he came down after I had
+started for Messina."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you go to Messina for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, I went to see my nephew, Guido, who is in
+the hospital. He has&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Non fa niente! non fa niente!" interrupted the Cancelliere.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Non fa niente! What time did you start?" said the
+Pretore.</p>
+
+<p>The Maresciallo cleared his throat with great elaboration,
+and spat with power twice.</p>
+
+<p>"Signor Pretore, I do not know. I did not look at
+the clock. But it was before sunset&mdash;it was well before
+sunset."</p>
+
+<p>"And the signore only came down from the Casa del
+Prete very late," interposed Artois, quietly. "I was
+there and kept him. It was quite evening before he
+started."</p>
+
+<p>An expression of surprise went over Salvatore's face
+and vanished. He had realized that for some reason
+this stranger was his ally.</p>
+
+<p>"Had you any reason to suppose the signore was
+coming to fish with you yesterday?" asked the Pretore
+of Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore. I thought as the signora was back the
+poor signore would stay with her at the house."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally, naturally!" said the Cancelliere.</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally! It seems the signore had several times
+passed across the rocks, from which he appears to have
+fallen, without any difficulty," remarked the Pretore.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore," said Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Salvatore, seemed to make a great effort,
+then added:</p>
+
+<p>"But never when it was dark, signore. And I was
+always with him. He used to take my hand."</p>
+
+<p>His chest began to heave.</p>
+
+<p>"Corragio, Gaspare!" said Artois to him, in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>His strong intuition enabled him to understand
+something of the conflict that was raging in the boy.
+He had seen his glances at Salvatore, and felt that he
+was longing to fly at the fisherman, that he only restrained
+himself with agony from some ferocious violence.</p>
+
+<p>The Pretore remained silent for a moment. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</a></span>
+evident that he was at a loss. He wished to appear
+acute, but the inquiry yielded nothing for the exercise
+of his talents.</p>
+
+<p>At last he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Did any one see you going to Messina? Is there any
+corroboration of your statement that you started before
+the signore came down here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think I am not speaking the truth, Signor
+Pretore?" said Salvatore, proudly. "Why should I lie?
+The poor signore was my benefactor. If I had known
+he was coming I should have been here to receive him.
+Why, he has eaten in my house! He has slept in my
+house.  I tell you we were as brothers."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, si," said the Cancelliere.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare set his teeth, walked away to the edge of the
+plateau, and stood looking out to sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Then no one saw you?" persisted the Pretore.</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so," said Salvatore. "I did not think of
+such things. I wanted to go to Messina, so I sent Maddalena
+to pass the night in the village, and I took the
+boat.  What else should I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene!  Va bene!" said the Cancelliere.</p>
+
+<p>The Maresciallo cleared his throat again. That, and
+the ceremony which invariably followed, were his only
+contributions to this official proceeding.</p>
+
+<p>The Pretore, receiving no assistance from his colleagues,
+seemed doubtful what more to do. It was evident
+to Artois that he was faintly suspicious, that he was
+not thoroughly satisfied about the cause of this death.</p>
+
+<p>"Your daughter seems very upset about all this,"
+he said to Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma mia! And how should she not? Why, Signor
+Pretore, we loved the poor signore. We would
+have thrown ourselves into the sea for him. When we
+saw him coming down from the mountain to us it was
+as if we saw God coming down from heaven."</p>
+
+<p>"Certo!  Certo!" said the Cancelliere.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I think every one who knew the signore at all grew
+to be very fond of him," said Artois, quietly. "He was
+greatly beloved here by every one."</p>
+
+<p>His manner to the Pretore was very civil, even respectful.
+Evidently it had its effect upon that personage.
+Every one here seemed to be assured that this
+death was merely an accident, could only have been an
+accident.  He did not know what more to do.</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene!" he said at last, with some reluctance.
+"We shall see what the doctors say when the autopsy
+is concluded. Let us hope that nothing will be discovered.
+I do not wish to distress the poor signora.
+At the same time I must do my duty.  That is evident."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me you have done it with admirable
+thoroughness," said Artois.</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, Signor Barone, grazie!"</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, grazie, Signor Barone!" added the Cancelliere.</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie, Signor Barone!" said the deep voice of the
+Maresciallo.</p>
+
+<p>The authorities now slowly prepared to take their departure.</p>
+
+<p>"You are coming with us, Signor Barone?" said the
+Pretore.</p>
+
+<p>Artois was about to say yes, when he saw pass across
+the aperture of the doorway of the cottage the figure of
+a girl with bent head.  It disappeared immediately.</p>
+
+<p>"That must be Maddalena!" he thought.</p>
+
+<p>"Scusi, signore," he said, "but I have been seriously
+ill. The ride down here has tired me, and I should be
+glad to rest for a few minutes longer, if&mdash;" He looked
+at Salvatore.</p>
+
+<p>"I will fetch a chair for the signore!" said the fisherman,
+quickly.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know what this stranger wanted, but he
+felt instinctively that it was nothing that would be
+harmful to him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Pretore and his companions, after polite inquiries
+as to the illness of Artois, took their leave with many
+salutations. Only Gaspare remained on the edge of the
+plateau staring at the sea. As Salvatore went to fetch
+the chair Artois went over to the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Si!" said the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to go up with the Pretore. Go to the
+signora. Tell her the inquiry is finished. It will relieve
+her to know."</p>
+
+<p>"You will come with me, signore?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>The boy turned and looked him full in the face.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you stay?"</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Artois did not speak. He was considering
+rapidly what to say, how to treat Gaspare.
+He was now sure that there had been a tragedy, with
+which the people of the sirens' house were, somehow,
+connected. He was sure that Gaspare either knew or
+suspected what had happened, yet meant to conceal his
+knowledge despite his obvious hatred for the fisherman.
+Was the boy's reason for this strange caution, this
+strange secretiveness, akin to his&mdash;Artois's&mdash;desire?
+Was the boy trying to protect his padrona or the memory
+of his padrone?  Artois wondered.  Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare, I shall only stay a few minutes. We must
+have no gossip that can get to the padrona's ears. We
+understand each other, I think, you and I. We want
+the same thing. Men can keep silence, but girls talk.
+I wish to see Maddalena for a minute."</p>
+
+<p>"Ma&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare stared at him almost fiercely. But something
+in the face of Artois inspired him with confidence.
+Suddenly his reserve disappeared. He put his hand on
+Artois's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell Maddalena to be silent and not to go on crying,
+signore," he said, violently.  "Tell her that if she does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span>
+not stop crying I will come down here in the night and
+kill her."</p>
+
+<p>"Go, Gaspare!  The Pretore is wondering&mdash;go!"</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare went down over the edge of the land and disappeared
+towards the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Ecco, signore!"</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore reappeared from the cottage carrying a
+chair which he set down under an olive-tree, the same
+tree by which Maddalena had stood when Maurice first
+saw her in the dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Grazie."</p>
+
+<p>Artois sat down. He was very tired, but he scarcely
+knew it. The fisherman stood by him, looking at him
+with a sort of shifty expectation, and Artois, as he
+noticed the hard Arab type of the man's face, the glitter
+of the small, cunning eyes, the nervous alertness of the
+thin, sensitive hands, understood a great deal about
+Salvatore. He knew Arabs well. He had slept under
+their tents, had seen them in joy and in anger, had
+witnessed scenes displaying fully their innate carelessness
+of human life. This fisherman was almost as much
+Arab as Sicilian. The blend scarcely made for gentleness.
+If such a man were wronged, he would be quick
+and subtle in revenge. Nothing would stay him. But
+had Maurice wronged him? Artois meant to assume
+knowledge and to act upon his assumption. His instinct
+advised him that in doing so he would be doing
+the best thing possible for the protection of Hermione.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you make much money here?" he said, sharply
+yet carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>The fisherman moved as if startled.</p>
+
+<p>"Signore!"</p>
+
+<p>"They tell me Sicily's a poor land for the poor. Isn't
+that so?"</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore recovered himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, si, signore, one earns nothing. It is a
+hard life, Per Dio!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He stopped and stared hard at the stranger with his
+hands on his hips. His eyes, his whole expression and
+attitude said, "What are you up to?"</p>
+
+<p>"America is the country for a sharp-witted man to
+make his fortune in," said Artois, returning his gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. Many go from here. I know many
+who are working in America. But one must have
+money to pay the ticket."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes.    This terreno belongs to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only the bit where the house stands, signore. And
+it is all rocks. It is no use to any one. And in winter
+the winds come over it. Why, it would take years of
+work to turn it into anything. And I am not a contadino.
+Once I had a wine-shop, but I am a man of
+the sea."</p>
+
+<p>"But you are a man with sharp wits. I should think
+you would do well in America. Others do, and why not
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>They looked at each other hard for a full minute.
+Then Salvatore said, slowly:</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, I will tell you the truth. It is the truth.
+I would swear it with sea-water on my lips. If I had
+the money I would go to America. I would take the
+first ship."</p>
+
+<p>"And your daughter, Maddalena? You couldn't
+leave her behind you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, if I were ever to go to America you may
+be sure I should take Maddalena with me."</p>
+
+<p>"I think you would," Artois said, still looking at the
+man full in the eyes. "I think it would be wiser to take
+Maddalena with you."</p>
+
+<p>Salvatore looked away.</p>
+
+<p>"If I had the money, signore, I would buy the tickets
+to-morrow. Here I can make nothing, and it is a hard
+life, always on the sea. And in America you get good
+pay. A man can earn eight lire a day there, they tell
+me."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I have not seen your daughter yet," Artois said,
+abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, signore, she is not well to-day. And the Signor
+Pretore frightened her. She will stay in the house to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"But I should like to see her for a moment."</p>
+
+<p>"Signore, I am very sorry, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Artois turned round in the chair and looked towards
+the house. The door, which had been open, was now
+shut.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena is praying, signore. She is praying to
+the Madonna for the soul of the dead signore."</p>
+
+<p>For the first time Artois noticed in the hard, bird-like
+face of the fisherman a sign of emotion, almost of
+softness.</p>
+
+<p>"We must not disturb her, signore."</p>
+
+<p>Artois got up and went a few steps nearer to the
+cottage.</p>
+
+<p>"Can one see the place where the signore's body was
+found?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore, from the other side, among the trees."</p>
+
+<p>"I will come back in a moment," said Artois.</p>
+
+<p>He walked away from the fisherman and entered the
+wood, circling the cottage. The fisherman did not
+come with him. Artois's instinct had told him that
+the man would not care to come on such an errand. As
+Artois passed at the back of the cottage he noticed an
+open window, and paused near it in the long grass.
+From within there came the sound of a woman's voice,
+murmuring. It was frequently interrupted by sobs.
+After a moment Artois went close to the window, and
+said, but without showing himself:</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>The murmuring voice stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!"</p>
+
+<p>There was silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Maddalena!" Artois said.    "Are you listening?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He heard a faint movement as if the woman within
+came nearer to the casement.</p>
+
+<p>"If you loved the dead signore, if you care for his
+memory, do not talk of your grief for him to others.
+Pray for him, and be silent for him. If you are silent
+the Holy Mother will hear your prayers."</p>
+
+<p>As he said the last words Artois made his deep voice
+sound mysterious, mystical.</p>
+
+<p>Then he went away softly among the thickly growing
+trees.</p>
+
+<p>When he saw Salvatore again, still standing upon the
+plateau, he beckoned to him without coming into the
+open.</p>
+
+<p>"Bring the boat round to the inlet," he said. "I
+will cross from there."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"And as we cross we can speak a little more about
+America."</p>
+
+<p>The fisherman stared at him, with a faint smile that
+showed a gleam of sharp, white teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore&mdash;a little more about America."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+
+<p>A night and a day had passed, and still Artois had
+not seen Hermione. The autopsy had been finished,
+and had revealed nothing to change the theory of Dr.
+Marini as to the determining cause of death. The English
+stranger had been crossing the dangerous wall of
+rock, probably in darkness, had fallen, been stunned
+upon the rocks in the sea beneath, and drowned before
+he recovered consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Gaspare said nothing. Salvatore held his peace and
+began his preparations for America. And Maddalena,
+if she wept, wept now in secret; if she prayed, prayed
+in the lonely house of the sirens, near the window which
+had so often given a star to the eyes that looked down
+from the terrace of the Casa del Prete.</p>
+
+<p>There was gossip in Marechiaro, and the Pretore still
+preserved his air of faint suspicion. But that would
+probably soon vanish under the influence of the Cancelliere,
+with whom Artois had had some private conversation.
+The burial had been allowed, and very
+early in the morning of the day following that of
+Hermione's arrival at the hotel it took place from the
+hospital.</p>
+
+<p>Few people knew the hour, and most were still asleep
+when the coffin was carried down the street, followed
+only by Hermione, and by Gaspare in a black, ready-made
+suit that had been bought in the village of Cattaro.
+Hermione would not allow any one else to follow her
+dead, and as Maurice had been a Protestant there was no
+service.    This shocked Gaspare, and added to his grief,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span>
+till Hermione explained that her husband had been of a
+different religion from that of Sicily, a religion with different
+rites.</p>
+
+<p>"But we can pray for him, Gaspare," she said. "He
+loved us, and perhaps he will know what we are
+doing."</p>
+
+<p>The thought seemed to soothe the boy. He kneeled
+down by his padrona under the wall of the Campo Santo
+by which Protestants were buried, and whispered a
+petition for the repose of the soul of his padrone. Into
+the gap of earth, where now the coffin lay, he had thrown
+roses from his father's little terreno near the village.
+His tears fell fast, and his prayer was scarcely more than
+a broken murmur of "Povero signorino&mdash;povero signorino&mdash;Dio
+ci mandi buon riposo in Paradiso." Hermione
+could not pray although she was in the attitude
+of supplication; but when she heard the words of Gaspare
+she murmured them too. "Buon riposo!" The
+sweet Sicilian good-night&mdash;she said it now in the
+stillness of the lonely dawn. And her tears fell fast
+with those of the boy who had loved and served his
+master.</p>
+
+<p>When the funeral was over she walked up the mountain
+with Gaspare to the Casa del Prete, and from there,
+on the following day, she sent a message to Artois, asking
+him if he would come to see her.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I don't ask you to forgive me for not seeing you before," she
+wrote. "We understand each other and do not need explanations.
+I wanted to see nobody. Come at any hour when you
+feel that you would like to.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Hermione</span>."<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Artois rode up in the cool of the day, towards
+evening.</p>
+
+<p>He was met upon the terrace by Gaspare.</p>
+
+<p>"The signora is on the mountain, signore," he said.
+"If you go up you will find her, the povero signora.
+She is all alone upon the mountain."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I will go, Gaspare. I have told Maddalena. I think
+she will be silent."</p>
+
+<p>The boy dropped his eyes. His unreserve of the
+island had not endured. It had been a momentary
+impulse, and now the impulse had died away.</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene, signore," he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>He had evidently nothing more to say, yet Artois did
+not leave him immediately.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare," he said, "the signora will not stay here
+through the great heat, will she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Non lo so, signore."</p>
+
+<p>"She ought to go away. It will be better if she goes
+away."</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signore. But perhaps she will not like to leave
+the povero signorino."</p>
+
+<p>Tears came into the boy's eyes. He turned away
+and went to the wall, and looked over into the ravine,
+and thought of many things: of readings under the oak-trees,
+of the tarantella, of how he and the padrone had
+come up from the fishing singing in the sunshine. His
+heart was full, and he felt dazed. He was so accustomed
+to being always with his padrone that he did not
+know how he was to go on without him. He did not
+remember his former life, before the padrone came.
+Everything seemed to have begun for him on that
+morning when the train with the padrone and the padrona
+in it ran into the station of Cattaro. And now
+everything seemed to have finished.</p>
+
+<p>Artois did not say any more to him, but walked slowly
+up the mountain leaning on his stick. Close to the
+top, by a heap of stones that was something like a cairn,
+he saw, presently, a woman sitting. As he came nearer
+she turned her head and saw him. She did not move.
+The soft rays of the evening sun fell on her, and showed
+him that her square and rugged face was pale and
+grave and, he thought, empty-looking, as if something
+had deprived it of its former possession, the ardent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[Pg 479]</a></span>
+vitality, the generous enthusiasm, the look of swiftness
+he had loved.</p>
+
+<p>When he came up to her he could only say:
+"Hermione, my friend&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The loneliness of this mountain summit was a fit
+setting for her loneliness, and these two solitudes, of
+nature and of this woman's soul, took hold of Artois
+and made him feel as if he were infinitely small, as if
+he could not matter to either. He loved nature, and
+he loved this woman. And of what use were he and
+his love to them?</p>
+
+<p>She stretched up her hand to him, and he bent down
+and took it and held it.</p>
+
+<p>"You said some day I should leave my Garden of
+Paradise, Emile."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't hurt me with my own words," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit by me."</p>
+
+<p>He sat down on the warm ground close to the heap
+of stones.</p>
+
+<p>"You said I should leave the garden, but I don't
+think you meant like this.    Did you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you thought we should be unhappy together.
+Well, we were never that. We were always
+very happy. I like to think of that. I come up here
+to think of that; of our happiness, and that we were
+always kind and tender to each other. Emile, if we
+hadn't been, if we had ever had even one quarrel, even
+once said cruel things to each other, I don't think
+I could bear it now. But we never did. God did
+watch us then, I think. God was with me so long as
+Maurice was with me. But I feel as if God had gone
+away from me with Maurice, as if they had gone together.
+Do you think any other woman has ever felt
+like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I am worthy to know how some women
+feel," he said, almost falteringly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[Pg 480]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I thought perhaps God would have stayed with me
+to help me, but I feel as if He hadn't. I feel as if He
+had only been able to love me so long as Maurice was
+with me."</p>
+
+<p>"That feeling will pass away."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps when my child comes," she said, very
+simply.</p>
+
+<p>Artois had not known about the coming of the child,
+but Hermione did not remember that now.</p>
+
+<p>"Your child!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad I came back in time to tell him about the
+child," she said. "I think at first he was almost frightened.
+He was such a boy, you see. He was the very
+spirit of youth, wasn't he? And perhaps that&mdash;but at
+the end he seemed happy. He kissed me as if he loved
+not only me. Do you understand, Emile? He seemed
+to kiss me the last time&mdash;for us both. Some day I shall
+tell my baby that."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent for a little while. She looked out over
+the great view, now falling into a strange repose. This
+was the land he had loved, the land he had belonged
+to.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to hear the 'Pastorale' now," she said,
+presently. "But Sebastiano&mdash;" A new thought seemed
+to strike her. "I wonder how some women can bear
+their sorrows," she said. "Don't you, Emile?"</p>
+
+<p>"What sorrows do you mean?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Such a sorrow as poor Lucrezia has to bear. Maurice
+always loved me. Lucrezia knows that Sebastiano
+loves some one else. I ought to be trying to comfort
+Lucrezia. I did try. I did go to pray with her. But
+that was before. I can't pray now, because I can't feel
+sure of almost anything. I sometimes think that this
+happened without God's meaning it to happen."</p>
+
+<p>"God!" Artois said, moved by an irresistible impulse.
+"And the gods, the old pagan gods?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" she said, understanding. "We called him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[Pg 481]</a></span>
+Mercury. Yes, it is as if he had gone to them, as if
+they had recalled their messenger. In the spring, before
+I went to Africa, I often used to think of legends,
+and put him&mdash;my Sicilian&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She did not go on. Yet her voice had not faltered.
+There was no contortion of sorrow in her face. There
+was a sort of soft calmness about her almost akin to
+the calmness of the evening. It was the more remarkable
+in her because she was not usually a tranquil woman.
+Artois had never known her before in deep grief.
+But he had known her in joy, and then she had been
+rather enthusiastic than serene. Something of her
+eager humanity had left her now. She made upon
+him a strange impression, almost as of some one he had
+never previously had any intercourse with. And yet
+she was being wonderfully natural with him, as natural
+as if she were alone.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you going to do, my friend?" he said,
+after a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. I have no wish to do anything. I shall
+just wait&mdash;for our child."</p>
+
+<p>"But where will you wait? You cannot wait here.
+The heat would weaken you. In your condition it
+would be dangerous."</p>
+
+<p>"He spoke of going. It hurt me for a moment, I
+remember. I had a wish to stay here forever then. It
+seemed to me that this little bit of earth and rock was
+the happiest place in all the world. Yes, I will go,
+Emile, but I shall come back. I shall bring our child
+here."</p>
+
+<p>He did not combat this intention then, for he was
+too thankful to have gained her assent to the departure
+for which he longed. The further future must take
+care of itself.</p>
+
+<p>"I will take you to Italy, to Switzerland, wherever
+you wish to go."</p>
+
+<p>"I have no wish for any other place.    But I will go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span>
+somewhere in Italy. Wherever it is cool and silent will
+do. But I must be far away from people; and when
+you have taken me there, dear Emile, you must leave
+me there."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gaspare will be with me. I shall always keep Gaspare.
+Maurice and he were like two brothers in their
+happiness. I know they loved each other, and I know
+Gaspare loves me."</p>
+
+<p>Artois only said:</p>
+
+<p>"I trust the boy."</p>
+
+<p>The word "trust" seemed to wake Hermione into
+a stronger life.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Emile," she said, "once you distrusted the
+south. I remember your very words. You said, 'I
+love the south, but I distrust what I love, and I see
+the south in him.' I want to tell you, I want you to
+know, how perfect he was always to me. He loved joy,
+but his joy was always innocent. There was always
+something of the child in him. He was unconscious of
+himself. He never understood his own beauty. He never
+realized that he was worthy of worship. His thought
+was to reverence and to worship others. He loved life
+and the sun&mdash;oh, how he loved them! I don't think
+any one can ever have loved life and the sun as he did,
+ever will love them as he did. But he was never selfish.
+He was just quite natural. He was the deathless
+boy. Emile, have you noticed anything about me&mdash;since?"</p>
+
+<p>"What, Hermione?"</p>
+
+<p>"How much older I look now. He was like my
+youth, and my youth has gone with him."</p>
+
+<p>"Will it not revive&mdash;when&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, never. I don't wish it to. Gaspare gathered
+roses, all the best roses from his father's little bit of
+land, to throw into the grave. And I want my youth
+to lie there with my Sicilian under Gaspare's roses.    I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[Pg 483]</a></span>
+feel as if that would be a tender companionship. I
+gave everything to him when he was alive, and I don't
+want to keep anything back now. I would like the sun
+to be with him under Gaspare's roses. And yet I know
+he's elsewhere. I can't explain. But two days ago at
+dawn I heard a child playing the tarantella, and it
+seemed to me as if my Sicilian had been taken away
+by the blue, by the blue of Sicily. I shall often come
+back to the blue. I shall often sit here again. For
+it was here that I heard the beating of the heart of
+youth. And there's no other music like that. Is there,
+Emile?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Had the music been wild? He suspected that the
+harmony she worshipped had passed on into the hideous
+crash of discords. And whose had been the fault? Who
+creates human nature as it is? In what workshop, of
+what brain, are forged the mad impulses of the wild
+heart of youth, are mixed together subtly the divine
+aspirations which leap like the winged Mercury to the
+heights, and the powerful appetites which lead the body
+into the dark places of the earth? And why is the Giver
+of the divine the permitter of those tremendous passions,
+which are not without their glory, but which
+wreck so many human lives?</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps a reason may be found in the sacredness of
+pity. Evil and agony are the manure from which
+spring some of the whitest lilies that have ever bloomed
+beneath that enigmatic blue which roofs the terror and
+the triumph of the world. And while human beings
+know how to pity, human beings will always believe in
+a merciful God.</p>
+
+<p>A strange thought to come into such a mind as Artois's!
+Yet it came in the twilight, and with it a sense
+of tears such as he had never felt before.</p>
+
+<p>With the twilight had come a little wind from Etna.
+It made something near him flutter, something white,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[Pg 484]</a></span>
+a morsel of paper among the stones by which he was
+sitting. He looked down and saw writing, and bent to
+pick the paper up.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Emile may leave at once. But there is no good boat till the
+10th. We shall take that...."</p></div>
+
+<p>Hermione's writing!</p>
+
+<p>Artois understood at once. Maurice had had Hermione's
+letter. He had known they were coming from Africa,
+and he had gone to the fair despite that knowledge.
+He had gone with the girl who wept and prayed beside
+the sea.</p>
+
+<p>His hand closed over the paper.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Emile? What have you picked up?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only a little bit of paper."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke quietly, tore it into tiny fragments and let
+them go upon the wind.</p>
+
+<p>"When will you come with me, Hermione? When
+shall we go to Italy?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am saying 'a rivederci' now"&mdash;she dropped her
+voice&mdash;"and buon riposo."</p>
+
+<p>The white fragments blew away into the gathering
+night, separated from one another by the careful wind.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Three days later Hermione and Artois left Sicily, and
+Gaspare, leaning out of the window of the train, looked
+his last on the Isle of the Sirens. A fisherman on the
+beach by the inlet, not Salvatore, recognized the boy
+and waved a friendly hand. But Gaspare did not see
+him.</p>
+
+<p>There they had fished! There they had bathed!
+There they had drunk the good red wine of Amato and
+called for brindisi! There they had lain on the warm
+sand of the caves! There they had raced together to
+Madre Carmela and her frying-pan! There they had
+shouted "O sole mio!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There&mdash;there they had been young together!</p>
+
+<p>The shining sea was blotted out from the boy's eyes
+by tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Povero signorino!" he whispered. "Povero signorino!"</p>
+
+<p>And then, as his "Paese" vanished, he added for the
+last time the words which he had whispered in the dawn
+by the grave of his padrone, "Dio ci mandi buon riposo
+in Paradiso."</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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@@ -0,0 +1,19129 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Call of the Blood, by Robert Smythe
+Hichens, Illustrated by Orson Lowell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Call of the Blood
+
+
+Author: Robert Smythe Hichens
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2006  [eBook #20157]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CALL OF THE BLOOD***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/c/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 20157-h.htm or 20157-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/1/5/20157/20157-h/20157-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/1/5/20157/20157-h.zip)
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+      Some minor changes have been made to correct typographical
+      errors and inconsistencies.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CALL OF THE BLOOD
+
+by
+
+ROBERT HICHENS
+
+Author of
+"The Garden of Allah" Etc.
+
+Illustrated by Orson Lowell
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: See p. 399 "HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY
+PRAYED"]
+
+
+
+New York and London
+Harper & Brothers Publishers
+MCMVI
+Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
+All rights reserved.
+Published October, 1906.
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+   "HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY PRAYED"     _Frontispiece_
+
+   "'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID"      _Facing p._ 38
+
+   "HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN
+   THE HOUSE OF THE SIRENS"                                 "      78
+
+   "HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE
+   DRINKING IN THE BREEZE"                                  "     120
+
+   "'I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,'
+   SHE SAID"                                                "     280
+
+   "HE KEPT HIS HAND ON HERS AND HELD IT ON THE
+   WARM GROUND"                                             "     302
+
+   "'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN--IN MY
+   SICILIAN,' SHE SAID, TENDERLY"                           "     366
+
+   "SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE
+   CAVES WHERE THE FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN
+   THE DAWN"                                                "     420
+
+
+
+
+THE
+CALL OF THE BLOOD
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+On a dreary afternoon of November, when London was closely wrapped in a
+yellow fog, Hermione Lester was sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton
+Place reading a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her
+writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from the writer of the
+letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to her on the previous day that he
+was coming over from Paris by the night train and boat.
+
+Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten in height, flat,
+thin, but strongly built, with a large waist and limbs which, though
+vigorous, were rather unwieldy. Her face was plain: rather square and
+harsh in outline, with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good
+complexion, clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and slightly
+prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy, and brightness, full,
+too, of eager intelligence and of energy, eyes of a woman who was
+intensely alive both in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look
+most attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent from her
+body but was present in her eyes, which showed forth the spirit in her
+with a glorious frankness and a keen intensity. Nevertheless, despite
+these eyes and her thickly growing, warm-colored, and wavy brown hair,
+she was a plain, almost an ugly woman, whose attractive force issued from
+within, inviting inquiry and advance, as the flame of a fire does,
+playing on the blurred glass of a window with many flaws in it.
+
+Hermione was, in fact, found very attractive by a great many people of
+varying temperaments and abilities, who were captured by her spirit and
+by her intellect, the soul of the woman and the brains, and who, while
+seeing clearly and acknowledging frankly the plainness of her face and
+the almost masculine ruggedness of her form, said, with a good deal of
+truth, that "somehow they didn't seem to matter in Hermione." Whether
+Hermione herself was of this opinion not many knew. Her general
+popularity, perhaps, made the world incurious about the subject.
+
+The room in which Hermione was reading the letters of Artois was small
+and crammed with books. There were books in cases uncovered by glass from
+floor to ceiling, some in beautiful bindings, but many in tattered paper
+covers, books that looked as if they had been very much read. On several
+tables, among photographs and vases of flowers, were more books and many
+magazines, both English and foreign. A large writing-table was littered
+with notes and letters. An upright grand-piano stood open, with a
+quantity of music upon it. On the thick Persian carpet before the fire
+was stretched a very large St. Bernard dog, with his muzzle resting on
+his paws and his eyes blinking drowsily in serene contentment.
+
+As Hermione read the letters one by one her face showed a panorama of
+expressions, almost laughably indicative of her swiftly passing thoughts.
+Sometimes she smiled. Once or twice she laughed aloud, startling the dog,
+who lifted his massive head and gazed at her with profound inquiry. Then
+she shook her head, looked grave, even sad, or earnest and full of
+sympathy, which seemed longing to express itself in a torrent of
+comforting words. Presently she put the letters together, tied them up
+carelessly with a piece of twine, and put them back into the drawer from
+which she had taken them. Just as she had finished doing this the door of
+the room, which was ajar, was pushed softly open, and a dark-eyed,
+Eastern-looking boy dressed in livery appeared.
+
+"What is it, Selim?" asked Hermione, in French.
+
+"Monsieur Artois, madame."
+
+"Emile!" cried Hermione, getting up out of her chair with a sort of eager
+slowness. "Where is he?"
+
+"He is here!" said a loud voice, also speaking French.
+
+Selim stood gracefully aside, and a big man stepped into the room and
+took the two hands which Hermione stretched out in his.
+
+"Don't let any one else in, Selim," said Hermione to the boy.
+
+"Especially the little Townly," said Artois, menacingly.
+
+"Hush, Emile! Not even Miss Townly if she calls, Selim."
+
+Selim smiled with grave intelligence at the big man, said, "I understand,
+madame," and glided out.
+
+"Why, in Heaven's name, have you--you, pilgrim of the Orient--insulted
+the East by putting Selim into a coat with buttons and cloth trousers?"
+exclaimed Artois, still holding Hermione's hands.
+
+"It's an outrage, I know. But I had to. He was stared at and followed,
+and he actually minded it. As soon as I found out that, I trampled on all
+my artistic prejudices, and behold him--horrible but happy! Thank you for
+coming--thank you."
+
+She let his hands go, and they stood for a moment looking at each other
+in the firelight.
+
+Artois was a tall man of about forty-three, with large, almost Herculean
+limbs, a handsome face, with regular but rather heavy features, and very
+big gray eyes, that always looked penetrating and often melancholy. His
+forehead was noble and markedly intellectual, and his well-shaped,
+massive head was covered with thick, short, mouse-colored hair. He wore a
+mustache and a magnificent beard. His barber, who was partly responsible
+for the latter, always said of it that it was the "most beautiful
+fan-shaped beard in Paris," and regarded it with a pride which was
+probably shared by its owner. His hands and feet were good,
+capable-looking, but not clumsy, and his whole appearance gave an
+impression of power, both physical and intellectual, and of indomitable
+will combined with subtlety. He was well dressed, fashionably not
+artistically, yet he suggested an artist, not necessarily a painter. As
+he looked at Hermione the smile which had played about his lips when he
+entered the little room died away.
+
+"I've come to hear about it all," he said, in his resonant voice--a voice
+which matched his appearance. "Do you know"--and here his accent was
+grave, almost reproachful--"that in all your letters to me--I looked them
+over before I left Paris--there is no allusion, not one, to this Monsieur
+Delarey."
+
+"Why should there be?" she answered.
+
+She sat down, but Artois continued to stand.
+
+"We seldom wrote of persons, I think. We wrote of events, ideas, of work,
+of conditions of life; of man, woman, child--yes--but not often of
+special men, women, children. I am almost sure--in fact, quite sure, for
+I've just been reading them--that in your letters to me there is very
+little discussion of our mutual friends, less of friends who weren't
+common to us both."
+
+As she spoke she stretched out a long, thin arm, and pulled open the
+drawer into which she had put the bundle tied with twine.
+
+"They're all in here."
+
+"You don't lock that drawer?"
+
+"Never."
+
+He looked at her with a sort of severity.
+
+"I lock the door of the room, or, rather, it locks itself. You haven't
+noticed it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It's the same as the outer door of a flat. I have a latch-key to it."
+
+He said nothing, but smiled. All the sudden grimness had gone out of his
+face.
+
+Hermione withdrew her hand from the drawer holding the letters.
+
+"Here they are!"
+
+"My complaints, my egoism, my ambitions, my views--Mon Dieu! Hermione,
+what a good friend you've been!"
+
+"And some people say you're not modest!"
+
+"I--modest! What is modesty? I know my own value as compared with that of
+others, and that knowledge to others must often seem conceit."
+
+She began to untie the packet, but he stretched out his hand and stopped
+her.
+
+"No, I didn't come from Paris to read my letters, or even to hear you
+read them! I came to hear about this Monsieur Delarey."
+
+Selim stole in with tea and stole out silently, shutting the door this
+time. As soon as he had gone, Artois drew a case from his pocket, took
+out of it a pipe, filled it, and lit it. Meanwhile, Hermione poured out
+tea, and, putting three lumps of sugar into one of the cups, handed it to
+Artois.
+
+"I haven't come to protest. You know we both worship individual freedom.
+How often in those letters haven't we written it--our respect of the
+right of the individual to act for him or herself, without the
+interference of outsiders? No, I've come to hear about it all, to hear
+how you managed to get into the pleasant state of mania."
+
+On the last words his deep voice sounded sarcastic, almost patronizing.
+Hermione fired up at once.
+
+"None of that from you, Emile!" she exclaimed.
+
+Artois stirred his tea rather more than was necessary, but did not begin
+to drink it.
+
+"You mustn't look down on me from a height," she continued. "I won't have
+it. We're all on a level when we're doing certain things, when we're
+truly living, simply, frankly, following our fates, and when we're dying.
+You feel that. Drop the analyst, dear Emile, drop the professional point
+of view. I see right through it into your warm old heart. I never was
+afraid of you, although I place you high, higher than your critics,
+higher than your public, higher than you place yourself. Every woman
+ought to be able to love, and every man. There's nothing at all absurd in
+the fact, though there may be infinite absurdities in the manifestation
+of it. But those you haven't yet had an opportunity of seeing in me, so
+you've nothing yet to laugh at or label. Now drink your tea."
+
+He laughed a loud, roaring laugh, drank some of his tea, puffed out a
+cloud of smoke, and said:
+
+"Whom will you ever respect?"
+
+"Every one who is sincere--myself included."
+
+"Be sincere with me now, and I'll go back to Paris to-morrow like a shorn
+lamb. Be sincere about Monsieur Delarey."
+
+Hermione sat quite still for a moment with the bundle of letters in her
+lap. At last she said:
+
+"It's difficult sometimes to tell the truth about a feeling, isn't it?"
+
+"Ah, you don't know yourself what the truth is."
+
+"I'm not sure that I do. The history of the growth of a feeling may be
+almost more complicated than the history of France."
+
+Artois, who was a novelist, nodded his head with the air of a man who
+knew all about that.
+
+"Maurice--Maurice Delarey has cared for me, in that way, for a long time.
+I was very much surprised when I first found it out."
+
+"Why, in the name of Heaven?"
+
+"Well, he's wonderfully good-looking."
+
+"No explanation of your astonishment."
+
+"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which astonished me, the
+fact of a very handsome man loving me."
+
+"Now, what's your theory?"
+
+He bent down his head a little towards her, and fixed his great, gray
+eyes on her face.
+
+"Theory! Look here, Emile, I dare say it's difficult for a man like you,
+genius, insight, and all, thoroughly to understand how an ugly woman
+regards beauty, an ugly woman like me, who's got intellect and passion
+and intense feeling for form, color, every manifestation of beauty. When
+I look at beauty I feel rather like a dirty little beggar staring at an
+angel. My intellect doesn't seem to help me at all. In me, perhaps, the
+sensation arises from an inward conviction that humanity was meant
+originally to be beautiful, and that the ugly ones among us are--well,
+like sins among virtues. You remember that book of yours which was and
+deserved to be your one artistic failure, because you hadn't put yourself
+really into it?"
+
+Artois made a wry face.
+
+"Eventually you paid a lot of money to prevent it from being published
+any more. You withdrew it from circulation. I sometimes feel that we ugly
+ones ought to be withdrawn from circulation. It's silly, perhaps, and I
+hope I never show it, but there the feeling is. So when the handsomest
+man I had ever seen loved me, I was simply amazed. It seemed to me
+ridiculous and impossible. And then, when I was convinced it was
+possible, very wonderful, and, I confess it to you, very splendid. It
+seemed to help to reconcile me with myself in a way in which I had never
+been reconciled before."
+
+"And that was the beginning?"
+
+"I dare say. There were other things, too. Maurice Delarey isn't at all
+stupid, but he's not nearly so intelligent as I am."
+
+"That doesn't surprise me."
+
+"The fact of this physical perfection being humble with me, looking up to
+me, seemed to mean a great deal. I think Maurice feels about intellect
+rather as I do about beauty. He made me understand that he must. And that
+seemed to open my heart to him in an extraordinary way. Can you
+understand?"
+
+"Yes. Give me some more tea, please."
+
+He held out his cup. She filled it, talking while she did so. She had
+become absorbed in what she was saying, and spoke without any
+self-consciousness.
+
+"I knew my gift, such as it is, the gift of brains, could do something
+for him, though his gift of beauty could do nothing for me--in the way of
+development. And that, too, seemed to lead me a step towards him.
+Finally--well, one day I knew I wanted to marry him. And so, Emile, I'm
+going to marry him. Here!"
+
+She held out to him his cup full of tea.
+
+"There's no sugar," he said.
+
+"Oh--the first time I've forgotten."
+
+"Yes."
+
+The tone of his voice made her look up at him quickly and exclaim:
+
+"No, it won't make any difference!"
+
+"But it has. You've forgotten for the first time. Cursed be the egotism
+of man."
+
+He sat down in an arm-chair on the other side of the tea-table.
+
+"It ought to make a difference. Maurice Delarey, if he is a man--and if
+you are going to marry him he must be--will not allow you to be the
+Egeria of a fellow who has shocked even Paris by telling it the naked
+truth."
+
+"Yes, he will. I shall drop no friendship for him, and he knows it.
+There is not one that is not honest and innocent. Thank God I can say
+that. If you care for it, Emile, we can both add to the size of the
+letter bundles."
+
+He looked at her meditatively, even rather sadly.
+
+"You are capable of everything in the way of friendship, I believe," he
+said. "Even of making the bundle bigger with a husband's consent. A
+husband's--I suppose the little Townly's upset? But she always is."
+
+"When you're there. You don't know Evelyn. You never will. She's at her
+worst with you because you terrify her. Your talent frightens her, but
+your appearance frightens her even more."
+
+"I am as God made me."
+
+"With the help of the barber. It's your beard as much as anything else."
+
+"What does she say of this affair? What do all your innumerable adorers
+say?"
+
+"What should they say? Why should anybody be surprised? It's surely the
+most natural thing in the world for a woman, even a very plain woman, to
+marry. I have always heard that marriage is woman's destiny, and though I
+don't altogether believe that, still I see no special reason why I should
+never marry if I wish to. And I do wish to."
+
+"That's what will surprise the little Townly and the gaping crowd."
+
+"I shall begin to think I've seemed unwomanly all these years."
+
+"No. You're an extraordinary woman who astonishes because she is going to
+do a very important thing that is very ordinary."
+
+"It doesn't seem at all ordinary to me."
+
+Emile Artois began to stroke his beard. He was determined not to feel
+jealous. He had never wished to marry Hermione, and did not wish to marry
+her now, but he had come over from Paris secretly a man of wrath.
+
+"You needn't tell me that," he said. "Of course it is the great event to
+you. Otherwise you would never have thought of doing it."
+
+"Exactly. Are you astonished?"
+
+"I suppose I am. Yes, I am."
+
+"I should have thought you were far too clever to be so."
+
+"Exactly what I should have thought. But what living man is too clever to
+be an idiot? I never met the gentleman and never hope to."
+
+"You looked upon me as the eternal spinster?"
+
+"I looked upon you as Hermione Lester, a great creature, an extraordinary
+creature, free from the prejudices of your sex and from its pettinesses,
+unconventional, big brained, generous hearted, free as the wind in a
+world of monkey slaves, careless of all opinion save your own, but humbly
+obedient to the truth that is in you, human as very few human beings are,
+one who ought to have been an artist but who apparently preferred to be
+simply a woman."
+
+Hermione laughed, winking away two tears.
+
+"Well, Emile dear, I'm being very simply a woman now, I assure you."
+
+"And why should I be surprised? You're right. What is it makes me
+surprised?"
+
+He sat considering.
+
+"Perhaps it is that you are so unusual, so individual, that my
+imagination refuses to project the man on whom your choice could fall. I
+project the snuffy professor--Impossible! I project the Greek god--again
+my mind cries, 'Impossible!' Yet, behold, it is in very truth the Greek
+god, the ideal of the ordinary woman."
+
+"You know nothing about it. You're shooting arrows into the air."
+
+"Tell me more then. Hold up a torch in the darkness."
+
+"I can't. You pretend to know a woman, and you ask her coldly to explain
+to you the attraction of the man she loves, to dissect it. I won't try
+to."
+
+"But," he said, with now a sort of joking persistence, which was only a
+mask for an almost irritable curiosity, "I want to know."
+
+"And you shall. Maurice and I are dining to-night at Caminiti's in
+Peathill Street, just off Regent Street. Come and meet us there, and
+we'll all three spend the evening together. Half-past eight, of course no
+evening dress, and the most delicious Turkish coffee in London."
+
+"Does Monsieur Delarey like Turkish coffee?"
+
+"Loves it."
+
+"Intelligently?"
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"Does he love it inherently, or because you do?"
+
+"You can find that out to-night."
+
+"I shall come."
+
+He got up, put his pipe into a case, and the case into his pocket, and
+said:
+
+"Hermione, if the analyst may have a word--"
+
+"Yes--now."
+
+"Don't let Monsieur Delarey, whatever his character, see now, or in the
+future, the dirty little beggar staring at the angel. I use your own
+preposterously inflated phrase. Men can't stand certain things and remain
+true to the good in their characters. Humble adoration from a woman like
+you would be destructive of blessed virtues in Antinous. Think well of
+yourself, my friend, think well of your sphinxlike eyes. Haven't they
+beauty? Doesn't intellect shoot its fires from them? Mon Dieu! Don't let
+me see any prostration to-night, or I shall put three grains of something
+I know--I always call it Turkish delight--into the Turkish coffee of
+Monsieur Delarey, and send him to sleep with his fathers."
+
+Hermione got up and held out her hands to him impulsively.
+
+"Bless you, Emile!" she said. "You're a--"
+
+There was a gentle tap on the door. Hermione went to it and opened it.
+Selim stood outside with a pencil note on a salver.
+
+"Ha! The little Townly has been!" said Artois.
+
+"Yes, it's from her. You told her, Selim, that I was with Monsieur
+Artois?"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Did she say anything?"
+
+"She said, 'Very well,' madame, and then she wrote this. Then she said
+again, 'Very well,' and then she went away."
+
+"All right, Selim."
+
+Selim departed.
+
+"Delicious!" said Artois. "I can hear her speaking and see her drifting
+away consumed by jealousy, in the fog."
+
+"Hush, Emile, don't be so malicious."
+
+"P'f! I must be to-day, for I too am--"
+
+"Nonsense. Be good this evening, be very good."
+
+"I will try."
+
+He kissed her hand, bending his great form down with a slightly burlesque
+air, and strode out without another word. Hermione sat down to read Miss
+Townly's note:
+
+       "Dearest, never mind. I know that I must now accustom myself to be
+     nothing in your life. It is difficult at first, but what is
+     existence but a struggle? I feel that I am going to have another of
+     my neuralgic seizures. I wonder what it all means?--Your,    EVELYN."
+
+Hermione laid the note down, with a sigh and a little laugh.
+
+"I wonder what it all means? Poor, dear Evelyn! Thank God, it sometimes
+means--" She did not finish the sentence, but knelt down on the carpet
+and took the St. Bernard's great head in her hands.
+
+"You don't bother, do you, old boy, as long as you have your bone. Ah,
+I'm a selfish wretch. But I am going to have my bone, and I can't help
+feeling happy--gloriously, supremely happy!"
+
+And she kissed the dog's cold nose and repeated:
+
+"Supremely--supremely happy!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+Miss Townly, gracefully turned away from Hermione's door by Selim, did,
+as Artois had surmised, drift away in the fog to the house of her friend
+Mrs. Creswick, who lived in Sloane Street. She felt she must unburden
+herself to somebody, and Mrs. Creswick's tea, a blend of China tea with
+another whose origin was a closely guarded secret, was the most delicious
+in London. There are merciful dispensations of Providence even for Miss
+Townlys, and Mrs. Creswick was at home with a blazing fire. When she saw
+Miss Townly coming sideways into the room with a slightly drooping head,
+she said, briskly:
+
+"Comfort me with crumpets, for I am sick with love! Cheer up, my dear
+Evelyn. Fogs will pass and even neuralgia has its limits. I don't ask you
+what is the matter, because I know perfectly well."
+
+Miss Townly went into a very large arm-chair and waveringly selected a
+crumpet.
+
+"What does it all mean?" she murmured, looking obliquely at her friend's
+parquet.
+
+"Ask the baker, No. 5 Allitch Street. I always get them from there. And
+he's a remarkably well-informed man."
+
+"No, I mean life with its extraordinary changes, things you never
+expected, never dreamed of--and all coming so abruptly. I don't think I'm
+a stupid person, but I certainly never looked for this."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"This most extraordinary engagement of Hermione's."
+
+Mrs. Creswick, who was a short woman who looked tall, with a briskly
+conceited but not unkind manner, and a decisive and very English nose,
+rejoined:
+
+"I don't know why we should call it extraordinary. Everybody gets engaged
+at some time or other, and Hermione's a woman like the rest of us and
+subject to aberration. But I confess I never thought she would marry
+Maurice Delarey. He never seemed to mean more to her than any one else,
+so far as I could see."
+
+"Everybody seems to mean so much to Hermione that it makes things
+difficult to outsiders," replied Miss Townly, plaintively. "She is so
+wide-minded and has so many interests that she dwarfs everybody else. I
+always feel quite squeezed when I compare my poor little life with hers.
+But then she has such physical endurance. She breaks the ice, you know,
+in her bath in the winter--of course I mean when there is ice."
+
+"It isn't only in her bath that she breaks the ice," said Mrs. Creswick.
+
+"I perfectly understand," Miss Townly said, vaguely. "You mean--yes,
+you're right. Well, I prefer my bath warmed for me, but my circulation
+was never of the best."
+
+"Hermione is extraordinary," said Mrs. Creswick, trying to look at her
+profile in the glass and making her face as Roman as she could, "I know
+all London, but I never met another Hermione. She can do things that
+other women can't dream of even, and nobody minds."
+
+"Well, now she is going to do a thing we all dream of and a great many of
+us do. Will it answer? He's ten years younger than she is. Can it
+answer?"
+
+"One can never tell whether a union of two human mysteries will answer,"
+said Mrs. Creswick, judicially. "Maurice Delarey is wonderfully
+good-looking."
+
+"Yes, and Hermione isn't."
+
+"That has never mattered in the least."
+
+"I know. I didn't say it had. But will it now?"
+
+"Why should it?"
+
+"Men care so much for looks. Do you think Hermione loves Mr. Delarey for
+his?"
+
+"She dives deep."
+
+"Yes, as a rule."
+
+"Why not now? She ought to have dived deeper than ever this time."
+
+"She ought, of course. I perfectly understand that. But it's very odd, I
+think we often marry the man we understand less than any one else in the
+world. Mystery is so very attractive."
+
+Miss Townly sighed. She was emaciated, dark, and always dressed to look
+mysterious.
+
+"Maurice Delarey is scarcely my idea of a mystery," said Mrs. Creswick,
+taking joyously a marron glace. "In my opinion he's an ordinarily
+intelligent but an extraordinarily handsome man. Hermione is exactly the
+reverse, extraordinarily intelligent and almost ugly."
+
+"Oh no, not ugly!" said Miss Townly, with unexpected warmth.
+
+Though of a tepid personality, she was a worshipper at Hermione's shrine.
+
+"Her eyes are beautiful," she added.
+
+"Good eyes don't make a beauty," said Mrs. Creswick again, looking at her
+three-quarters face in the glass. "Hermione is too large, and her face is
+too square, and--but as I said before, it doesn't matter the least.
+Hermione's got a temperament that carries all before it."
+
+"I do wish I had a temperament," said Miss Townly. "I try to cultivate
+one."
+
+"You might as well try to cultivate a mustache," Mrs. Creswick rather
+brutally rejoined. "If it's there, it's there, but if it isn't one prays
+in vain."
+
+"I used to think Hermione would do something," continued Miss Townly,
+finishing her second cup of tea with thirsty languor.
+
+"Do something?"
+
+"Something important, great, something that would make her famous, but of
+course now"--she paused--"now it's too late," she concluded. "Marriage
+destroys, not creates talent. Some celebrated man--I forget which--has
+said something like that."
+
+"Perhaps he'd destroyed his wife's. I think Hermione might be a great
+mother."
+
+Miss Townly blushed faintly. She did nearly everything faintly. That was
+partly why she admired Hermione.
+
+"And a great mother is rare," continued Mrs. Creswick. "Good mothers are,
+thank God, quite common even in London, whatever those foolish people who
+rail at the society they can't get into may say. But great mothers are
+seldom met with. I don't know one."
+
+"What do you mean by a great mother?" inquired Miss Townly.
+
+"A mother who makes seeds grow. Hermione has a genius for friendship and
+a special gift for inspiring others. If she ever has a child, I can
+imagine that she will make of that child something wonderful."
+
+"Do you mean an infant prodigy?" asked Miss Townly, innocently.
+
+"No, dear, I don't!" said Mrs. Creswick; "I mean nothing of the sort.
+Never mind!"
+
+When Mrs. Creswick said "Never mind!" Miss Townly usually got up to go.
+She got up to go now, and went forth into Sloane Street meditating, as
+she would have expressed it, "profoundly."
+
+Meanwhile Artois went back to the Hans Crescent Hotel on foot. He walked
+slowly along the greasy pavement through the yellow November fog, trying
+to combat a sensation of dreariness which had floated round his spirit,
+as the fog floated round his body, directly he stepped into the street.
+He often felt depressed without a special cause, but this afternoon
+there was a special cause for his melancholy. Hermione was going to be
+married.
+
+She often came to Paris, where she had many friends, and some years ago
+they had met at a dinner given by a brilliant Jewess, who delighted in
+clever people, not because she was stupid, but for the opposite reason.
+Artois was already famous, though not loved, as a novelist. He had
+published two books; works of art, cruel, piercing, brutal, true.
+Hermione had read them. Her intellect had revelled in them, but they had
+set ice about her heart, and when Madame Enthoven told her who was going
+to take her in to dinner, she very nearly begged to be given another
+partner. She felt that her nature must be in opposition to this man's.
+
+Artois was not eager for the honor of her company. He was a careful
+dissecter of women, and, therefore, understood how mysterious women are;
+but in his intimate life they counted for little. He regarded them there
+rather as the European traveller regards the Mousmes of Japan, as
+playthings, and insisted on one thing only--that they must be pretty. A
+Frenchman, despite his unusual intellectual power, he was not wholly
+emancipated from the la petite femme tradition, which will never be
+outmoded in Paris while Paris hums with life, and, therefore, when he was
+informed that he was to take in to dinner the tall, solidly built,
+big-waisted, rugged-faced woman, whom he had been observing from a
+distance ever since he came into the drawing-room, he felt that he was
+being badly treated by his hostess.
+
+Yet he had been observing this woman closely.
+
+Something unusual, something vital in her had drawn his attention, fixed
+it, held it. He knew that, but said to himself that it was the attention
+of the novelist that had been grasped by an uncommon human specimen, and
+that the man of the world, the diner-out, did not want to eat in company
+with a specimen, but to throw off professional cares with a gay little
+chatterbox of the Mousme type. Therefore he came over to be presented to
+Hermione with rather a bad grace.
+
+And that introduction was the beginning of the great friendship which was
+now troubling him in the fog.
+
+By the end of that evening Hermione and he had entirely rid themselves of
+their preconceived notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining
+him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a
+possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be
+agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She
+was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as
+she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen
+interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once
+began to show to Artois how much interested she was in him. By doing so
+she captivated him at once. He would not, perhaps, have been captivated
+by the heart without the brains, but the two in combination took
+possession of him with an ease which, when the evening was over, but only
+then, caused him some astonishment.
+
+Hermione had a divining-rod to discover the heart in another, and she
+found out at once that Artois had a big heart as well as a fine
+intellect. He was deceptive because he was always ready to show the
+latter, and almost always determined to conceal the former. Even to
+himself he was not quite frank about his heart, but often strove to
+minimize its influence upon him, if not to ignore totally its promptings
+and its utterances. Why this was so he could not perhaps have explained
+even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of his temperament. From the
+first moment of their intercourse Hermione showed to him her conviction
+that he had a warm heart, and that it could be relied upon without
+hesitation. This piqued but presently delighted, and also soothed
+Artois, who was accustomed to be misunderstood, and had often thought he
+liked to be misunderstood, but who now found out how pleasant a brilliant
+woman's intuition may be, even at a Parisian dinner. Before the evening
+was over they knew that they were friends; and friends they had remained
+ever since.
+
+Artois was a reserved man, but, like many reserved people, if once he
+showed himself as he really was, he could continue to be singularly
+frank. He was singularly frank with Hermione. She became his confidante,
+often at a distance. He scarcely ever came to London, which he disliked
+exceedingly, but from Paris or from the many lands in which he
+wandered--he was no pavement lounger, although he loved Paris rather as a
+man may love a very chic cocotte--he wrote to Hermione long letters, into
+which he put his mind and heart, his aspirations, struggles, failures,
+triumphs. They were human documents, and contained much of his secret
+history.
+
+It was of this history that he was now thinking, and of Hermione's
+comments upon it, tied up with a ribbon in Paris. The news of her
+approaching marriage with a man whom he had never seen had given him a
+rude shock, had awakened in him a strange feeling of jealousy. He had
+grown accustomed to the thought that Hermione was in a certain sense his
+property. He realized thoroughly the egotism, the dog-in-the-manger
+spirit which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish it. As a
+friend he certainly loved Hermione. She knew that. But he did not love
+her as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know
+that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her, and she loved but
+was not in love with him. Why, then, should this marriage make a
+difference in their friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt
+that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a mother. The latter
+thought made his egotism shudder. She would be involved in the happy
+turmoil of a family existence, while he would remain without in that
+loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom. Yes, his
+egotism shuddered, and he was angry at the weakness. He chastised the
+frailties of others, but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of
+helplessness came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven. How unworthy
+was his sensation of hostility against Delarey, his sensation that
+Hermione was wronging him by entering into this alliance, and how
+powerless he was to rid himself of either sensation! There was good cause
+for his melancholy--his own folly. He must try to conquer it, and, if
+that were impossible, to rein it in before the evening.
+
+When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room and worked for an
+hour and a half, producing a short paragraph, which did not please him.
+Then he took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.
+
+Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her
+back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As
+Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was
+passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to
+the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was
+to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual
+spirit.
+
+He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in
+build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by
+perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained
+limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick,
+low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide
+apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small,
+straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the
+features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that
+denoted health and an out-door life--an out-door life in the south,
+Artois thought.
+
+As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the
+restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself
+were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of
+a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical
+endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity,
+he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much
+handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he
+had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the
+look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant
+readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised
+for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an
+intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an
+extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was
+fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to
+be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that
+had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys
+dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that
+one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate,
+leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous,
+unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a
+tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.
+
+Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When
+she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as
+Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she
+had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body--sympathy,
+enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but
+a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of
+contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a
+Delarey for her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure
+rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been
+captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he
+still felt angry.
+
+Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her
+anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so
+transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and
+inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was
+also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception
+of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but
+not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced
+that in order to do so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in
+this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of a willing horse,
+a fine racing pace of the nature that woke pleasure and admiration in
+those who watched it.
+
+Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards him, but was
+ready to admire and rejoice in him as Hermione's greatest friend. He was
+met more than half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost touching
+him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike within Artois increased,
+and he consciously determined not to yield to the charm of this younger
+man who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not speak much
+English, but fortunately Delarey talked French fairly well, not with
+great fluency like Hermione, but enough to take a modest share in
+conversation, which was apparently all the share that he desired. Artois
+believed that he was no great talker. His eyes were more eager than was
+his tongue, and seemed to betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could
+not, perhaps, show forth in words. The conversation at first was mainly
+between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional word from
+Delarey--generally interrogative--and was confined to generalities. But
+this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and
+seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself
+the inane was speedily banished; pale topics--the spectres that haunt the
+dull and are cherished by them--were whipped away to limbo, and some
+subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities,
+was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two
+people in Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who had been
+very intimate, but who had now quarrelled, and every one said,
+irrevocably. The question arose whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the
+facts of the case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced,
+said it was the woman's.
+
+"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but in this instance it
+has failed her, it has been warped by jealousy; not the jealousy that
+often accompanies passion, for she and Robert Meunier were only great
+friends, linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much more subtle
+form of that mental disease. You know, Hermione, that both of them are
+brilliant critics of literature?"
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in this walk of
+letters, each striving to be more unerring than the other in dividing the
+sheep from the goats. I am the guilty person who made discord where there
+had been harmony."
+
+"You, Emile! How was that?"
+
+"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to be a critic, so
+difficult to be a creator. You two, now would you even dare to try to
+create?' They were nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a
+magnificent subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine, a conte. If
+you like I will give it you, and leave you to create--separately, not
+together--what you have so often written about, the perfect conte.' They
+accepted my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month to work it out.
+At the end of that time the two contes were to be submitted to a jury of
+competent literary men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but
+created great interest in our circle--you know it, Hermione, that dines
+at Reneau's on Thursday nights?"
+
+"Yes. Well, what happened?"
+
+"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but Robert Meunier astonished us
+all. He produced certainly one of the best contes that was ever written
+in the French language."
+
+"And Madame Lagrande?"
+
+"It is not too much to say that from that moment she has almost hated
+Robert."
+
+"And you dare to say she has a noble nature?"
+
+"Yes, a noble nature from which, under some apparently irresistible
+impulse, she has lapsed."
+
+"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on the table and leaning
+forward to her fiance, "you're not in literature any more than I am,
+you're an outsider--bless you! What d'you say to that?"
+
+Delarey hesitated and looked modestly at Artois.
+
+"No, no," cried Hermione, "none of that, Maurice! You may be a better
+judge in this than Emile is with all his knowledge of the human heart.
+You're the man in the street, and sometimes I'd give a hundred pounds for
+his opinion and not twopence for the big man's who's in the profession.
+Would--could a noble nature yield to such an impulse?"
+
+"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.
+
+"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's possible. For a
+moment, yes, perhaps. But you say, Emile, that there's an actual breach
+between them."
+
+"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study of jealousy in its
+various forms?"
+
+"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't understand it."
+
+"Yet you must be capable of it."
+
+"You think every one is?"
+
+"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not. And you, I am
+certain, are."
+
+Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang out wholesomely in the
+narrow room.
+
+"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For instance, if I cared
+for some one and was cared for--"
+
+"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had only a certain,
+limited faculty of affection and transferred his affection
+elsewhere--what then?"
+
+"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe my affection
+would die. My love subsists on sympathy--take that food from it and it
+would starve and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask. If
+I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And without the love there
+could be no jealousy. But that isn't the point, Emile."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"What is?"
+
+"The point is--can a noble nature lapse like that from its nobility?"
+
+"Yes, it can."
+
+"Then it changes, it ceases to be noble. You would not say that a brave
+man can show cowardice and remain a brave man."
+
+"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave, might, under certain
+circumstances, show fear, without being what is called a coward. Human
+nature is full of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of
+extraordinary contradictions. But this point I will concede you, that it
+is like the boomerang, which flies forward, circles, and returns to the
+point from which it started. The inherently noble nature will, because it
+must, return eventually to its nobility. Then comes the really tragic
+moment with the passion of remorse."
+
+He spoke quietly, almost coldly. Hermione looked at him with shining
+eyes. She had quite forgotten Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier, had
+lost the sense of the special in her love of the general.
+
+"That's a grand theory," she said. "That we must come back to the good
+that is in us in the end, that we must be true to that somehow, almost
+whether we will or no. I shall try to think of that when I am sinning."
+
+"You--sinning!" exclaimed Delarey.
+
+"Maurice, dear, you think too well of me."
+
+Delarey flushed like a boy, and glanced quickly at Artois, who did not
+return his gaze.
+
+"But if that's true, Emile," Hermione continued, "Madame Lagrande and
+Robert Meunier will be friends again."
+
+"Some day I know she will hold out the olive-branch, but what if he
+refuses it?"
+
+"You literary people are dreadfully difficile."
+
+"True. Our jealousies are ferocious, but so are the jealousies of
+thousands who can neither read nor write."
+
+"Jealousy," she said, forgetting to eat in her keen interest in the
+subject. "I told you I didn't believe myself capable of it, but I don't
+know. The jealousy that is born of passion I might understand and suffer,
+perhaps, but jealousy of a talent greater than my own, or of one that I
+didn't possess--that seems to me inexplicable. I could never be jealous
+of a talent."
+
+"You mean that you could never hate a person for a talent in them?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Suppose that some one, by means of a talent which you had not, won from
+you a love which you had? Talent is a weapon, you know."
+
+"You think it is a weapon to conquer the affections! Ah, Emile, after all
+you don't know us!"
+
+"You go too fast. I did not say a weapon to conquer the affection of a
+woman."
+
+"You're speaking of men?"
+
+"I know," Delarey said, suddenly, forgetting to be modest for once, "you
+mean that a man might be won away from one woman by a talent in another.
+Isn't that it?"
+
+"Ah," said Hermione, "a man--I see."
+
+She sat for a moment considering deeply, with her luminous eyes fixed on
+the food in her plate, food which she did not see.
+
+"What horrible ideas you sometimes have, Emile," she said, at last.
+
+"You mean what horrible truths exist," he answered, quietly.
+
+"Could a man be won so? Yes, I suppose he might be if there were a
+combination."
+
+"Exactly," said Artois.
+
+"I see now. Suppose a man had two strains in him, say: the adoration of
+beauty, of the physical; and the adoration of talent, of the mental. He
+might fall in love with a merely beautiful woman and transfer his
+affections if he came across an equally beautiful woman who had some
+great talent."
+
+"Or he might fall in love with a plain, talented woman, and be taken from
+her by one in whom talent was allied with beauty. But in either case are
+you sure that the woman deserted could never be jealous, bitterly
+jealous, of the talent possessed by the other woman? I think talent often
+creates jealousy in your sex."
+
+"But beauty much oftener, oh, much! Every woman, I feel sure, could more
+easily be jealous of physical beauty in another woman than of mental
+gifts. There's something so personal in beauty."
+
+"And is genius not equally personal?"
+
+"I suppose it is, but I doubt if it seems so."
+
+"I think you leave out of account the advance of civilization, which is
+greatly changing men and women in our day. The tragedies of the mind are
+increasing."
+
+"And the tragedies of the heart--are they diminishing in consequence? Oh,
+Emile!" And she laughed.
+
+"Hermione--your food! You are not eating anything!" said Delarey, gently,
+pointing to her plate. "And it's all getting cold."
+
+"Thank you, Maurice."
+
+She began to eat at once with an air of happy submission, which made
+Artois understand a good deal about her feeling for Delarey.
+
+"The heart will always rule the head, I dare say, in this world where the
+majority will always be thoughtless," said Artois. "But the greatest
+jealousy, the jealousy which is most difficult to resist and to govern,
+is that in which both heart and brain are concerned. That is, indeed, a
+full-fledged monster."
+
+Artois generally spoke with a good deal of authority, often without
+meaning to do so. He thought so clearly, knew so exactly what he was
+thinking and what he meant, that he felt very safe in conversation, and
+from this sense of safety sprang his air of masterfulness. It was an air
+that was always impressive, but to-night it specially struck Hermione.
+Now she laid down her knife and fork once more, to Delarey's half-amused
+despair, and exclaimed:
+
+"I shall never forget the way you said that. Even if it were nonsense one
+would have to believe it for the moment, and of course it's dreadfully
+true. Intellect and heart suffering in combination must be far more
+terrible than the one suffering without the other. No, Maurice, I've
+really finished. I don't want any more. Let's have our coffee."
+
+"The Turkish coffee," said Artois, with a smile. "Do you like Turkish
+coffee, Monsieur Delarey?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur. Hermione has taught me to."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"At first it seemed to me too full of grounds," he explained.
+
+"Perhaps a taste for it must be an acquired one among Europeans. Do we
+have it here?"
+
+"No, no," said Hermione, "Caminiti has taken my advice, and now there's a
+charming smoke-room behind this. Come along."
+
+She got up and led the way out. The two men followed her, Artois coming
+last. He noticed now more definitely the very great contrast between
+Hermione and her future husband. Delarey, when in movement, looked more
+than ever like a Mercury. His footstep was light and elastic, and his
+whole body seemed to breathe out a gay activity, a fulness of the joy of
+life. Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the tarantella, and
+when they were in the small smoke-room, which Caminiti had fitted up in
+what he believed to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely
+accurate, was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire:
+
+"Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?"
+
+"No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her veins. But I have
+never been in Sicily or Italy."
+
+"Ah, Emile," said Hermione, "how clever of you to find that out. I notice
+it, too, sometimes, that touch of the blessed South. I shall take him
+there some day, and see if the Southern blood doesn't wake up in his
+veins when he's in the rays of the real sun we never see in England."
+
+"She'll take you to Italy, you fortunate, damned dog!" thought Artois.
+"What luck for you to go there with such a companion!"
+
+They sat down and the two men began to smoke. Hermione never smoked
+because she had tried smoking and knew she hated it. They were alone in
+the room, which was warm, but not too warm, and faintly lit by shaded
+lamps. Artois began to feel more genial, he scarcely knew why. Perhaps
+the good dinner had comforted him, or perhaps he was beginning to yield
+to the charm of Delarey's gay and boyish modesty, which was untainted and
+unspoiled by any awkward shyness.
+
+Artois did not know or seek to know, but he was aware that he was more
+ready to be happy with the flying moment than he had been, or had
+expected to be that evening. Something almost paternal shone in his gray
+eyes as he stretched his large limbs on Caminiti's notion of a Turkish
+divan, and watched the first smoke-wreaths rise from his cigar, a light
+which made his face most pleasantly expressive to Hermione.
+
+"He likes Maurice," she thought, with a glow of pleasure, and with the
+thought came into her heart an even deeper love for Maurice. For it was a
+triumph, indeed, if Artois were captured speedily by any one. It seemed
+to her just then as if she had never known what perfect happiness was
+till now, when she sat between her best friend and her lover, and
+sensitively felt that in the room there were not three separate persons
+but a Trinity. For a moment there was a comfortable silence. Then an
+Italian boy brought in the coffee. Artois spoke to him in Italian. His
+eyes lit up as he answered with the accent of Naples, lit up still more
+when Artois spoke to him again in his own dialect. When he had served the
+coffee he went out, glowing.
+
+"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.
+
+"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I--it doesn't matter to me.
+Wherever it is will be the same to me."
+
+"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said Artois. "I expect that's
+profoundly true."
+
+"Don't you--don't you know?" ventured Delarey.
+
+"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every branch of knowledge."
+
+He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm that had in it
+something more sad than bitterness. It struck both Hermione and Delarey
+as almost monstrous that anybody with whom they were connected should be
+feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life presented itself to them in a
+glorious radiance of sunshine, in a passionate light, in a torrent of
+color. Their knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by their
+dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as if every one ought to be
+as happy as they were, almost as if every one could be as happy as they
+were.
+
+"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you can't mean to say that
+you have never known the happiness that makes of every place--Clapham,
+Lippe-Detmold, a West African swamp, a Siberian convict settlement--an
+Italy? You have had a wonderful life. You have worked, you have wandered,
+had your ambition and your freedom--"
+
+"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted, "wide open on
+life watching the manifestations of life."
+
+"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a minute to everything but
+your own happiness? Oh, it's selfish, I know, but it does one good,
+Emile, any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It
+reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of
+the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one
+sees--one must see--everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery,
+not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking
+graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps
+I don't put it well, but--"
+
+"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what you say."
+
+"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.
+
+His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration
+and love.
+
+Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw
+children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A
+desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his
+intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign
+spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had
+arrived.
+
+"There's truth in what you say. But there's another truth, too, which you
+bring to my mind at this moment."
+
+"What's that, Emile?"
+
+"The payment that is exacted from great happiness. These intense joys of
+which you speak--what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any
+violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably,
+followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a
+beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this
+highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the
+great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the
+track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or
+woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost
+certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."
+
+"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"
+
+"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 had lifted, 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
+very handsome, 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 hand and
+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."
+
+[Illustration: "'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 is modest 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 select and 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.
+
+
+
+III
+
+Lucrezia Gabbi came 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 but
+slight 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
+portiere. 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 opened wider, 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 old man'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 manly chin. 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?"
+
+"Macche!"
+
+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.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+"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 passionately tender 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 was a 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:
+
+     "This is a word--perhaps unwelcome, for I think I understand, dear
+     friend, something of what you are feeling and of what you desire
+     just now--a word of welcome to your garden of paradise. May there
+     never be an angel with a flaming sword to keep the gate against
+     you. Listen to the shepherds fluting, dream, or, better, live, as
+     you are grandly capable of living, under the old olives of Sicily.
+     Take your golden time boldly with both hands. Life may seem to most
+     of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured thing,
+     but when it is not so for a while to one who can think as you can
+     think, the power of thought, of deep thought, intensifies its
+     glory. You will never enjoy as might a pagan, perhaps never as
+     might a saint. But you will enjoy as a generous-blooded woman with
+     a heart that only your friends--I should like to dare to say only
+     one friend--know in its rare entirety. There is an egoist here, in
+     the shadow of the mosques, who turns his face towards Mecca, and
+     prays that you may never leave your garden.
+                                                               E. A."
+
+     "Does the Sicilian grandmother respond to the magic of the south?"
+
+When she drew near to the end of this letter Hermione hesitated.
+
+"He--there's something," she said, "that is too kind to me. I don't think
+I'll read it."
+
+"Don't," said Delarey. "But it can't be too kind."
+
+She saw the postscript and smiled.
+
+"And quite at the end there's an allusion to you."
+
+"Is there?"
+
+"I must read that."
+
+And she read it.
+
+"He needn't be afraid of the grandmother's not responding, need he,
+Maurice?"
+
+"No," he said, smiling too. "But is that it, do you think? Why should it
+be? Who wouldn't love this place?"
+
+And he went to the open door and looked out towards the sea.
+
+"Who wouldn't?" he repeated.
+
+"Oh, I have met an Englishman who was angry with Etna for being the shape
+it is."
+
+"What an ass!"
+
+"I thought so, too. But, seriously, I expect the grandmother has
+something to say in that matter of your feeling already, as if you
+belonged here."
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+He was still looking towards the distant sea far down below them.
+
+"Is that an island?" he asked.
+
+"Where?" said Hermione, getting up and coming towards him. "Oh, that--no,
+it is a promontory, but it's almost surrounded by the sea. There is only
+a narrow ledge of rock, like a wall, connecting it with the main-land,
+and in the rock there's a sort of natural tunnel through which the sea
+flows. I've sometimes been to picnic there. On the plateau hidden among
+the trees there's a ruined house. I have spent many hours reading and
+writing in it. They call it, in Marechiaro, Casa delle Sirene--the house
+of the sirens."
+
+               "Questo vino e bello e fino,"
+
+cried Gaspare's voice outside.
+
+"A Brindisi!" said Hermione. "Gaspare's treating the boys. Questo
+vino--oh, how glorious to be here in Sicily!"
+
+She put her arm through Delarey's, and drew him out onto the terrace.
+Gaspare, Lucrezia, Sebastiano, and the three boys stood there with
+glasses of red wine in their hands raised high above their heads.
+
+               "Questo vino e bello e fino,
+               E portato da Castel Perini,
+               Faccio brindisi alla Signora Ermini,"
+
+continued Gaspare, joyously, and with an obvious pride in his poetical
+powers.
+
+They all drank simultaneously, Lucrezia spluttering a little out of
+shyness.
+
+"Monte Amato, Gaspare, not Castel Perini. But that doesn't rhyme, eh?
+Bravo! But we must drink, too."
+
+Gaspare hastened to fill two more glasses.
+
+"Now it's our turn," cried Hermione.
+
+               "Questo vino e bello e fino,
+               E portato da Castello a mare,
+               Faccio brindisi al Signor Gaspare."
+
+The boys burst into a hearty laugh, and Gaspare's eyes gleamed with
+pleasure while Hermione and Maurice drank. Then Sebastiano drew from the
+inner pocket of his old jacket a little flute, smiling with an air of
+intense and comic slyness which contorted his face.
+
+"Ah," said Hermione, "I know--it's the tarantella!"
+
+She clapped her hands.
+
+"It only wanted that," she said to Maurice. "Only that--the tarantella!"
+
+"Guai Lucrezia!" cried Gaspare, tyrannically.
+
+Lucrezia bounded to one side, bent her body inward, and giggled with all
+her heart. Sebastiano leaned his back against a column and put the flute
+to his lips.
+
+"Here, Maurice, here!" said Hermione.
+
+She made him sit down on one of the seats under the parlor window, facing
+the view, while the four boys took their places, one couple opposite to
+the other. Then Sebastiano began to twitter the tune familiar to the
+Sicilians of Marechiaro, in which all the careless pagan joy of life in
+the sun seems caught and flung out upon a laughing, dancing world.
+Delarey laid his hands on the warm tiles of the seat, leaned forward, and
+watched with eager eyes. He had never seen the tarantella, yet now with
+his sensation of expectation there was blended another feeling. It seemed
+to him as if he were going to see something he had known once, perhaps
+very long ago, something that he had forgotten and that was now going to
+be recalled to his memory. Some nerve in his body responded to
+Sebastiano's lively tune. A desire of movement came to him as he saw the
+gay boys waiting on the terrace, their eyes already dancing, although
+their bodies were still.
+
+Gaspare bent forward, lifted his hands above his head, and began to snap
+his fingers in time to the music. A look of joyous invitation had come
+into his eyes--an expression that was almost coquettish, like the
+expression of a child who has conceived some lively, innocent design of
+which he thinks that no one knows except himself. His young figure surely
+quivered with a passion of merry mischief which was communicated to his
+companions. In it there began to flame a spirit that suggested undying
+youth. Even before they began to dance the boys were transformed. If they
+had ever known cares those cares had fled, for in the breasts of those
+who can really dance the tarantella there is no room for the smallest
+sorrow, in their hearts no place for the most minute regret, anxiety, or
+wonder, when the rapture of the measure is upon them. Away goes
+everything but the pagan joy of life, the pagan ecstasy of swift
+movement, and the leaping blood that is quick as the motes in a sunray
+falling from a southern sky. Delarey began to smile as he watched them,
+and their expression was reflected in his eyes. Hermione glanced at him
+and thought what a boy he looked. His eyes made her feel almost as if
+she were sitting with a child.
+
+The mischief, the coquettish joy of the boys increased. They snapped
+their fingers more loudly, swayed their bodies, poised themselves first
+on one foot, then on the other, then abruptly, and with a wildness that
+was like the sudden crash of all the instruments in an orchestra breaking
+in upon the melody of a solitary flute, burst into the full frenzy of the
+dance. And in the dance each seemed to be sportively creative, ruled by
+his own sweet will.
+
+"That's why I love the tarantella more than any other dance," Hermione
+murmured to her husband, "because it seems to be the invention of the
+moment, as if they were wild with joy and had to show it somehow, and
+showed it beautifully by dancing. Look at Gaspare now."
+
+With his hands held high above his head, and linked together, Gaspare was
+springing into the air, as if propelled by one of those boards which are
+used by acrobats in circuses for leaping over horses. He had thrown off
+his hat, and his low-growing hair, which was rather long on the forehead,
+moved as he sprang upward, as if his excitement, penetrating through
+every nerve in his body, had filled it with electricity. While Hermione
+watched him she almost expected to see its golden tufts give off sparks
+in response to the sparkling radiance that flashed from his laughing
+eyes. For in all the wild activity of his changing movements Gaspare
+never lost his coquettish expression, the look of seductive mischief that
+seemed to invite the whole world to be merry and mad as he was. His
+ever-smiling lips and ever-smiling eyes defied fatigue, and his young
+body--grace made a living, pulsing, aspiring reality--suggested the
+tireless intensity of a flame. The other boys danced well, but Gaspare
+outdid them all, for they only looked gay while he looked mad with joy.
+And to-day, at this moment, he felt exultant. He had a padrona to whom he
+was devoted with that peculiar sensitive devotion of the Sicilian which,
+once it is fully aroused, is tremendous in its strength and jealous in
+its doggedness. He was in command of Lucrezia, and was respectfully
+looked up to by all his boy friends of Marechiaro as one who could
+dispense patronage, being a sort of purse-bearer and conductor of rich
+forestieri in a strange land. Even Sebastiano, a personage rather apt to
+be a little haughty in his physical strength, and, though no longer a
+brigand, no great respecter of others, showed him to-day a certain
+deference which elated his boyish spirit. And all his elation, all his
+joy in the present and hopes for the future, he let out in the dance. To
+dance the tarantella almost intoxicated him, even when he only danced it
+in the village among the contadini, but to-day the admiring eyes of his
+padrona were upon him. He knew how she loved the tarantella. He knew,
+too, that she wanted the padrone, her husband, to love it as she did.
+Gaspare was very shrewd to read a woman's thoughts so long as her love
+ran in them. Though but eighteen, he was a man in certain knowledge. He
+understood, almost unconsciously, a good deal of what Hermione was
+feeling as she watched, and he put his whole soul into the effort to
+shine, to dazzle, to rouse gayety and wonder in the padrone, who saw him
+dance for the first time. He was untiring in his variety and his
+invention. Sometimes, light-footed in his mountain boots, with an almost
+incredible swiftness and vim, he rushed from end to end of the terrace.
+His feet twinkled in steps so complicated and various that he made the
+eyes that watched him wink as at a play of sparks in a furnace, and his
+arms and hands were never still, yet never, even for a second, fell into
+a curve that was ungraceful. Sometimes his head was bent whimsically
+forward as if in invitation. Sometimes he threw his whole body backward,
+exposing his brown throat, and staring up at the sun like a sun
+worshipper dancing to his divinity. Sometimes he crouched on his
+haunches, clapping his hands together rhythmically, and, with bent knees,
+shooting out his legs like some jovially grotesque dwarf promenading
+among a crowd of Follies. And always the spirit of the dance seemed to
+increase within him, and the intoxication of it to take more hold upon
+him, and his eyes grew brighter and his face more radiant, and his body
+more active, more utterly untiring, till he was the living embodiment
+surely of all the youth and all the gladness of the world.
+
+Hermione had kept Artois's letter in her hand, and now, as she danced in
+spirit with Gaspare, and rejoiced not only in her own joy, but in his,
+she thought suddenly of that sentence in it--"Life may seem to most of us
+who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured, thing." Life a
+tortured thing! She was thinking now, exultantly thinking. Her thoughts
+were leaping, spinning, crouching, whirling, rushing with Gaspare in the
+sunshine. But life was a happy, a radiant reality. No dream, it was more
+beautiful than any dream, as the clear, when lovely, is more lovely than
+even that which is exquisite and vague. She had, of course, always known
+that in the world there is much joy. Now she felt it, she felt all the
+joy of the world. She felt the joy of sunshine and of blue, the joy of
+love and of sympathy, the joy of health and of activity, the joy of sane
+passion that fights not against any law of God or man, the joy of liberty
+in a joyous land where the climate is kindly, and, despite poverty and
+toil, there are songs upon the lips of men, there are tarantellas in
+their sun-browned bodies, there are the fires of gayety in their bold,
+dark eyes. Joy, joy twittered in the reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the
+boys were joys made manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of
+joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off drone of the
+"Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy that was different, less subtly
+sweet, perhaps, but more buoyant, more fearless, more careless. The glory
+of the pagan world was round about her, and for a moment her heart was
+like the heart of a nymph scattering roses in a Bacchic triumph.
+
+Maurice moved beside her, and she heard him breathing quickly.
+
+"What is it, Maurice?" she asked. "You--do you--"
+
+"Yes," he answered, understanding the question she had not fully asked.
+"It drives me almost mad to sit still and see those boys. Gaspare's like
+a merry devil tempting one."
+
+As if Gaspare had understood what Maurice said, he suddenly spun round
+from his companions, and began to dance in front of Maurice and Hermione,
+provocatively, invitingly, bending his head towards them, and laughing
+almost in their faces, but without a trace of impertinence. He did not
+speak, though his lips were parted, showing two rows of even, tiny teeth,
+but his radiant eyes called to them, scolded them for their inactivity,
+chaffed them for it, wondered how long it would last, and seemed to deny
+that it could last forever.
+
+"What eyes!" said Hermione. "Did you ever see anything so expressive?"
+
+Maurice did not answer. He was watching Gaspare, fascinated, completely
+under the spell of the dance. The blood was beginning to boil in his
+veins, warm blood of the south that he had never before felt in his body.
+Artois had spoken to Hermione of "the call of the blood." Maurice began
+to hear it now, to long to obey it.
+
+Gaspare clapped his hands alternately in front of him and behind him,
+leaping from side to side, with a step in which one foot crossed over the
+other, and holding his body slightly curved inward. And all the time he
+kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation grew stronger in
+them.
+
+"Venga!" he whispered, always dancing. "Venga, signorino, venga--venga!"
+
+He spun round, clapped his hands furiously, snapped his fingers, and
+jumped back. Then he held out his hands to Delarey, with a gay authority
+that was irresistible.
+
+"Venga, venga, signorino! Venga, venga!"
+
+All the blood in Delarey responded, chasing away something--was it a
+shyness, a self-consciousness of love--that till now had held him back
+from the gratification of his desire? He sprang up and he danced the
+tarantella, danced it almost as if he had danced it all his life, with a
+natural grace, a frolicsome abandon that no pure-blooded Englishman could
+ever achieve, danced it as perhaps once the Sicilian grandmother had
+danced it under the shadow of Etna. Whatever Gaspare did he imitated,
+with a swiftness and a certainty that were amazing, and Gaspare,
+intoxicated by having such a pupil, outdid himself in countless changing
+activities. It was like a game and like a duel, for Gaspare presently
+began almost to fight for supremacy as he watched Delarey's startling
+aptitude in the tarantella, which, till this moment, he had considered
+the possession of those born in Sicily and of Sicilian blood. He seemed
+to feel that this pupil might in time become the master, and to be put
+upon his mettle, and he put forth all his cunning to be too much for
+Delarey.
+
+And Hermione was left alone, watching, for Lucrezia had disappeared,
+suddenly mindful of some household duty.
+
+When Delarey sprang up she felt a thrill of responsive excitement, and
+when she watched his first steps, and noted the look of youth in him, the
+supple southern grace that rivalled the boyish grace of Gaspare, she was
+filled with that warm, that almost yearning admiration which is the
+child of love. But another feeling followed--a feeling of melancholy. As
+she watched him dancing with the four boys, a gulf seemed to yawn between
+her and them. She was alone on her side of this gulf, quite alone. They
+were remote from her. She suddenly realized that Delarey belonged to the
+south, and that she did not. Despite all her understanding of the beauty
+of the south, all her sympathy for the spirit of the south, all her
+passionate love of the south, she was not of it. She came to it as a
+guest. But Delarey was of it. She had never realized that absolutely till
+this moment. Despite his English parentage and upbringing, the southern
+strain in his ancestry had been revived in him. The drop of southern
+blood in his veins was his master. She had not married an Englishman.
+
+Once again, and in all the glowing sunshine, with Etna and the sea before
+her, and the sound of Sebastiano's flute in her ears, she was on the
+Thames Embankment in the night with Artois, and heard his deep voice
+speaking to her.
+
+"Does he know his own blood?" said the voice. "Our blood governs us when
+the time comes."
+
+And again the voice said:
+
+"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."
+
+"The call of the blood." There was now something almost terrible to
+Hermione in that phrase, something menacing and irresistible. Were men,
+then, governed irrevocably, dominated by the blood that was in them?
+Artois had certainly seemed to imply that they were, and he knew men as
+few knew them. His powerful intellect, like a search-light, illumined the
+hidden places, discovering the concealed things of the souls of men. But
+Artois was not a religious man, and Hermione had a strong sense of
+religion, though she did not cling, as many do, to any one creed. If the
+call of the blood were irresistible in a man, then man was only a slave.
+The criminal must not be condemned, nor the saint exalted. Conduct was
+but obedience in one who had no choice but to obey. Could she believe
+that?
+
+The dance grew wilder, swifter. Sebastiano quickened the time till he was
+playing it prestissimo. One of the boys, Giulio, dropped out exhausted.
+Then another, Alfio, fell against the terrace wall, laughing and wiping
+his streaming face. Finally Giuseppe gave in, too, obviously against his
+will. But Gaspare and Maurice still kept on. The game was certainly a
+duel now--a duel which would not cease till Sebastiano put an end to it
+by laying down his flute. But he, too, was on his mettle and would not
+own fatigue. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could not bear the dance any
+more. It was, perhaps, absurd of her. Her brain, fatigued by travel, was
+perhaps playing her tricks. But she felt as if Maurice were escaping from
+her in this wild tarantella, like a man escaping through a fantastic
+grotto from some one who called to him near its entrance. A faint
+sensation of something that was surely jealousy, the first she had ever
+known, stirred in her heart--jealousy of a tarantella.
+
+"Maurice!" she said.
+
+He did not hear her.
+
+"Maurice!" she called. "Sebastiano--Gaspare--stop! You'll kill
+yourselves!"
+
+Sebastiano caught her eye, finished the tune, and took the flute from his
+lips. In truth he was not sorry to be commanded to do the thing his pride
+of music forbade him to do of his own will. Gaspare gave a wild, boyish
+shout, and flung himself down on Giuseppe's knees, clasping him round the
+neck jokingly. And Maurice--he stood still on the terrace for a moment
+looking dazed. Then the hot blood surged up to his head, making it tingle
+under his hair, and he came over slowly, almost shamefacedly, and sat
+down by Hermione.
+
+"This sun's made me mad, I think," he said, looking at her. "Why, how
+pale you are, Hermione!"
+
+"Am I? No, it must be the shadow of the awning makes me look so. Oh,
+Maurice, you are indeed a southerner! Do you know, I feel--I feel as if I
+had never really seen you till now, here on this terrace, as if I had
+never known you as you are till now, now that I've watched you dance the
+tarantella."
+
+"I can't dance it, of course. It was absurd of me to try."
+
+"Ask Gaspare! No, I'll ask him. Gaspare, can the padrone dance the
+tarantella?"
+
+"Eh--altro!" said Gaspare, with admiring conviction.
+
+He got off Giuseppe's knee, where he had been curled up almost like a big
+kitten, came and stood by Hermione, and added:
+
+"Per Dio, signora, but the padrone is like one of us!"
+
+Hermione laughed. Now that the dance was over and the twittering flute
+was silent, her sense of loneliness and melancholy was departing. Soon,
+no doubt, she would be able to look back upon it and laugh at it as one
+laughs at moods that have passed away.
+
+"This is his first day in Sicily, Gaspare."
+
+"There are forestieri who come here every year, and who stay for months,
+and who can talk our language--yes, and can even swear in dialetto as we
+can--but they are not like the padrone. Not one of them could dance the
+tarantella like that. Per Dio!"
+
+A radiant look of pleasure came into Maurice's face.
+
+"I'm glad you've brought me here," he said. "Ah, when you chose this
+place for our honeymoon you understood me better than I understand
+myself, Hermione."
+
+"Did I?" she said, slowly. "But no, Maurice, I think I chose a little
+selfishly. I was thinking of what I wanted. Oh, the boys are going, and
+Sebastiano."
+
+That evening, when they had finished supper--they did not wish to test
+Lucrezia's powers too severely by dining the first day--they came out
+onto the terrace. Lucrezia and Gaspare were busily talking in the
+kitchen. Tito, the donkey, was munching his hay under the low-pitched
+roof of the out-house. Now and then they could faintly hear the sound of
+his moving jaws, Lucrezia's laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These
+fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence that lay about
+them, the night hush of the mountains and the sea. Hermione sat down on
+the seat in the terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless
+night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars. There was a cool
+breeze blowing from Etna. Here and there upon the mountains shone
+solitary lights, and one was moving slowly through the darkness along the
+crest of a hill opposite to them, a torch carried by some peasant going
+to his hidden cottage among the olive-trees.
+
+Maurice lit his cigar and stood by Hermione, who was sitting sideways and
+leaning her arms on the wall, and looking out into the wide dimness in
+which, somewhere, lay the ravine. He did not want to talk just then, and
+she kept silence. This was really their wedding night, and both of them
+were unusually conscious, but in different ways, of the mystery that lay
+about them, and that lay, too, within them. It was strange to be together
+up here, far up in the mountains, isolated in their love. Below the wall,
+on the side of the ravine, the leaves of the olives rustled faintly as
+the wind passed by. And this whisper of the leaves seemed to be meant for
+them, to be addressed to them. They were surely being told something by
+the little voices of the night.
+
+"Maurice," Hermione said, at last, "does this silence of the mountains
+make you wish for anything?"
+
+"Wish?" he said. "I don't know--no, I think not. I have got what I
+wanted. I have got you. Why should I wish for anything more? And I feel
+at home here. It's extraordinary how I feel at home."
+
+"You! No, it isn't extraordinary at all."
+
+She looked up at him, still keeping her arms on the terrace wall. His
+physical beauty, which had always fascinated her, moved her more than
+ever in the south, seemed to her to become greater, to have more meaning
+in this setting of beauty and romance. She thought of the old pagan gods.
+He was, indeed, suited to be their happy messenger. At that moment
+something within her more than loved him, worshipped him, felt for him an
+idolatry that had something in it of pain. A number of thoughts ran
+through her mind swiftly. One was this: "Can it be possible that he will
+die some day, that he will be dead?" And the awfulness, the unspeakable
+horror of the death of the body gripped her and shook her in the dark.
+
+"Oh, Maurice!" she said. "Maurice!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+She held out her hands to him. He took them and sat down by her.
+
+"What is it, Hermione?" he said again.
+
+"If beauty were only deathless!"
+
+"But--but all this is, for us. It was here for the old Greeks to see, and
+I suppose it will be here--"
+
+"I didn't mean that."
+
+"I've been stupid," he said, humbly.
+
+"No, my dearest--my dearest one. Oh, how did you ever love me?"
+
+She had forgotten the warning of Artois. The dirty little beggar was
+staring at the angel and wanted the angel to know it.
+
+"Hermione! What do you mean?"
+
+He looked at her, and there was genuine surprise in his face and in his
+voice.
+
+"How can you love me? I'm so ugly. Oh, I feel it here, I feel it horribly
+in the midst of--of all this loveliness, with you."
+
+She hid her face against his shoulder almost like one afraid.
+
+"But you are not ugly! What nonsense! Hermione!"
+
+He put his hand under her face and raised it, and the touch of his hand
+against her cheek made her tremble. To-night she more than loved, she
+worshipped him. Her intellect did not speak any more. Its voice was
+silenced by the voice of the heart, by the voices of the senses. She felt
+as if she would like to go down on her knees to him and thank him for
+having loved her, for loving her. Abasement would have been a joy to her
+just then, was almost a necessity, and yet there was pride in her, the
+decent pride of a pure-natured woman who has never let herself be soiled.
+
+"Hermione," he said, looking into her face. "Don't speak to me like that.
+It's all wrong. It puts me in the wrong place, I a fool and you--what you
+are. If that friend of yours could hear you--by Jove!"
+
+There was something so boyish, so simple in his voice that Hermione
+suddenly threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, as she might have
+kissed a delightful child. She began to laugh through tears.
+
+"Thank God you're not conceited!" she exclaimed.
+
+"What about?" he asked.
+
+But she did not answer. Presently they heard Gaspare's step on the
+terrace. He came to them bareheaded, with shining eyes, to ask if they
+were satisfied with Lucrezia. About himself he did not ask. He felt that
+he had done all things for his padrona as he alone could have done them,
+knowing her so well.
+
+"Gaspare," Hermione said, "everything is perfect. Tell Lucrezia."
+
+"Better not, signora. I will say you are fairly satisfied, as it is only
+the first day. Then she will try to do better to-morrow. I know
+Lucrezia."
+
+And he gazed at them calmly with his enormous liquid eyes.
+
+"Do not say too much, signora. It makes people proud."
+
+[Illustration: "HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN THE HOUSE OF
+THE SIRENS"]
+
+She thought that she heard an odd Sicilian echo of Artois. The peasant
+lad's mind reflected the mind of the subtle novelist for a moment.
+
+"Very well, Gaspare," she said, submissively.
+
+He smiled at her with satisfaction.
+
+"I understand girls," he said. "You must keep them down or they will keep
+you down. Every girl in Marechiaro is like that. We keep them down
+therefore."
+
+He spoke calmly, evidently quite without thought that he was speaking to
+a woman.
+
+"May I go to bed, signora?" he added. "I got up at four this morning."
+
+"At four!"
+
+"To be sure all was ready for you and the signore."
+
+"Gaspare! Go at once. We will go to bed, too. Shall we, Maurice?"
+
+"Yes. I'm ready."
+
+Just as they were going up the steps into the house, he turned to take a
+last look at the night. Far down below him over the terrace wall he saw a
+bright, steady light.
+
+"Is that on the sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing to it. "Do they fish
+there at night?"
+
+"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."
+
+Gaspare shook his head.
+
+"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.
+
+"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."
+
+"But no one lives there."
+
+"Oh, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista lives there with
+Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora. Buon riposo, signore."
+
+"Buon riposo, Gaspare."
+
+And Maurice echoed it:
+
+"Buon riposo."
+
+As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near
+Tito's stable, Maurice added:
+
+"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying good-night. I feel as if
+I'd said it before, somehow."
+
+"Your blood has said it without your knowing it, perhaps many times. Are
+you coming, Maurice?"
+
+He turned once more, looked down at the light shining in the house of the
+sirens, then followed Hermione in through the open door.
+
+
+
+V
+
+That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such
+as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world--a world that
+never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to
+hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the
+dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see
+it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to
+enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked
+up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of
+worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of
+when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or
+a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past
+years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a
+youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt
+when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased,
+instead of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this sometimes
+surprised her. For she had thought till now that the dead sculptors of
+Greece and Rome had in their works succeeded in transcending humanity,
+had shown what God might have created instead of what He had created, and
+had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living
+being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material.
+Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty
+something strange, something ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if
+he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence
+in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks
+in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the
+trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again
+in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green
+glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like
+Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she
+imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing,
+light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent
+spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a
+"fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did
+not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her
+by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had
+been struck by in a London restaurant.
+
+This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a
+handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that
+set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In
+Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he
+arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and
+he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each
+other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously
+absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this
+son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of
+satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering
+upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her
+orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing
+seas.
+
+"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one
+morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the
+world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the
+shining that came in answer to the words--"Let there be light!"
+
+In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the
+wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be
+busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had
+realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that
+there was nothing remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not
+cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily
+she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because
+they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more
+closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that
+was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing,
+playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to
+know that she would be a little saddened were her husband to change, to
+grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had spoken to Artois of
+possible development in Maurice, of what she might do for him, and at
+first, just at first, she had instinctively exerted her influence over
+him to bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And he had eagerly
+striven to respond, stirred by his love for her, and his reverence--not a
+very clever, but certainly a very affectionate reverence--for her
+brilliant qualities of brain. In those very first days together, isolated
+in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go--as she
+herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind
+was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious,
+love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land
+stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours
+forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of
+love but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love prompts thought,
+not stifles it. In their long mountain walks, in their rides on muleback
+to distant villages, hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests
+of the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when the noon
+wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on the terrace when the stars
+came out, and the shepherds led their flocks down to the valleys with
+little happy tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts,
+desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that beauty and
+solitude and nearness to nature in this isle of the south woke in her.
+She did not fear to be subtle, she did not fear to be trivial. Everything
+she noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she noticed
+suggested to her, she related. The sound of the morning breeze in the
+olive-trees seemed to her different from the sound of the breeze of
+evening. She tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of the
+music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every sound, not only with
+the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon
+the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy
+against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring
+as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked
+Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with
+her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the
+sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over
+rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away
+towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line
+immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came,
+like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then
+fading until taken softly by eternity--that was Hermione's feeling--that
+sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can
+imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys
+elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight,
+when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the
+little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the
+bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail
+came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she
+was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring
+of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and
+laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her passionate
+imagination now threw gossamers before, now drew gossamers away from a
+holy of holies that no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that
+holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was a tender, glorious
+attempt to compass the impossible.
+
+All this was at first. But Hermione was generally too clear-brained to be
+long tricked even by her own enthusiasms. She soon began to understand
+that though Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she saw and
+felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant attempt of love in a man
+who thought he had married his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and
+the spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She watched in a
+rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion of gratitude. But Gaspare was
+in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of
+the phenomenon, a dancer in the exquisite tarantella. And Maurice, too,
+on that first day had he not obeyed Sebastiano's call? Soon she knew that
+when she had sat alone on the terrace seat, and seen the dancers losing
+all thought of time and the hour in the joy of their moving bodies, while
+hers was still, the scene had been prophetic. In that moment Maurice had
+instinctively taken his place in the mask of the spring and she hers.
+Their bodies had uttered their minds. She was the passionate watcher, but
+he was the passionate performer. Therefore she was his audience. She had
+travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it, had travelled
+out to be Sicily.
+
+There was a great difference between them, but, having realized it
+thoroughly, Hermione was able not to regret but to delight in it. She did
+not wish to change her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice
+to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand with her heart,
+he would be completely changed, and into something not natural, like a
+performing dog or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps
+amazement, combined too often with a faint disgust. And ceasing to desire
+she ceased to endeavor.
+
+"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering her
+conversation with Artois. "And, thank God, I don't want to now."
+
+And then she set herself to watch her Sicilian, as she loved to call him,
+enjoying the spring in Sicily in his own way, dancing the tarantella with
+surely the spirit of eternal youth. He had, she thought, heard the call
+of the blood and responded to it fully and openly, fearless and
+unashamed. Day by day, seeing his boyish happiness in this life of the
+mountains and the sea, she laughed at the creeping, momentary sense of
+apprehension that had been roused in her during her conversation with
+Artois upon the Thames Embankment. Artois had said that he distrusted
+what he loved. That was the flaw in an over-intellectual man. The mind
+was too alert, too restless, dogging the steps of the heart like a spy,
+troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness. But she could trust where
+she loved. Maurice was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of
+paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched him, then threw
+himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.
+
+The strain of Sicilian blood that was in him worked in him curiously,
+making her sometimes marvel at the mysterious power of race, at the
+stubborn and almost tyrannical domination some dead have over some
+living, those who are dust over those who are quick with animation and
+passion. Everything that was connected with Sicily and with Sicilian life
+not only reached his senses and sank easily into his heart, but seemed
+also to rouse his mind to an activity that astonished her. In connection
+with Sicily he showed a swiftness, almost a cleverness, she never noted
+in him when things Sicilian were not in question.
+
+For instance, like most Englishmen, Maurice had no great talent for
+languages. He spoke French fairly well, having had a French nurse when he
+was a child, and his mother had taught him a little Italian. But till now
+he had never had any desire to be proficient in any language except his
+own. Hermione, on the other hand, was gifted as a linguist, loving
+languages and learning them easily. Yet Maurice picked up--in his case
+the expression, usually ridiculous, was absolutely applicable--Sicilian
+with a readiness that seemed to Hermione almost miraculous. He showed no
+delight in the musical beauty of Italian. What he wanted, and what his
+mind--or was it rather what his ears and his tongue and his lips?--took,
+and held and revelled in, was the Sicilian dialect spoken by Lucrezia and
+Gaspare when they were together, spoken by the peasants of Marechiaro and
+of the mountains. To Hermione Gaspare had always talked Italian,
+incorrect, but still Italian, and she spoke no dialect, although she
+could often guess at what the Sicilians meant when they addressed her in
+their vigorous but uncouth jargon, different from Italian almost as
+Gaelic is from English. But Maurice very soon began to speak a few words
+of Sicilian. Hermione laughed at him and discouraged him jokingly,
+telling him that he must learn Italian thoroughly, the language of love,
+the most melodious language in the world.
+
+"Italian!" he said. "What's the use of it? I want to talk to the people.
+A grammar! I won't open it. Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+Gaspare came rushing bareheaded to them in the sun.
+
+"The signora says I'm to learn Italian, but I say that I've Sicilian
+blood in my veins and must talk as you do."
+
+"But I, signore, can speak Italian!" said Gaspare, with twinkling pride.
+
+"As a bear dances. No, professor, you and I, we'll be good patriots.
+We'll speak in our mother-tongue. You rascal, you know we've begun
+already."
+
+And looking mischievously at Hermione, he began to sing in a loud, warm
+voice:
+
+               "Cu Gabbi e Jochi e Parti e Mascarati,
+               Si fa lu giubileu universali.
+               Tiripi-tumpiti, tumpiti, tumpiti,
+               Milli cardubuli 'n culu ti puncinu!"
+
+Gaspare burst into a roar of delighted laughter.
+
+"It's the tarantella over again," Hermione said. "You're a hopeless
+Sicilian. I give you up."
+
+That same day she said to him:
+
+"You love the peasants, don't you, Maurice?"
+
+"Yes. Are you surprised?"
+
+"No; at least I'm not surprised at your loving them."
+
+"Well, then, Hermione?"
+
+"Perhaps a little at the way you love them."
+
+"What way's that?"
+
+"Almost as they love each other--that's to say, when they love each other
+at all. Gaspare now! I believe you feel more as if he were a young
+brother of yours than as if he were your servant."
+
+"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna[1] of a boy in spite
+of all his mischief and fun. You should hear him talk of you. He'd die
+for his padrona."
+
+[Footnote: 1. The Sicilians use the word "donna" to express the meaning
+we convey by the word "trump."]
+
+"I believe he would. In love, the love that means being in love, I think
+Sicilians, though tremendously jealous, are very fickle, but if they take
+a devotion to any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a
+splendid quality."
+
+"If they've got faults, I love their faults," he said. "They're a lovable
+race."
+
+"Praising yourself!" she said, laughing at him, but with tender eyes.
+
+"Myself?"
+
+"Never mind. What is it, Gaspare?"
+
+Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes shining with happiness and a
+box under his arm.
+
+"The signore knows."
+
+"Revolver practice," said Maurice. "I promised him he should have a try
+to-day. We're going to a place close by on the mountain. He's warned off
+Ciccio and his goats. Got the paper, Gaspare?"
+
+Gaspare pointed to a bulging pocket.
+
+"Enough to write a novel on. Well--will you come, Hermione?"
+
+"It's too hot in the sun, and I know you're going into the eye of the
+sun."
+
+"You see, it's the best place up at the top. There's that stone wall,
+and--"
+
+"I'll stay here and listen to your music."
+
+They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into the heart of the
+gold, and singing as they went:
+
+               "Ciao, ciao, ciao,
+               Morettina bella, ciao--"
+
+Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise of stones falling
+downward from their feet on the sunbaked mountain-side. Hermione sat
+still on the seat by the ravine.
+
+               "Ciao, ciao, ciao!"
+
+She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing
+that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have
+to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang
+that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even
+the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet
+plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard
+coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always
+comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met
+many Sicilians of the nobility in Palermo--princes, senators, young men
+of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese.
+Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian
+peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered
+what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead.
+Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of
+hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive!
+Things that had doubtless stirred in them--instincts, desires,
+repugnances, joys--were stirring in him, dominating his English
+inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was
+assisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to
+be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the
+greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man
+and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things
+in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had
+once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their
+faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long
+cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if
+there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And
+she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a
+good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat,
+socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe
+her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman--and she
+was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high
+traditions--she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its
+pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, that
+all men and women are just human beings, brothers and sisters of a great
+family. In judging of individuals she could never be influenced by
+anything except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart and mind,
+qualities that might belong to any man. She was affected by habits,
+manners--what woman of breeding is not?--but even these could scarcely
+warp her judgment if they covered anything fine. She could find gold
+beneath mud and forget the mud.
+
+Maurice was like the peasants, not like the Palermitan aristocracy. He
+was near to the breast of Sicily, of that mother of many nations, who had
+come to conquer, and had fought, and bled, and died, or been expelled,
+but had left indefaceable traces behind them, traces of Norman of Greek
+of Arab. He was no cosmopolitan with characteristics blurred; he was of
+the soil. Well, she loved the soil dearly. The almond blossomed from it.
+The olive gave its fruit, and the vine its generous blood, and the orange
+its gold, at the word of the soil, the dear, warm earth of Sicily. She
+thought of Maurice's warm hands, brown now as Gaspare's. How she loved
+his hands, and his eyes that shone with the lustre of the south! Had not
+this soil, in very truth, given those hands and those eyes to her? She
+felt that it had. She loved it more for the gift. She had reaped and
+garnered in her blessed Sicilian harvest.
+
+Lucrezia came to her round the angle of the cottage, knowing she was
+alone. Lucrezia was mending a hole in a sock for Gaspare. Now she sat
+down on the seat under the window, divided from Hermione by the terrace,
+but able to see her, to feel companionship. Had the padrone been there
+Lucrezia would not have ventured to come. Gaspare had often explained to
+her her very humble position in the household. But Gaspare and the
+padrone were away on the mountain-top, and she could not resist being
+near to her padrona, for whom she already felt a very real affection and
+admiration.
+
+"Is it a big hole, Lucrezia?" said Hermione, smiling at her.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia put her thumb through it, holding it up on her fist.
+
+"Gaspare's holes are always big."
+
+She spoke as if in praise.
+
+"Gaspare is strong," she added. "But Sebastiano is stronger."
+
+As she said the last words a dreamy look came into her round face, and
+she dropped the hand that held the stocking into her lap.
+
+"Sebastiano is hard like the rocks, signora."
+
+"Hard-hearted, Lucrezia."
+
+Lucrezia said nothing.
+
+"You like Sebastiano, Lucrezia?"
+
+Lucrezia reddened under her brown skin.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"So do I. He's always been a good friend of mine."
+
+Lucrezia shifted along the seat until she was nearly opposite to where
+Hermione was sitting.
+
+"How old is he?"
+
+"Twenty-five, signora."
+
+"I suppose he will be marrying soon, won't he? The men all marry young
+round about Marechiaro."
+
+Lucrezia began to darn.
+
+"His father, Chinetti Urbano, wishes him to marry at once. It is better
+for a man."
+
+"You understand men, Lucrezia?"
+
+"Si, signora. They are all alike."
+
+"And what are they like?"
+
+"Oh, signora, you know as well as I do. They must have their own way and
+we must not think to have ours. They must roam where they like, love
+where they choose, day or night, and we must sit in the doorway and get
+to bed at dark, and not bother where they've been or what they've done.
+They say we've no right, except one or two. There's Francesco, to be
+sure. He's a lamb with Maria. She can sit with her face to the street.
+But she wouldn't sit any other way, and he knows it. But the rest! Eh,
+gia!"
+
+"You don't think much of men, Lucrezia!"
+
+"Oh, signora, they're just as God made them. They can't help it any more
+than we can help--"
+
+She stopped and pursed her lips suddenly, as if checking some words that
+were almost on them.
+
+"Lucrezia, come here and sit by me."
+
+Lucrezia looked up with a sort of doubtful pleasure and surprise.
+
+"Signora?"
+
+"Come here."
+
+Lucrezia got up and came slowly to the seat by the ravine. Hermione took
+her hand.
+
+"You like Sebastiano very much, don't you?"
+
+Lucrezia hung her head.
+
+"Si, signora," she whispered.
+
+"Do you think he'd be good to a woman if she loved him?"
+
+"I shouldn't care. Bad or good, I'd--I'd--"
+
+Suddenly, with a sort of childish violence, she put her two hands on
+Hermione's arms.
+
+"I want Sebastiano, signora; I want him!" she cried. "I've prayed to the
+Madonna della Rocca to give him to me; all last year I've prayed, and
+this. D'you think the Madonna's going to do it? Do you? Do you?"
+
+Heat came out of her two hands, and heat flashed in her eyes. Her broad
+bosom heaved, and her lips, still parted when she had done speaking,
+seemed to interrogate Hermione fiercely in the silence. Before Hermione
+could reply two sounds came to them: from below in the ravine the distant
+drone of the ceramella, from above on the mountain-top the dry crack of a
+pistol-shot.
+
+Swiftly Lucrezia turned and looked downward, but Hermione looked upward
+towards the bare flank that rose behind the cottage.
+
+"It's Sebastiano, signora."
+
+The ceramella droned on, moving slowly with its player on the hidden path
+beneath the olive-trees.
+
+A second pistol-shot rang out sharply.
+
+"Go down and meet him, Lucrezia."
+
+"May I--may I, really, signora?"
+
+"Yes; go quickly."
+
+Lucrezia bent down and kissed her padrona's hand.
+
+"Bacio la mano, bacio la mano a Lei!"
+
+Then, bareheaded, she went out from the awning into the glare of the
+sunshine, passed through the ruined archway, and disappeared among the
+rocks. She had gone to her music. Hermione stayed to listen to hers, the
+crack of the pistol up there near the blue sky.
+
+Sebastiano was playing the tune she loved, the "Pastorale," but to-day
+she did not heed it. Indeed, now that she was left alone she was not
+conscious that she heard it. Her heart was on the hill-top near the blue.
+
+Again and again the shots rang out. It seemed to Hermione that she knew
+which were fired by Maurice and which by Gaspare, and she whispered to
+herself "That's Maurice!" when she fancied one was his. Presently she was
+aware of some slight change and wondered what it was. Something had
+ceased, and its cessation recalled her mind to her surroundings. She
+looked round her, then down to the ravine, and then at once she
+understood. There was no more music from the ceramella. Lucrezia had met
+Sebastiano under the olives. That was certain. Hermione smiled. Her
+woman's imagination pictured easily enough why the player had stopped.
+She hoped Lucrezia was happy. Her first words, still more her manner, had
+shown Hermione the depth of her heart. There was fire there, fire that
+burned before a shrine when she prayed to the Madonna della Rocca. She
+was ready even to be badly treated if only she might have Sebastiano. It
+seemed to be all one to her. She had no illusions, but her heart knew
+what it needed.
+
+Crack went the pistol up on the mountain-top.
+
+"That's not Maurice!" Hermione thought.
+
+There was another report, then another.
+
+"That last one was Maurice!"
+
+Lucrezia did not seem even to expect a man to be true and faithful.
+Perhaps she knew the Sicilian character too well. Hermione lifted her
+face up and looked towards the mountain. Her mind had gone once more to
+the Thames Embankment. As once she had mentally put Gaspare beside
+Artois, so now she mentally put Lucrezia. Lucrezia distrusted the south,
+and she was of it. Men must be as God had made them, she said, and
+evidently she thought that God had made them to run wild, careless of
+woman's feelings, careless of everything save their own vagrant desires.
+The tarantella--that was the dance of the soil here, the dance of the
+blood. And in the tarantella each of the dancers seemed governed by his
+own sweet will, possessed by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he
+followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence, giving himself up
+joyously, eagerly, utterly--to what? To his whim. Was the tarantella an
+allegory of life here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that
+first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of separation which
+brought with it a faint and creeping melancholy.
+
+"Crack! Crack!"
+
+She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly the sound of the firing
+was distressing to her, almost sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music
+better. For it suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith,
+and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian. But the
+reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death, ugly things.
+
+"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing up towards the
+mountain-top. "Maurice!"
+
+The pistol made reply. They had not heard her. They were too far or were
+too intent upon their sport to hear.
+
+"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost as a person calls
+for help. Another pistol-shot answered her, mocking at her in the sun.
+Then she heard a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be
+either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the laughter of
+something she could not personify, of some jeering spirit of the
+mountain. It died away at last, and she stood there, shivering in the
+sunshine.
+
+"Signora! Signora!"
+
+Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below. She turned and saw him
+standing with Lucrezia on the terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's
+waist. He took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm round
+Lucrezia.
+
+Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the mountain-top. But
+something within her held her back from climbing up to the distant
+laughter, a feeling, an idiotic feeling she called it to herself
+afterwards. She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling of
+fear.
+
+"Am I wanted up there?"
+
+That was what something within her said. And the answer was made by her
+body. She turned and began to descend towards the terrace.
+
+And at that moment, for the first time in her life, she was conscious of
+a little stab of pain such as she had never known before. It was pain of
+the mind and of the heart, and yet it was like bodily pain, too. It made
+her angry with herself. It was like a betrayal, a betrayal of herself by
+her own intellect, she thought.
+
+She stopped once more on the mountain-side.
+
+"Am I going to be ridiculous?" she said to herself. "Am I going to be one
+of the women I despise?"
+
+Just then she realized that love may become a tyrant, ministering to the
+soul with persecutions.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Sebastiano took his arm from Lucrezia's waist as Hermione came down to
+the terrace, and said:
+
+"Buona sera, signora. Is the signore coming down yet?"
+
+He flung out his arm towards the mountain.
+
+"I don't know, Sebastiano. Why?"
+
+"I've come with a message for him."
+
+"Not for Lucrezia?"
+
+Sebastiano laughed boldly, but Lucrezia, blushing red, disappeared into
+the kitchen.
+
+"Don't play with her, Sebastiano," said Hermione. "She's a good girl."
+
+"I know that, signora."
+
+"She deserves to be well treated."
+
+Sebastiano went over to the terrace wall, looked into the ravine, turned
+round, and came back.
+
+"Who's treating Lucrezia badly, signora?"
+
+"I did not say anybody was."
+
+"The girls in Marechiaro can take care of themselves, signora. You don't
+know them as I do."
+
+"D'you think any woman can take care of herself, Sebastiano?"
+
+He looked into her face and laughed, but said nothing. Hermione sat down.
+She had a desire to-day, after Lucrezia's conversation with her, to get
+at the Sicilian man's point of view in regard to women.
+
+"Don't you think women want to be protected?" she asked.
+
+"What from, signora?"
+
+There was still laughter in his eyes.
+
+"Not from us, anyway," he added. "Lucrezia there--she wants me for her
+husband. All Marechiaro knows it."
+
+Hermione felt that under the circumstances it was useless to blush for
+Lucrezia, useless to meet blatant frankness with sensitive delicacy.
+
+"Do you want Lucrezia for your wife?" she said.
+
+"Well, signora, I'm strong. A stick or a knife in my hand and no man can
+touch me. You've never seen me do the scherma con coltello? One day I'll
+show you with Gaspare. And I can play better even than the men from
+Bronte on the ceramella. You've heard me. Lucrezia knows I can have any
+girl I like."
+
+There was a simplicity in his immense superiority to women that robbed it
+of offensiveness and almost made Hermione laugh. In it, too, she felt the
+touch of the East. Arabs had been in Sicily and left their traces there,
+not only in the buildings of Sicily, but in its people's songs, and in
+the treatment of the women by the men.
+
+"And are you going to choose Lucrezia?" she asked, gravely.
+
+"Signora, I wasn't sure. But yesterday, I had a letter from Messina. They
+want me there. I've got a job that'll pay me well to go to the Lipari
+Islands with a cargo."
+
+"Are you a sailor, too?"
+
+"Signora, I can do anything."
+
+"And will you be long away?"
+
+"Who knows, signora? But I told Lucrezia to-day, and when she cried I
+told her something else. We are 'promised.'"
+
+"I am glad," Hermione said, holding out her hand to him.
+
+He took it in an iron grip.
+
+"Be very good to her when you're married, won't you?"
+
+"Oh, she'll be all right with me," he answered, carelessly. "And I won't
+give her the slap in the face on the wedding-day."
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+There was a shrill cry from the mountain and Maurice and Gaspare came
+leaping down, scattering the stones, the revolvers still in their hands.
+
+"Look, signora, look!" cried Gaspare, pulling a sheet of paper from his
+pocket and holding it proudly up. "Do you see the holes? One, two,
+three--"
+
+He began to count.
+
+"And I made five. Didn't I, signore?"
+
+"You're a dead shot, Gasparino. Did you hear us, Hermione?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "But you didn't hear me."
+
+"You? Did you call?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Sebastiano's got a message for you," Hermione said.
+
+She could not tell him now the absurd impulse that had made her call him.
+
+"What's the message, Sebastiano?" asked Maurice, in his stumbling
+Sicilian-Italian that was very imperfect, but that nevertheless had
+already the true accent of the peasants about Marechiaro.
+
+"Signore, there will be a moon to-night."
+
+"Gia. Lo so."
+
+"Are you sleepy, signorino?"
+
+He touched his eyes with his sinewy hands and made his face look drowsy.
+Maurice laughed.
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you afraid of being naked in the sea at night? But you need not
+enter it. Are you afraid of sleeping at dawn in a cave upon the sands?"
+
+"What is it all?" asked Maurice. "Gaspare, I understand you best."
+
+"I know," said Gaspare, joyously. "It's the fishing. Nito has sent. I
+told him to. Is it Nito, Sebastiano?"
+
+Sebastiano nodded. Gaspare turned eagerly to Maurice.
+
+"Oh, signore, you must come, you will come!"
+
+"Where? In a boat?"
+
+"No. We go down to the shore, to Isola Bella. We take food, wine, red
+wine, and a net. Between twenty-two and twenty-three o'clock is the time
+to begin. And the sea must be calm. Is the sea calm to-day, Sebastiano?"
+
+"Like that."
+
+Sebastiano moved his hand to and fro in the air, keeping it absolutely
+level. Gaspare continued to explain with gathering excitement and
+persuasiveness, talking to his master as much by gesture as by the words
+that Maurice could only partially understand.
+
+"The sea is calm. Nito has the net, but he will not go into the sea. Per
+Dio, he is birbante. He will say he has the rheumatism, I know, and walk
+like that." (Gaspare hobbled to and fro before them, making a face of
+acute suffering.) "He has asked for me. Hasn't Nito asked for me,
+Sebastiano?"
+
+Here Gaspare made a grimace at Sebastiano, who answered, calmly:
+
+"Yes, he has asked for you to come with the padrone."
+
+"I knew it. Then I shall undress. I shall take one end of the net while
+Nito holds the other, and I shall go out into the sea. I shall go up to
+here." (He put his hands up to his chin, stretching his neck like one
+avoiding a rising wave.) "And I shall wade, you'll see!--and if I come to
+a hole I shall swim. I can swim for hours, all day if I choose."
+
+"And all night too?" said Hermione, smiling at his excitement.
+
+"Davvero! But at night I must drink wine to keep out the cold. I come out
+like this." (He shivered violently, making his teeth chatter.) "Then I
+drink a glass and I am warm, and when they have taken the fish I go in
+again. We fish all along the shore from Isola Bella round by the point
+there, where there's the Casa delle Sirene, and to the caves beyond the
+Caffe Berardi. And when we've got enough--many fish--at dawn we sleep on
+the sand. And when the sun is up Carmela will take the fish and make a
+frittura, and we all eat it and drink more wine, and then--"
+
+"And then--you're ready for the Campo Santo?" said Hermione.
+
+"No, signora. Then we will dance the tarantella, and come home up the
+mountain singing, 'O sole mio!' and 'A mezzanotte a punto,' and the song
+of the Mafioso, and--"
+
+Hermione began to laugh unrestrainedly. Gaspare, by his voice, his face,
+his gestures, had made them assist at a veritable orgie of labor,
+feasting, sleep, and mirth, all mingled together and chasing one another
+like performers in a revel. Even his suggestion of slumber on the sands
+was violent, as if they were to sleep with a kind of fury of excitement
+and determination.
+
+"Signora!" he cried, staring as if ready to be offended.
+
+Then he looked at Maurice, who was laughing, too, threw himself back
+against the wall, opened his mouth, and joined in with all his heart. But
+suddenly he stopped. His face changed, became very serious.
+
+"I may go, signora?" he asked. "No one can fish as I can. The others will
+not go in far, and they soon get cold and want to put on their clothes.
+And the padrone! I must take care of the padrone! Guglielmo, the
+contadino, will sleep in the house, I know. Shall I call him? Guglielmo!
+Guglielmo!"
+
+He vanished like a flash, they scarcely knew in what direction.
+
+"He's alive!" exclaimed Maurice. "By Jove, he's alive, that boy!
+Glorious, glorious life! Oh, there's something here that--"
+
+He broke off, looked down at the broad sea shimmering in the sun, then
+said:
+
+"The sun, the sea, the music, the people, the liberty--it goes to my
+head, it intoxicates me."
+
+"You'll go to-night?" she said.
+
+"D'you mind if I do?"
+
+"Mind? No. I want you to go. I want you to revel in this happy time, this
+splendid, innocent, golden time. And to-morrow we'll watch for you,
+Lucrezia and I, watch for you down there on the path. But--you'll bring
+us some of the fish, Maurice? You won't forget us?"
+
+"Forget you!" he said. "You shall have all--"
+
+"No, no. Only the little fish, the babies that Carmela rejects from the
+frittura."
+
+"I'll go into the sea with Gaspare," said Maurice.
+
+"I'm sure you will, and farther out even than he does."
+
+"Ah, he'll never allow that. He'd swim to Africa first!"
+
+That night, at twenty-one o'clock, Hermione and Lucrezia stood under the
+arch, and watched Maurice and Gaspare springing down the mountain-side as
+if in seven-leagued boots. Soon they disappeared into the darkness of the
+ravine, but for some time their loud voices could be heard singing
+lustily:
+
+                    "Ciao, ciao, ciao,
+                    Morettina bella ciao,
+                    Prima di partire
+                    Un bacio ti voglio da';
+                    Un bacio al papa,
+                    Un bacio alla mamma,
+                    Cinquanta alla mia fidanzata,
+                    Che vado a far solda'."
+
+"I wish I were a man, Lucrezia," said Hermione, when the voices at length
+died away towards the sea.
+
+"Signora, we were made for the men. They weren't made for us. But I like
+being a girl."
+
+"To-night. I know why, Lucrezia."
+
+And then the padrona and the cameriera sat down together on the terrace
+under the stars, and talked together about the man the cameriera loved,
+and his exceeding glory.
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice and Gaspare were giving themselves joyously to the
+glory of the night. The glamour of the moon, which lay full upon the
+terrace where the two women sat, was softened, changed to a shadowy
+magic, in the ravine where the trees grew thickly, but the pilgrims did
+not lower their voices in obedience to the message of the twilight of the
+night. The joy of life which was leaping within them defied the subtle
+suggestions of mystery, was careless because it was triumphant, and all
+the way down to the sea they sang, Gaspare changing the song when it
+suited his mood to do so; and Maurice, as in the tarantella, imitating
+him with the swiftness that is born of sympathy. For to-night, despite
+their different ages, ranks, ways of life, their gayety linked them
+together, ruled out the differences, and made them closely akin, as they
+had been in Hermione's eyes when they danced upon the terrace. They did
+not watch the night. They were living too strongly to be watchful. The
+spirit of the dancing faun was upon them, and guided them down among the
+rocks and the olive-trees, across the Messina road, white under the moon,
+to the stony beach of Isola Bella, where Nito was waiting for them with
+the net.
+
+Nito was not alone. He had brought friends of his and of Gaspare's, and a
+boy who staggered proudly beneath a pannier filled with bread and cheese,
+oranges and apples, and dark blocks of a mysterious dolce. The
+wine-bottles were not intrusted to him, but were in the care of Giulio,
+one of the donkey-boys who had carried up the luggage from the station.
+Gaspare and his padrone were welcomed with a lifting of hats, and for a
+moment there was a silence, while the little group regarded the
+"Inglese" searchingly. Had Maurice felt any strangeness, any aloofness,
+the sharp and sensitive Sicilians would have at once been conscious of
+it, and light-hearted gayety might have given way to gravity, though not
+to awkwardness. But he felt, and therefore showed, none. His soft hat
+cocked at an impudent angle over his sparkling, dark eyes, his laughing
+lips, his easy, eager manner, and his pleasant familiarity with Gaspare
+at once reassured everybody, and when he cried out, "Ciao, amici, ciao!"
+and waved a pair of bathing drawers towards the sea, indicating that he
+was prepared to be the first to go in with the net, there was a general
+laugh, and a babel of talk broke forth--talk which he did not fully
+understand, yet which did not make him feel even for a moment a stranger.
+
+Gaspare at once took charge of the proceedings as one born to be a leader
+of fishermen. He began by ordering wine to be poured into the one glass
+provided, placed it in Maurice's hand, and smiled proudly at his pupil's
+quick "Alla vostra salute!" before tossing it off. Then each one in turn,
+with an "Alla sua salute!" to Maurice, took a drink from the great,
+leather bottle; and Nito, shaking out his long coil of net, declared that
+it was time to get to work.
+
+Gaspare cast a sly glance at Maurice, warning him to be prepared for a
+comedy, and Maurice at once remembered the scene on the terrace when
+Gaspare had described Nito's "birbante" character, and looked out for
+rheumatics.
+
+"Who goes into the sea, Nito?" asked Gaspare, very seriously.
+
+Nito's wrinkled and weather-beaten face assumed an expression of
+surprise.
+
+"Who goes into the sea!" he ejaculated. "Why, don't we all know who likes
+wading, and can always tell the best places for the fish?"
+
+He paused, then as Gaspare said nothing, and the others, who had received
+a warning sign from him, stood round with deliberately vacant faces, he
+added, clapping Gaspare on the shoulder, and holding out one end of the
+net:
+
+"Off with your clothes, compare, and we will soon have a fine frittura
+for Carmela."
+
+But Gaspare shook his head.
+
+"In summer I don't mind. But this is early in the year, and, besides--"
+
+"Early in the year! Who told me the signore distinto would--"
+
+"And besides, compare, I've got the stomach-ache."
+
+He deftly doubled himself up and writhed, while the lips of the others
+twitched with suppressed amusement.
+
+"Comparedro, I don't believe it!"
+
+"Haven't I, signorino?" cried Gaspare, undoubling himself, pointing to
+his middleman, and staring hard at Maurice.
+
+"Si, si! E vero, e vero!" cried Maurice.
+
+"I've been eating Zampaglione, and I am full. If I go into the sea
+to-night I shall die."
+
+"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Nito, throwing up his hands towards the stars.
+
+He dared not give the lie to the "signore distinto," yet he had no trust
+in Gaspare's word, and had gained no sort of conviction from his eloquent
+writhings.
+
+"You must go in, Nito," said Gaspare.
+
+"I--Madonna!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not?" cried Nito, in a plaintive whine that was almost feminine. "I
+go into the sea with my rheumatism!"
+
+Abruptly one of his legs gave way, and he stood before them in a crooked
+attitude.
+
+"Signore," he said to Maurice. "I would go into the sea, I would stay
+there all night, for I love it, but Dr. Marini has forbidden me to enter
+it. See how I walk!"
+
+And he began to hobble up and down exactly as Gaspare had on the terrace,
+looking over his shoulder at Maurice all the time to see whether his
+deception was working well. Gaspare, seeing that Nito's attention was for
+the moment concentrated, slipped away behind a boat that was drawn up on
+the beach; and Maurice, guessing what he was doing, endeavored to make
+Nito understand his sympathy.
+
+"Molto forte--molto dolore?" he said.
+
+"Si, signore!"
+
+And Nito burst forth into a vehement account of his sufferings,
+accompanied by pantomime.
+
+"It takes me in the night, signore! Madonna, it is like rats gnawing at
+my legs, and nothing will stop it. Pancrazia--she is my wife,
+signore--Pancrazia, she gets out of bed and she heats oil to rub it on,
+but she might as well put it on the top of Etna for all the good it does
+me. And there I lie like a--"
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+A wild shriek rent the air, and Gaspare, clad in a pair of bathing
+drawers, bounded out from behind the boat, gave Nito a cuff on the cheek,
+executed some steps of the tarantella, whirled round, snatched up one end
+of the net, and cried:
+
+"Al mare, al mare!"
+
+Nito's rheumatism was no more. His bent leg straightened itself as if by
+magic, and he returned Gaspare's cuff by an affectionate slap on his bare
+shoulder, exclaiming to Maurice:
+
+"Isn't he terribile, signore? Isn't he terribile?"
+
+Nito lifted up the other end of the net and they all went down to the
+shore.
+
+That night it seemed to Delarey as if Sicily drew him closer to her
+breast. He did not know why he had now for the first time the sensation
+that at last he was really in his natural place, was really one with the
+soil from which an ancestor of his had sprung, and with the people who
+had been her people. That Hermione's absence had anything to do with his
+almost wild sense of freedom did not occur to him. All he knew was this,
+that alone among these Sicilian fishermen in the night, not understanding
+much of what they said, guessing at their jokes, and sharing in their
+laughter, without always knowing what had provoked it, he was perfectly
+at home, perfectly happy.
+
+Gaspare went into the sea, wading carefully through the silver waters,
+and Maurice, from the shore, watched his slowly moving form, taking a
+lesson which would be useful to him later. The coast-line looked
+enchanted in the glory of the moon, in the warm silence of the night, but
+the little group of men upon the shore scarcely thought of its
+enchantment. They felt it, perhaps, sometimes faintly in their gayety,
+but they did not savor its wonder and its mystery as Hermione would have
+savored them had she been there.
+
+The naked form of Gaspare, as he waded far out in the shallow sea, was
+like the form of a dream creature rising out of waves of a dream. When he
+called to them across the silver surely something of the magic of the
+night was caught and echoed in his voice. When he lifted the net, and its
+black and dripping meshes slipped down from his ghostly hands into the
+ghostly movement that was flickering about him, and the circles tipped
+with light widened towards sea and shore, there was a miracle of delicate
+and fantastic beauty delivered up tenderly like a marvellous gift to the
+wanderers of the dark hours. But Sicily scarcely wonders at Sicily.
+Gaspare was intent only on the catching of fish, and his companions smote
+the night with their jokes and their merry, almost riotous laughter.
+
+The night wore on. Presently they left Isola Bella, crossed a stony spit
+of land, and came into a second and narrower bay, divided by a turmoil
+of jagged rocks and a bold promontory covered with stunted olive-trees,
+cactus, and seed-sown earth plots, from the wide sweep of coast that
+melted into the dimness towards Messina. Gathered together on the little
+stones of the beach, in the shadow of some drawn-up fishing-boats, they
+took stock of the fish that lay shining in the basket, and broke their
+fast on bread and cheese and more draughts from the generous wine-bottle.
+
+Gaspare was dripping, and his thin body shook as he gulped down the wine.
+
+"Basta Gaspare!" Maurice said to him. "You mustn't go in any more."
+
+"No, no, signore, non basta! I can fish all night. Once the wine has
+warmed me, I can--"
+
+"But I want to try it."
+
+"Oh, signore, what would the signora say? You are a stranger. You will
+take cold, and then the signora will blame me and say I did not take
+proper care of my padrone."
+
+But Delarey was determined. He stripped off his clothes, put on his
+bathing drawers, took up the net, and, carefully directed by the admiring
+though protesting Gaspare, he waded into the sea.
+
+For a moment he shuddered as the calm water rose round him. Then, English
+fashion, he dipped under, with a splash that brought a roar of laughter
+to him from the shore.
+
+"Meglio cosi!" he cried, coming up again in the moonlight. "Adesso sto
+bene!"
+
+The plunge had made him suddenly feel tremendously young and triumphant,
+reckless with a happiness that thrilled with audacity. As he waded out he
+began to sing in a loud voice:
+
+               "Ciao, ciao, ciao,
+               Morettina bella ciao,
+               Prima di partire
+               Un bacio ti voglio da'."
+
+Gaspare, who was hastily dressing by the boats, called out to him that
+his singing would frighten away the fish, and he was obediently silent.
+He imprisoned the song in his heart, but that went on singing bravely. As
+he waded farther he felt splendid, as if he were a lord of life and of
+the sea. The water, now warm to him, seemed to be embracing him as it
+crept upward towards his throat. Nature was clasping him with amorous
+arms. Nature was taking him for her own.
+
+"Nature, nature!" he said to himself. "That's why I'm so gloriously happy
+here, because I'm being right down natural."
+
+His mind made an abrupt turn, like a coursed hare, and he suddenly found
+himself thinking of the night in London, when he had sat in the
+restaurant with Hermione and Artois and listened to their talk,
+reverently listened. Now, as the net tugged at his hand, influenced by
+the resisting sea, that talk, as he remembered it, struck him as
+unnatural, as useless, and the thoughts which he had then admired and
+wondered at, as complicated and extraordinary. Something in him said,
+"That's all unnatural." The touch of the water about his body, the light
+of the moon upon him, the breath of the air in his wet face drove out his
+reverence for what he called "intellectuality," and something savage got
+hold of his soul and shook it, as if to wake up the sleeping self within
+him, the self that was Sicilian.
+
+As he waded in the water, coming ever nearer to the jagged rocks that
+shut out from his sight the wide sea and something else, he felt as if
+thinking and living were in opposition, as if the one were destructive of
+the other; and the desire to be clever, to be talented, which had often
+assailed him since he had known, and especially since he had loved,
+Hermione, died out of him, and he found himself vaguely pitying Artois,
+and almost despising the career and the fame of a writer. What did
+thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to live with your body,
+out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat as the savages live. When he
+waded to shore for the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the
+fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he could have
+shouted like a boy.
+
+He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now clothed, took hold of him
+by the arm with a familiarity that had in it nothing disrespectful.
+
+"Signore, basta, basta! Giulio will go in now."
+
+"Si! si!" cried Giulio, beginning to tug at his waistcoat buttons.
+
+"Once more, Gaspare!" said Maurice. "Only once!"
+
+"But if you take cold, signorino, the signora--"
+
+"I sha'n't catch cold. Only once!"
+
+He broke away, laughing, from Gaspare, and was swiftly in the sea. The
+Sicilians looked at him with admiration.
+
+"E' veramente piu Siciliano di noi!" exclaimed Nito.
+
+The others murmured their assent. Gaspare glowed with pride in his pupil.
+
+"I shall make the signore one of us," he said, as he deftly let out the
+coils of the net.
+
+"But how long is he going to stay?" asked Nito. "Will he not soon be
+going back to his own country?"
+
+For a moment Gaspare's countenance fell.
+
+"When the heat comes," he began, doubtfully. Then he cheered up.
+
+"Perhaps he will take me with him to England," he said.
+
+This time Maurice waded with the net into the shadow of the rocks out of
+the light of the moon. The night was waning, and a slight chill began to
+creep into the air. A little breeze, too, sighed over the sea, ruffling
+its surface, died away, then softly came again. As he moved into the
+darkness Maurice was conscious that the buoyancy of his spirits received
+a slight check. The night seemed suddenly to have changed, to have
+become more mysterious. He began to feel its mystery now, to be aware of
+the strangeness of being out in the sea alone at such an hour. Upon the
+shore he saw the forms of his companions, but they looked remote and
+phantom-like. He did not hear their voices. Perhaps the slow approach of
+dawn was beginning to affect them, and the little wind that was springing
+up chilled their merriment and struck them to silence. Before him the
+dense blackness of the rocks rose like a grotesque wall carved in
+diabolic shapes, and as he stared at these shapes he had an odd fancy
+that they were living things, and that they were watching him at his
+labor. He could not get this idea, that he was being watched, out of his
+head, and for a moment he forgot about the fish, and stood still, staring
+at the monsters, whose bulky forms reared themselves up into the
+moonlight from which they banished him.
+
+"Signore! Signorino!"
+
+There came to him a cry of protest from the shore. He started, moved
+forward with the net, and went under water. He had stepped into a deep
+hole. Still holding fast to the net, he came up to the surface, shook his
+head, and struck out. As he did so he heard another cry, sharp yet
+musical. But this cry did not come from the beach where his companions
+were gathered. It rose from the blackness of the rocks close to him, and
+it sounded like the cry of a woman. He winked his eyes to get the water
+out of them, and swam for the rocks, heedless of his duty as a fisherman.
+But the net impeded him, and again there was a shout from the shore:
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! E' pazzo Lei?"
+
+Reluctantly he turned and swam back to the shallow water. But when his
+feet touched bottom he stood still. That cry of a woman from the mystery
+of the rocks had startled, had fascinated his ears. Suddenly he
+remembered that he must be near to that Casa delle Sirene, whose little
+light he had seen from the terrace of the priest's house on his first
+evening in Sicily. He longed to hear that woman's voice again. For a
+moment he thought of it as the voice of a siren, of one of those beings
+of enchantment who lure men on to their destruction, and he listened
+eagerly, almost passionately, while the ruffled water eddied softly about
+his breast. But no music stole to him from the blackness of the rocks,
+and at last he turned slowly and waded to the shore.
+
+He was met with merry protests. Nito declared that the net had nearly
+been torn out of his hands. Gaspare, half undressed to go to his rescue,
+anxiously inquired if he had come to any harm. The rocks were sharp as
+razors near the point, and he might have cut himself to pieces upon them.
+He apologized to Nito and showed Gaspare that he was uninjured. Then,
+while the others began to count the fish, he went to the boats to put on
+his clothes, accompanied by Gaspare.
+
+"Why did you swim towards the rocks, signorino?" asked the boy, looking
+at him with a sharp curiosity.
+
+Delarey hesitated for a moment. He was inclined, he scarcely knew why, to
+keep silence about the cry he had heard. Yet he wanted to ask Gaspare
+something.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, at last, as they reached the boats, "was any one of
+you on the rocks over there just now?"
+
+He had forgotten to number his companions when he reached the shore.
+Perhaps one was missing, and had wandered towards the point to watch him
+fishing.
+
+"No, signore. Why do you ask?"
+
+Again Delarey hesitated. Then he said:
+
+"I heard some one call out to me there."
+
+He began to rub his wet body with a towel.
+
+"Call! What did they call?"
+
+"Nothing; no words. Some one cried out."
+
+"At this hour! Who should be there, signore?"
+
+The action of the rough towel upon his body brought a glow of warmth to
+Delarey, and the sense of mystery began to depart from his mind.
+
+"Perhaps it was a fisherman," he said.
+
+"They do not fish from there, signore. It must have been me you heard.
+When you went under the water I cried out. Drink some wine, signorino."
+
+He held a glass full of wine to Delarey's lips. Delarey drank.
+
+"But you've got a man's voice, Gaspare!" he said, putting down the glass
+and beginning to get into his clothes.
+
+"Per Dio! Would you have me squeak like a woman, signore?"
+
+Delarey laughed and said no more. But he knew it was not Gaspare's voice
+he had heard.
+
+The net was drawn up now for the last time, and as soon as Delarey had
+dressed they set out to walk to the caves on the farther side of the
+rocks, where they meant to sleep till Carmela was about and ready to make
+the frittura. To reach them they had to clamber up from the beach to the
+Messina road, mount a hill, and descend to the Caffe Berardi, a small,
+isolated shanty which stood close to the sea, and was used in summer-time
+by bathers who wanted refreshment. Nito and the rest walked on in front,
+and Delarey followed a few paces behind with Gaspare. When they reached
+the summit of the hill a great sweep of open sea was disclosed to their
+view, stretching away to the Straits of Messina, and bounded in the far
+distance by the vague outlines of the Calabrian Mountains. Here the wind
+met them more sharply, and below them on the pebbles by the caffe they
+could see the foam of breaking waves. But to the right, and nearer to
+them, the sea was still as an inland pool, guarded by the tree-covered
+hump of land on which stood the house of the sirens. This hump, which
+would have been an islet but for the narrow wall of sheer rock which
+joined it to the main-land, ran out into the sea parallel to the road.
+
+On the height, Delarey paused for a moment, as if to look at the wide
+view, dim and ethereal, under the dying moon.
+
+"Is that Calabria?" he asked.
+
+"Si, signore. And there is the caffe. The caves are beyond it. You cannot
+see them from here. But you are not looking, signorino!"
+
+The boy's quick eyes had noticed that Delarey was glancing towards the
+tangle of trees, among which was visible a small section of the gray wall
+of the house of the sirens.
+
+"How calm the sea is there!" Delarey said, swiftly.
+
+"Si, signore. That is where you can see the light in the window from our
+terrace."
+
+"There's no light now."
+
+"How should there be? They are asleep. Andiamo?"
+
+They followed the others, who were now out of sight. When they reached
+the caves, Nito and the boys had already flung themselves down upon the
+sand and were sleeping. Gaspare scooped out a hollow for Delarey, rolled
+up his jacket as a pillow for his padrone's head, murmured a "Buon
+riposo!" lay down near him, buried his face in his arms, and almost
+directly began to breathe with a regularity that told its tale of
+youthful, happy slumber.
+
+It was dark in the cave and quite warm. The sand made a comfortable bed,
+and Delarey was luxuriously tired after the long walk and the wading in
+the sea. When he lay down he thought that he, too, would be asleep in a
+moment, but sleep did not come to him, though he closed his eyes in
+anticipation of it. His mind was busy in his weary body, and that little
+cry of a woman still rang in his ears. He heard it like a song sung by a
+mysterious voice in a place of mystery by the sea. Soon he opened his
+eyes. Turning a little in the sand, away from his companions, he looked
+out from the cave, across the sloping beach and the foam of the waves,
+to the darkness of trees on the island. (So he called the place of the
+siren's house to himself now, and always hereafter.) From the cave he
+could not see the house, but only the trees, a formless, dim mass that
+grew about it. The monotonous sound of wave after wave did not still the
+cry in his ears, but mingled with it, as must have mingled with the song
+of the sirens to Ulysses the murmur of breaking seas ever so long ago.
+And he thought of a siren in the night stealing to a hidden place in the
+rocks to watch him as he drew the net, breast high in the water. There
+was romance in his mind to-night, new-born and strange. Sicily had put it
+there with the wild sense of youth and freedom that still possessed him.
+Something seemed to call him away from this cave of sleep, to bid his
+tired body bestir itself once more. He looked at the dark forms of his
+comrades, stretched in various attitudes of repose, and suddenly he knew
+he could not sleep. He did not want to sleep. He wanted--what? He raised
+himself to a sitting posture, then softly stood up, and with infinite
+precaution stole out of the cave.
+
+The coldness of the coming dawn took hold on him on the shore, and he saw
+in the east a mysterious pallor that was not of the moon, and upon the
+foam of the waves a light that was ghastly and that suggested infinite
+weariness and sickness. But he did not say this to himself. He merely
+felt that the night was quickly departing, and that he must hasten on his
+errand before the day came.
+
+He was going to search for the woman who had cried out to him in the sea.
+And he felt as if she were a creature of the night, of the moon and of
+the shadows, and as if he could never hope to find her in the glory of
+the day.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Delarey stole along the beach, walking lightly despite his fatigue. He
+felt curiously excited, as if he were on the heels of some adventure. He
+passed the Caffe Berardi almost like a thief in the night, and came to
+the narrow strip of pebbles that edged the still and lakelike water,
+protected by the sirens' isle. There he paused. He meant to gain that
+lonely land, but how? By the water lay two or three boats, but they were
+large and clumsy, impossible to move without aid. Should he climb up to
+the Messina road, traverse the spit of ground that led to the rocky wall,
+and try to make his way across it? The feat would be a difficult one, he
+thought. But it was not that which deterred him. He was impatient of
+delay, and the detour would take time. Between him and the islet was the
+waterway. Already he had been in the sea. Why not go in again? He
+stripped, packed his clothes into a bundle, tied roughly with a rope made
+of his handkerchief and bootlaces, and waded in. For a long way the water
+was shallow. Only when he was near to the island did it rise to his
+breast, to his throat, higher at last. Holding the bundle on his head
+with one hand, he struck out strongly and soon touched bottom again. He
+scrambled out, dressed on a flat rock, then looked for a path leading
+upward.
+
+The ground was very steep, almost precipitous, and thickly covered with
+trees and with undergrowth. This undergrowth concealed innumerable rocks
+and stones which shifted under his feet and rolled down as he began to
+ascend, grasping the bushes and the branches. He could find no path.
+What did it matter? All sense of fatigue had left him. With the activity
+of a cat he mounted. A tree struck him across the face. Another swept off
+his hat. He felt that he had antagonists who wished to beat him back to
+the sea, and his blood rose against them. He tore down a branch that
+impeded him, broke it with his strong hands, and flung it away viciously.
+His teeth were set and his nerves tingled, and he was conscious of the
+almost angry joy of keen bodily exertion. The body--that was his God
+to-night. How he loved it, its health and strength, its willingness, its
+capacities! How he gloried in it! It had bounded down the mountain. It
+had gone into the sea and revelled there. It had fished and swum. Now it
+mounted upward to discovery, defying the weapons that nature launched
+against it. Splendid, splendid body!
+
+He fought with the trees and conquered them. His trampling feet sent the
+stones leaping downward to be drowned in the sea. His swift eyes found
+the likely places for a foothold. His sinewy hands forced his enemies to
+assist him in the enterprise they hated. He came out on to the plateau at
+the summit of the island and stood still, panting, beside the house that
+hid there.
+
+Its blind, gray wall confronted him coldly in the dimness, one shuttered
+window, like a shut eye, concealing the interior, the soul of the house
+that lay inside its body. In this window must have been set the light he
+had seen from the terrace. He wished there were a light burning now. Had
+he swum across the inlet and fought his way up through the wood only to
+see a gray wall, a shuttered window? That cry had come from the rocks,
+yet he had been driven by something within him to this house,
+connecting--he knew not why--the cry with it and with the far-off light
+that had been like a star caught in the sea. Now he said to himself that
+he should have gone back to the rocks and sought the siren there. Should
+he go now? He hesitated for a moment, leaning against the wall of the
+house.
+
+               "Maju torna, maju veni
+               Cu li belli soi ciureri;
+               Oh chi pompa chi nni fa;
+               Maju torna, maju e cca!
+
+               "Maju torna, maju vinni,
+               Duna isca a li disinni;
+               Vinni riccu e ricchi fa,
+               Maju viva! Maju e cca!"
+
+He heard a girl's voice singing near him, whether inside the house or
+among the trees he could not at first tell. It sang softly yet gayly, as
+if the sun were up and the world were awake, and when it died away
+Delarey felt as if the singer must be in the dawn, though he stood still
+in the night. He put his ear to the shuttered window and listened.
+
+"L'haju; nun l'haju?"
+
+The voice was speaking now with a sort of whimsical and half-pathetic
+merriment, as if inclined to break into laughter at its own childish
+wistfulness.
+
+"M'ama; nun m'ama?"
+
+It broke off. He heard a little laugh. Then the song began again:
+
+               "Maju viju, e maju cogghiu,
+               Bona sorti di Diu vogghiu;
+               Ciuri di maju cogghiu a la campia,
+               Diu, pinzaticci vu a la sorti mia!"
+
+The voice was not in the house. Delarey was sure of that now. He was
+almost sure, too, that it was the same voice which had cried out to him
+from the rocks. Moving with precaution, he stole round the house to the
+farther side, which looked out upon the open sea, keeping among the
+trees, which grew thickly about the house on three sides, but which left
+it unprotected to the sea-winds on the fourth.
+
+A girl was standing in this open space, alone, looking seaward, with one
+arm out-stretched, one hand laid lightly, almost caressingly, upon the
+gnarled trunk of a solitary old olive-tree, the other arm hanging at her
+side. She was dressed in some dark, coarse stuff, with a short skirt, and
+a red handkerchief tied round her head, and seemed in the pale and almost
+ghastly light in which night and day were drawing near to each other to
+be tall and slim of waist. Her head was thrown back, as if she were
+drinking in the breeze that heralded the dawn--drinking it in like a
+voluptuary.
+
+Delarey stood and watched her. He could not see her face.
+
+She spoke some words in dialect in a clear voice. There was no one else
+visible. Evidently she was talking to herself. Presently she laughed
+again, and began to sing once more:
+
+               "Maju viju, e maju cogghiu,
+               A la me'casa guaj nu' nni vogghiu;
+               Ciuri di maju cogghiu a la campia,
+               Oru ed argentu a la sacchetta mia!"
+
+There was an African sound in the girl's voice--a sound of mystery that
+suggested heat and a force that could be languorous and stretch itself at
+ease. She was singing the song the Sicilian peasant girls join in on the
+first of May, when the ciuri di maju is in blossom, and the young
+countrywomen go forth in merry bands to pick the flower of May, and,
+turning their eyes to the wayside shrine, or, if there be none near, to
+the east and the rising sun, lift their hands full of the flowers above
+their heads, and, making the sign of the cross, murmur devoutly:
+
+               "Divina Pruvidenza, pruvviditimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza, cunsulatimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza e granni assai;
+               Cu' teni fidi a Diu, 'un pirisci mai!"
+
+[Illustration: "HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE DRINKING IN THE
+BREEZE"]
+
+Delarey knew neither song nor custom, but his ears were fascinated by the
+voice and the melody. Both sounded remote and yet familiar to him, as if
+once, in some distant land--perhaps of dreams--he had heard them before.
+He wished the girl to go on singing, to sing on and on into the dawn
+while he listened in his hiding-place, but she suddenly turned round and
+stood looking towards him, as if something had told her that she was not
+alone. He kept quite still. He knew she could not see him, yet he felt as
+if she was aware that he was there, and instinctively he held his breath
+and leaned backward into deeper shadow. After a minute the girl took a
+step forward, and, still staring in his direction, called out:
+
+"Padre?"
+
+Then Delarey knew that it was her voice that he had heard when he was in
+the sea, and he suddenly changed his desire. Now he no longer wished to
+remain unseen, and without hesitation he came out from the trees. The
+girl stood where she was, watching him as he came. Her attitude showed
+neither surprise nor alarm, and when he was close to her, and could at
+last see her face, he found that its expression was one of simple, bold
+questioning. It seemed to be saying to him quietly, "Well, what do you
+want of me?"
+
+Delarey was not acquainted with the Arab type of face. Had he been he
+would have at once been struck by the Eastern look in the girl's long,
+black eyes, by the Eastern cast of her regular, slightly aquiline
+features. Above her eyes were thin, jet-black eyebrows that looked almost
+as if they were painted. Her chin was full and her face oval in shape.
+She had hair like Gaspare's, black-brown, immensely thick and wavy, with
+tiny feathers of gold about the temples. She was tall, and had the
+contours of a strong though graceful girl just blooming into womanhood.
+Her hands were as brown as Delarey's, well shaped, but the hands of a
+worker. She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and brimful of lusty life.
+
+After a minute of silence Delarey's memory recalled some words of
+Gaspare's, till then forgotten.
+
+"You are Maddalena!" he said, in Italian.
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+She uttered the words softly, then fell into silence again, staring at
+him with her lustrous eyes, that were like black jewels.
+
+"You live here with Salvatore?"
+
+She nodded once more and began to smile, as if with pleasure at his
+knowledge of her.
+
+Delarey smiled too, and made with his arms the motion of swimming. At
+that she laughed outright and broke into quick speech. She spoke
+vivaciously, moving her hands and her whole body. Delarey could not
+understand much of what she said, but he caught the words mare and
+pescatore, and by her gestures knew that she was telling him she had been
+on the rocks and had seen his mishap. Suddenly in the midst of her talk
+she uttered the little cry of surprise or alarm which he had heard as he
+came up above water, pointed to her lips to indicate that she had given
+vent to it, and laughed again with all her heart. Delarey laughed too. He
+felt happy and at ease with his siren, and was secretly amused at his
+thought in the sea of the magical being full of enchantment who sang to
+lure men to their destruction. This girl was simply a pretty, but not
+specially uncommon, type of the Sicilian contadina--young, gay, quite
+free from timidity, though gentle, full of the joy of life and of the
+nascent passion of womanhood, blossoming out carelessly in the sunshine
+of the season of flowers. She could sing, this island siren, but probably
+she could not read or write. She could dance, could perhaps innocently
+give and receive love. But there was in her face, in her manner, nothing
+deliberately provocative. Indeed, she looked warmly pure, like a bright,
+eager young animal of the woods, full of a blithe readiness to enjoy,
+full of hope and of unself-conscious animation.
+
+Delarey wondered why she was not sleeping, and strove to ask her,
+speaking carefully his best Sicilian, and using eloquent gestures, which
+set her smiling, then laughing again. In reply to him she pointed towards
+the sea, then towards the house, then towards the sea once more. He
+guessed that some fisherman had risen early to go to his work, and that
+she had got up to see him off, and had been too wakeful to return to bed.
+
+"Niente piu sonno!" he said, opening wide his eyes.
+
+"Niente! Niente!"
+
+He feigned fatigue. She took his travesty seriously, and pointed to the
+house, inviting him by gesture to go in and rest there. Evidently she
+believed that, being a stranger, he could not speak or understand much of
+her language. He did not even try to undeceive her. It amused him to
+watch her dumb show, for her face spoke eloquently and her pretty, brown
+hands knew a language that was delicious. He had no longer any thought of
+sleep, but he felt curious to see the interior of the cottage, and he
+nodded his head in response to her invitation. At once she became the
+hospitable peasant hostess. Her eyes sparkled with eagerness and
+pleasure, and she went quickly by him to the door, which stood half open,
+pushed it back, and beckoned to him to enter.
+
+He obeyed her, went in, and found himself almost in darkness, for the big
+windows on either side of the door were shuttered, and only a tiny flame,
+like a spark, burned somewhere among the dense shadows of the interior at
+some distance from him. Pretending to be alarmed at the obscurity, he put
+out his hand gropingly, and let it light on her arm, then slip down to
+her warm, strong young hand.
+
+"I am afraid!" he exclaimed.
+
+He heard her merry laugh and felt her trying to pull her hand away, but
+he held it fast, prolonging a joke that he found a pleasant one. In that
+moment he was almost as simple as she was, obeying his impulses
+carelessly, gayly, without a thought of wrong--indeed, almost without
+thought at all. His body was still tingling and damp with the sea-water.
+Her face was fresh with the sea-wind. He had never felt more wholesome or
+as if life were a saner thing.
+
+She dragged her hand out of his at last; he heard a grating noise, and a
+faint light sputtered up, then grew steady as she moved away and set a
+match to a candle, shielding it from the breeze that entered through the
+open door with her body.
+
+"What a beautiful house!" he cried, looking curiously around.
+
+He saw such a dwelling as one may see in any part of Sicily where the
+inhabitants are not sunk in the direst poverty and squalor, a modest home
+consisting of two fair-sized rooms, one opening into the other. In each
+room was a mighty bed, high and white, with fat pillows, and a
+counterpane of many colors. At the head of each was pinned a crucifix and
+a little picture of the Virgin, Maria Addolorata, with a palm branch that
+had been blessed, and beneath the picture in the inner room a tiny light,
+rather like an English night-light near its end, was burning. It was this
+that Delarey had seen like a spark in the distance. At the foot of each
+bed stood a big box of walnut wood, carved into arabesques and grotesque
+faces. There were a few straw chairs and kitchen utensils. An old gun
+stood in a corner with a bundle of wood. Not far off was a pan of
+charcoal. There were also two or three common deal-tables, on one of
+which stood the remains of a meal, a big jar containing wine, a flat loaf
+of coarse brown bread, with a knife lying beside it, some green stuff in
+a plate, and a slab of hard, yellow cheese.
+
+Delarey was less interested in these things than in the display of
+photographs, picture-cards, and figures of saints that adorned the
+walls, carefully arranged in patterns to show to the best advantage. Here
+were colored reproductions of actresses in languid attitudes, of peasants
+dancing, of babies smiling, of elaborate young people with carefully
+dressed hair making love with "Molti Saluti!" "Una stretta di Mano!"
+"Mando un bacio!" "Amicizia eterna!" and other expressions of friendship
+and affection, scribbled in awkward handwritings across and around them.
+And mingled with them were representations of saints, such as are sold at
+the fairs and festivals of Sicily, and are reverently treasured by the
+pious and superstitious contadine; San Pancrazio, Santa Leocanda, the
+protector of child-bearing women; Sant Aloe, the patron saint of the
+beasts of burden; San Biagio, Santo Vito, the patron saint of dogs; and
+many others, with the Bambino, the Immacolata, the Madonna di Loreto, the
+Madonna della Rocca.
+
+In the faint light cast by the flickering candle, the faces of saints and
+actresses, of smiling babies, of lovers and Madonnas peered at Delarey as
+if curious to know why at such an hour he ventured to intrude among them,
+why he thus dared to examine them when all the world was sleeping. He
+drew back from them at length and looked again at the great bed with its
+fat pillows that stood in the farther room secluded from the sea-breeze.
+Suddenly he felt a longing to throw himself down and rest.
+
+The girl smiled at him with sympathy.
+
+"That is my bed," she said, simply. "Lie down and sleep, signorino."
+
+Delarey hesitated for a moment. He thought of his companions. If they
+should wake in the cave and miss him what would they think, what would
+they do? Then he looked again at the bed. The longing to lie down on it
+was irresistible. He pointed to the open door.
+
+"When the sun comes will you wake me?" he said.
+
+He took hold of his arm with one hand, and made the motion of shaking
+himself.
+
+"Sole," he said. "Quando c'e il sole."
+
+The girl laughed and nodded.
+
+"Si, signore--non dubiti!"
+
+Delarey climbed up on to the mountainous bed.
+
+"Buona notte, Maddalena!" he said, smiling at her from the pillow like a
+boy.
+
+"Buon riposo, signorino!"
+
+That was the last thing he heard. The last thing he saw was the dark,
+eager face of the girl lit up by the candle-flame watching him from the
+farther room. Her slight figure was framed by the doorway, through which
+a faint, sad light was stealing with the soft wind from the sea. Her
+lustrous eyes were looking towards him curiously, as if he were something
+of a phenomenon, as if she longed to understand his mystery.
+
+Soon, very soon, he saw those eyes no more. He was asleep in the midst of
+the Madonnas and the saints, with the blessed palm branch and the
+crucifix and Maria Addolorata above his head.
+
+The girl sat down on a chair just outside the door, and began to sing to
+herself once more in a low voice:
+
+               "Divina Pruvidenza, pruvviditimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza, consulatimi;
+               Divina Pruvidenza e granni assai;
+               Cu' teni fidi a Diu, 'un pirisci mai!"
+
+Once, in his sleep, Delarey must surely have heard her song, for he began
+to dream that he was Ulysses sailing across the purple seas along the
+shores of an enchanted coast, and that he heard far off the sirens
+singing, and saw their shadowy forms sitting among the rocks and
+reclining upon the yellow sands. Then he bade his mariners steer the bark
+towards the shore. But when he drew near the sirens changed into devout
+peasant women, and their alluring songs into prayers uttered to the
+Bambino and the Virgin. But one watched him with eyes that gleamed like
+black jewels, and her lips smiled while they uttered prayers, as if they
+could murmur love words and kiss the lips of men.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Delarey stirred on the great, white bed. A hand grasped him firmly, shook
+him ruthlessly.
+
+"Signorino! C'e il sole!"
+
+He opened his eyes reluctantly. Maddalena was leaning over him. He saw
+her bright face and curious young eyes, then the faces of the saints and
+the actresses upon the wall, and he wondered where he was and where
+Hermione was.
+
+"Hermione!" he said.
+
+"Cosa?" said Maddalena.
+
+She shook him again gently. He stretched himself, yawned, and began to
+smile. She smiled back at him.
+
+"C'e il sole!"
+
+Now he remembered, lifted himself up, and looked towards the doorway. The
+first rays of the sun were filtering in and sparkling in the distance
+upon the sea. The east was barred with red.
+
+He slipped down from the bed.
+
+"The frittura!" he said, in English. "I must make haste!"
+
+Maddalena laughed. She had never heard English before.
+
+"Ditelo ancora!" she cried, eagerly.
+
+They went but together on to the plateau and stood looking seaward.
+
+"I--must--make--haste!" he said, speaking slowly and dividing the words.
+
+"Hi--maust--maiki--'ai--isti!" she repeated, trying to imitate his
+accent.
+
+He burst out laughing. She pouted. Then she laughed, too, peal upon peal,
+while the sunlight grew stronger about them. How fresh the wind was! It
+played with her hair, from which she had now removed the handkerchief,
+and ruffled the little feathers of gold upon her brow. It blew about her
+smooth, young face as if it loved to touch the soft cheeks, the innocent
+lips, the candid, unlined brow. The leaves of the olive-trees rustled and
+the brambles and the grasses swayed. Everything was in movement, stirring
+gayly into life to greet the coming day. Maurice opened his mouth and
+drew in the air to his lungs, expanding his chest. He felt inclined to
+dance, to sing, and very much inclined to eat.
+
+"Addio, Maddalena!" he said, holding out his hand.
+
+He looked into her eyes and added:
+
+"Addio, Maddalena mia!"
+
+She smiled and looked down, then up at him again.
+
+"A rivederci, signorino!"
+
+She took his hand warmly in hers.
+
+"Yes, that's better. A rivederci!"
+
+He held her hand for a moment, looking into her long and laughing eyes,
+and thinking how like a young animal's they were in their unwinking
+candor. And yet they were not like an animal's. For now, when he gazed
+into them, they did not look away from him, but continued to regard him,
+and always with an eager shining of curiosity. That curiosity stirred his
+manhood, fired him. He longed to reply to it, to give a quick answer to
+its eager question, its "what are you?" He glanced round, saw only the
+trees, the sea all alight with sun-rays, the red east now changing slowly
+into gold. Then he bent down, kissed the lips of Maddalena with a laugh,
+turned and descended through the trees by the way he had come. He had no
+feeling that he had done any wrong to Hermione, any wrong to Maddalena.
+His spirits were high, and he sang as he leaped down, agile as a goat, to
+the sea. He meant to return as he had come, and at the water's edge he
+stripped off his clothes once more, tied them into a bundle, plunged into
+the sea, and struck out for the beach opposite. As he did so, as the
+cold, bracing water seized him, he heard far above him the musical cry
+of the siren of the night. He answered it with a loud, exultant call.
+
+That was her farewell and his--this rustic Hero's good-bye to her
+Leander.
+
+When he reached the Caffe Berardi its door stood open, and a middle-aged
+woman was looking out seaward. Beyond, by the caves, he saw figures
+moving. His companions were awake. He hastened towards them. His morning
+plunge in the sea had given him a wild appetite.
+
+"Frittura! Frittura!" he shouted, taking off his hat and waving it.
+
+Gaspare came running towards him.
+
+"Where have you been, signorino?"
+
+"For a walk along the shore."
+
+He still kept his hat in his hand.
+
+"Why, your face is all wet, and so is your hair."
+
+"I washed them in the sea. Mangiamo! Mangiamo!"
+
+"You did not sleep?"
+
+Gaspare spoke curiously, regarded him with inquisitive, searching eyes.
+
+"I couldn't. I'll sleep up there when we get home."
+
+He pointed to the mountain. His eyes were dancing with gayety.
+
+"The frittura, Gasparino, the frittura! And then the tarantella, and then
+'O sole mio'!"
+
+He looked towards the rising sun, and began to sing at the top of his
+voice:
+
+               "O sole, o sole mio,
+               Sta 'n fronte a te,
+               Sta 'n fronte a te!"
+
+Gaspare joined in lustily, and Carmela in the doorway of the Caffe
+Berardi waved a frying-pan at them in time to the music.
+
+"Per Dio, Gaspare!" exclaimed Maurice, as they raced towards the house,
+each striving to be first there--"Per Dio, I never knew what life was
+till I came to Sicily! I never knew what happiness was till this
+morning!"
+
+"The frittura! The frittura!" shouted Gaspare. "I'll be first!"
+
+Neck and neck they reached the caffe as Nito poured the shining fish into
+Madre Carmela's frying-pan.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"They are coming, signora, they are coming! Don't you hear them?"
+
+Lucrezia was by the terrace wall looking over into the ravine. She could
+not see any moving figures, but she heard far down among the olives and
+the fruit trees Gaspare's voice singing "O sole mio!" and while she
+listened another voice joined in, the voice of the padrone:
+
+"Dio mio, but they are merry!" she added, as the song was broken by a
+distant peal of laughter.
+
+Hermione came out upon the steps. She had been in the sitting-room
+writing a letter to Miss Townly, who sent her long and tearful effusions
+from London almost every day.
+
+"Have you got the frying-pan ready, Lucrezia?" she asked.
+
+"The frying-pan, signora!"
+
+"Yes, for the fish they are bringing us."
+
+Lucrezia looked knowing.
+
+"Oh, signora, they will bring no fish."
+
+"Why not? They promised last night. Didn't you hear?"
+
+"They promised, yes, but they won't remember. Men promise at night and
+forget in the morning."
+
+Hermione laughed. She had been feeling a little dull, but now the sound
+of the lusty voices and the laughter from the ravine filled her with a
+sudden cheerfulness, and sent a glow of anticipation into her heart.
+
+"Lucrezia, you are a cynic."
+
+"What is a cinico, signora?"
+
+"A Lucrezia. But you don't know your padrone. He won't forget us."
+
+Lucrezia reddened. She feared she had perhaps said something that seemed
+disrespectful.
+
+"Oh, signora, there is not another like the padrone. Every one says so.
+Ask Gaspare and Sebastiano. I only meant that--"
+
+"I know. Well, to-day you will understand that all men are not forgetful,
+when you eat your fish."
+
+Lucrezia still looked very doubtful, but she said nothing more.
+
+"There they are!" exclaimed Hermione.
+
+She waved her hand and cried out. Life suddenly seemed quite different to
+her. These moving figures peopled gloriously the desert waste, these
+ringing voices filled with music the brooding silence of it. She murmured
+to herself a verse of scripture, "Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy
+cometh with the morning," and she realized for the first time how
+absurdly sad and deserted she had been feeling, how unreasonably forlorn.
+By her present joy she measured her past--not sorrow exactly; she could
+not call it that--her past dreariness, and she said to herself with a
+little shock almost of fear, "How terribly dependent I am!"
+
+"Mamma mia!" cried Lucrezia, as another shout of laughter came up from
+the ravine, "how merry and mad they are! They have had a good night's
+fishing."
+
+Hermione heard the laughter, but now it sounded a little harsh in her
+ears.
+
+"I wonder," she thought, as she leaned upon the terrace wall--"I wonder
+if he has missed me at all? I wonder if men ever miss us as we miss
+them?"
+
+Her call, it seemed, had not been heard, nor her gesture of welcome seen,
+but now Maurice looked up, waved his cap, and shouted. Gaspare, too, took
+off his linen hat with a stentorian cry of "Buon giorno, signora."
+
+"Signora!" said Lucrezia.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Look! Was not I right? Are they carrying anything?"
+
+Hermione looked eagerly, almost passionately, at the two figures now
+drawing near to the last ascent up the bare mountain flank. Maurice had a
+stick in one hand, the other hung empty at his side. Gaspare still waved
+his hat wildly, holding it with both hands as a sailor holds the
+signalling-flag.
+
+"Perhaps," she said--"perhaps it wasn't a good night, and they've caught
+nothing."
+
+"Oh, signora, the sea was calm. They must have taken--"
+
+"Perhaps their pockets are full of fish. I am sure they are."
+
+She spoke with a cheerful assurance.
+
+"If they have caught any fish, I know your frying-pan will be wanted,"
+she said.
+
+"Chi lo sa?" said Lucrezia, with rather perfunctory politeness.
+
+Secretly she thought that the padrona had only one fault. She was a
+little obstinate sometimes, and disinclined to be told the truth. And
+certainly she did not know very much about men, although she had a
+husband.
+
+Through the old Norman arch came Delarey and Gaspare, with hot faces and
+gay, shining eyes, splendidly tired with their exertions and happy in the
+thought of rest. Delarey took Hermione's hand in his. He would have
+kissed her before Lucrezia and Gaspare, quite naturally, but he felt that
+her hand stiffened slightly in his as he leaned forward, and he forbore.
+She longed for his kiss, but to receive it there would have spoiled a
+joy. And kind and familiar though she was with those beneath her, she
+could not bear to show the deeps of her heart before them. To her his
+kiss after her lonely night would be an event. Did he know that? She
+wondered.
+
+He still kept her hand in his as he began to tell her about their
+expedition.
+
+"Did you enjoy it?" she asked, thinking what a boy he looked in his
+eager, physical happiness.
+
+"Ask Gaspare!"
+
+"I don't think I need. Your eyes tell me."
+
+"I never enjoyed any night so much before, out there under the moon. Why
+don't we always sleep out-of-doors?"
+
+"Shall we try some night on the terrace?"
+
+"By Jove, we will! What a lark!"
+
+"Did you go into the sea?"
+
+"I should think so! Ask Gaspare if I didn't beat them all. I had to swim,
+too."
+
+"And the fish?" she said, trying to speak, carelessly.
+
+"They were stunning. We caught an awful lot, and Mother Carmela cooked
+them to a T. I had an appetite, I can tell you, Hermione, after being in
+the sea."
+
+She was silent for a moment. Her hand had dropped out of his. When she
+spoke again, she said:
+
+"And you slept in the caves?"
+
+"The others did."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I couldn't sleep, so I went out on to the beach. But I'll tell you all
+that presently. You won't be shocked, Hermione, if I take a siesta now?
+I'm pretty well done--grandly tired, don't you know. I think I could get
+a lovely nap before collazione."
+
+"Come in, my dearest," she said. "Collazione a little late, Lucrezia, not
+till half-past one."
+
+"And the fish, signora?" asked Lucrezia.
+
+"We've got quite enough without fish," said Hermione, turning away.
+
+"Oh, by Jove!" Delarey said, as they went into the cottage, putting his
+hand into his jacket-pocket, "I've got something for you, Hermione."
+
+"Fish!" she cried, eagerly, her whole face brightening. "Lucre--"
+
+"Fish in my coat!" he interrupted, still not remembering. "No, a letter.
+They gave it me from the village as we came up. Here it is."
+
+He drew out a letter, gave it to her, and went into the bedroom, while
+Hermione stood in the sitting-room by the dining-table with the letter in
+her hand.
+
+It was from Artois, with the Kairouan postmark.
+
+"It's from Emile," she said.
+
+Maurice was closing the shutters, to make the bedroom dark.
+
+"Is he still in Africa?" he asked, letting down the bar with a clatter.
+
+"Yes," she said, opening the envelope. "Go to bed like a good boy while I
+read it."
+
+She wanted his kiss so much that she did not go near to him, and spoke
+with a lightness that was almost like a feigned indifference. He thrust
+his gay face through the doorway into the sunshine, and she saw the beads
+of perspiration on his smooth brow above his laughing, yet half-sleepy
+eyes.
+
+"Come and tuck me up afterwards!" he said, and vanished.
+
+Hermione made a little movement as if to follow him, but checked it and
+unfolded the letter.
+
+
+                                 "4, RUE D'ABDUL KADER, KAIROUAN.
+
+     MY DEAR FRIEND,--This will be one of my dreary notes, but you must
+     forgive me. Do you ever feel a heavy cloud of apprehension lowering
+     over you, a sensation of approaching calamity, as if you heard the
+     footsteps of a deadly enemy stealthily approaching you? Do you know
+     what it is to lose courage, to fear yourself, life, the future, to
+     long to hear a word of sympathy from a friendly voice, to long to
+     lay hold of a friendly hand? Are you ever like a child in the dark,
+     your intellect no weapon against the dread of formless things? The
+     African sun is shining here as I sit under a palm-tree writing,
+     with my servant, Zerzour, squatting beside me. It is so clear that
+     I can almost count the veins in the leaves of the palms, so warm
+     that Zerzour has thrown off his burnous and kept on only his linen
+     shirt. And yet I am cold and seem to be in blackness. I write to
+     you to gain some courage if I can. But I have gained none yet. I
+     believe there must be a physical cause for my malaise, and that I
+     am going to have some dreadful illness, and perhaps lay my bones
+     here in the shadow of the mosques among the sons of Islam. Write to
+     me. Is the garden of paradise blooming with flowers? Is the tree of
+     knowledge of good weighed down with fruit, and do you pluck the
+     fruit boldly and eat it every day? You told me in London to come
+     over and see you. I am not coming. Do not fear. But how I wish that
+     I could now, at this instant, see your strong face, touch your
+     courageous hand! There is a sensation of doom upon me. Laugh at me
+     as much as you like, but write to me. I feel cold--cold in the sun.
+
+                                                          EMILE."
+
+When she had finished reading this letter, Hermione stood quite still
+with it in her hand, gazing at the white paper on which this cry from
+Africa was traced. It seemed to her that--a cry from across the sea for
+help against some impending fate. She had often had melancholy letters
+from Artois in the past, expressing pessimistic views about life and
+literature, anxiety about some book which he was writing and which he
+thought was going to be a failure, anger against the follies of men, the
+turn of French politics, or the degeneration of the arts in modern times.
+Diatribes she was accustomed to, and a definite melancholy from one who
+had not a gay temperament. But this letter was different from all the
+others. She sat down and read it again. For the moment she had forgotten
+Maurice, and did not hear his movements in the adjoining room. She was in
+Africa under a palm-tree, looking into the face of a friend with keen
+anxiety, trying to read the immediate future for him there.
+
+"Maurice!" she called, presently, without getting up from her seat,
+"I've had such a strange letter from Emile. I'm afraid--I feel as if he
+were going to be dreadfully ill or have an accident."
+
+There was no reply.
+
+"Maurice!" she called again.
+
+Then she got up and looked into the bedroom. It was nearly dark, but she
+could see her husband's black head on the pillow and hear a sound of
+regular breathing. He was asleep already; she had not received his kiss
+or tucked him up. She felt absurdly unhappy, as if she had missed a
+pleasure that could never come to her again. That, she thought, is one of
+the penalties of a great love, the passionate regret it spends on the
+tiny things it has failed of. At this moment she fancied--no, she felt
+sure--that there would always be a shadow in her life. She had lost
+Maurice's kiss after his return from his first absence since their
+marriage. And a kiss from his lips still seemed to her a wonderful,
+almost a sacred thing, not only a physical act, but an emblem of that
+which was mysterious and lay behind the physical. Why had she not let him
+kiss her on the terrace? Her sensitive reserve had made her loss. For a
+moment she thought she wished she had the careless mind of a peasant.
+Lucrezia loved Sebastiano with passion, but she would have let him kiss
+her in public and been proud of it. What was the use of delicacy, of
+sensitiveness, in the great, coarse thing called life? Even Maurice had
+not shared her feeling. He was open as a boy, almost as a peasant boy.
+
+She began to wonder about him. She often wondered about him now in
+Sicily. In England she never had. She had thought there that she knew him
+as he, perhaps, could never know her. It seemed to her that she had been
+almost arrogant, filled with a pride of intellect. She was beginning to
+be humbler here, face to face with Etna.
+
+Let him sleep, mystery wrapped in the mystery of slumber!
+
+She sat down in the twilight, waiting till he should wake, watching the
+darkness of his hair upon the pillow.
+
+Some time passed, and presently she heard a noise upon the terrace. She
+got up softly, went into the sitting-room, and looked out. Lucrezia was
+laying the table for collazione.
+
+"Is it half-past one already?" she asked.
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"But the padrone is still asleep!"
+
+"So is Gaspare in the hay. Come and see, signora."
+
+Lucrezia took Hermione by the hand and led her round the angle of the
+cottage. There, under the low roof of the out-house, dressed only in his
+shirt and trousers with his brown arms bare and his hair tumbled over his
+damp forehead, lay Gaspare on a heap of hay close to Tito, the donkey.
+Some hens were tripping and pecking by his legs, and a black cat was
+curled up in the hollow of his left armpit. He looked infinitely young,
+healthy, and comfortable, like an embodied carelessness that had flung
+itself down to its need.
+
+"I wish I could sleep like that," said Hermione.
+
+"Signora!" said Lucrezia, shocked. "You in the stable with that white
+dress! Mamma mia! And the hens!"
+
+"Hens, donkey, cat, hay, and all--I should love it. But I'm too old ever
+to sleep like that. Don't wake him!"
+
+Lucrezia was stepping over to Gaspare.
+
+"And I won't wake the padrone. Let them both sleep. They've been up all
+night. I'll eat alone. When they wake we'll manage something for them.
+Perhaps they'll sleep till evening, till dinner-time."
+
+"Gaspare will, signora. He can sleep the clock round when he's tired."
+
+"And the padrone too, I dare say. All the better."
+
+She spoke cheerfully, then went to sit down to her solitary meal.
+
+The letter of Artois was her only company. She read it again as she ate,
+and again felt as if it had been written by a man over whom some real
+misfortune was impending. The thought of his isolation in that remote
+African city pained her warm heart. She compared it with her own
+momentary solitude, and chided herself for minding--and she did mind--the
+lonely meal. How much she had--everything almost! And Artois, with his
+genius, his fame, his liberty--how little he had! An Arab servant for his
+companion, while she for hers had Maurice! Her heart glowed with
+thankfulness, and, feeling how rich she was, she felt a longing to give
+to others--a longing to make every one happy, a longing specially to make
+Emile happy. His letter was horribly sad. Each time she looked at it she
+was made sad by it, even apprehensive. She remembered their long and
+close friendship, how she had sympathized with all his struggles, how she
+had been proud of possessing his confidence and of being asked to advise
+him on points connected with his work. The past returned to her, kindling
+fires in her heart, till she longed to be near him and to shed their
+warmth on him. The African sun shone upon him and left him cold, numb.
+How wonderful it was, she thought, that the touch of a true friend's
+hand, the smile of the eyes of a friend, could succeed where the sun
+failed. Sometimes she thought of herself, of all human beings, as
+pygmies. Now she felt that she came of a race of giants, whose powers
+were illimitable. If only she could be under that palm-tree for a moment
+beside Emile, she would be able to test the power she knew was within
+her, the glorious power that the sun lacked, to shed light and heat
+through a human soul. With an instinctive gesture she stretched out her
+hand as if to give Artois the touch he longed for. It encountered only
+the air and dropped to her side. She got up with a sigh.
+
+"Poor old Emile!" she said to herself. "If only I could do something for
+him!"
+
+The thought of Maurice sleeping calmly close to her made her long to say
+"Thank you" for her great happiness by performing some action of
+usefulness, some action that would help another--Emile for choice--to
+happiness, or, at least, to calm.
+
+This longing was for a moment so keen in her that it was almost like an
+unconscious petition, like an unuttered prayer in the heart, "Give me an
+opportunity to show my gratitude."
+
+She stood by the wall for a moment, looking over into the ravine and at
+the mountain flank opposite. Etna was startlingly clear to-day. She
+fancied that if a fly were to settle upon the snow on its summit she
+would be able to see it. The sea was like a mirror in which lay the
+reflection of the unclouded sky. It was not far to Africa. She watched a
+bird pass towards the sea. Perhaps it was flying to Kairouan, and would
+settle at last on one of the white cupolas of the great mosque there, the
+Mosque of Djama Kebir.
+
+What could she do for Emile? She could at least write to him. She could
+renew her invitation to him to come to Sicily.
+
+"Lucrezia!" she called, softly, lest she might waken Maurice.
+
+"Signora?" said Lucrezia, appearing round the corner of the cottage.
+
+"Please bring me out a pen and ink and writing-paper, will you?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia was standing beside Hermione. Now she turned to go into the
+house. As she did so she said:
+
+"Ecco, Antonino from the post-office!"
+
+"Where?" asked Hermione.
+
+Lucrezia pointed to a little figure that was moving quickly along the
+mountain-path towards the cottage.
+
+"There, signora. But why should he come? It is not the hour for the post
+yet."
+
+"No. Perhaps it is a telegram. Yes, it must be a telegram."
+
+She glanced at the letter in her hand.
+
+"It's a telegram from Africa," she said, as if she knew.
+
+And at that moment she felt that she did know.
+
+Lucrezia regarded her with round-eyed amazement.
+
+"But, signora, how can you--"
+
+"There, Antonino has disappeared under the trees! We shall see him in a
+minute among the rocks. I'll go to meet him."
+
+And she went quickly to the archway, and looked down the path where the
+lizards were darting to and fro in the sunshine. Almost directly Antonino
+reappeared, a small boy climbing steadily up the steep pathway, with a
+leather bag slung over his shoulder.
+
+"Antonino!" she called to him. "Is it a telegram?"
+
+"Si, signora!" he cried out.
+
+He came up to her, panting, opened the bag, and gave her the folded
+paper.
+
+"Go and get something to drink," she said. "To eat, too, if you're
+hungry."
+
+Antonino ran off eagerly, while Hermione tore open the paper and read
+these words in French:
+
+     "Monsieur Artois dangerously ill; fear may not recover; he wished
+     you to know.
+
+                          MAX BERTON, Docteur Medecin, Kairouan."
+
+Hermione dropped the telegram. She did not feel at all surprised. Indeed,
+she felt that she had been expecting almost these very words, telling her
+of a tragedy at which the letter she still held in her hand had hinted.
+For a moment she stood there without being conscious of any special
+sensation. Then she stooped, picked up the telegram, and read it again.
+This time it seemed like an answer to that unuttered prayer in her heart:
+"Give me an opportunity to show my gratitude." She did not hesitate for
+a moment as to what she would do. She would go to Kairouan, to close the
+eyes of her friend if he must die, if not to nurse him back to life.
+
+Antonino was munching some bread and cheese and had one hand round a
+glass full of red wine.
+
+"I'm going to write an answer," she said to him, "and you must run with
+it."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Was it from Africa, signora?" asked Lucrezia.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Lucrezia's jaw fell, and she stared in superstitious amazement.
+
+"I wonder," Hermione thought, "if Maurice--"
+
+She went gently to the bedroom. He was still sleeping calmly. His
+attitude of luxurious repose, the sound of his quiet breathing, seemed
+strange to her eyes and ears at this moment, strange and almost horrible.
+For an instant she thought of waking him in order to tell him her news
+and consult with him about the journey. It never occurred to her to ask
+him whether there should be a journey. But something held her back, as
+one is held back from disturbing the slumber of a tired child, and she
+returned to the sitting-room, wrote out the following telegram:
+
+     "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, reaching Africa 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 the midst 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 among the 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 dejeuner!" 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 she was 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
+help Hermione. 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 a fire 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--when two 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.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+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 of understanding 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 was _The
+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 against a 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 could harm 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. How quickly 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 the village the people were
+gossiping at one another's doors, were lounging together in the piazza,
+were playing cards in the caffes, 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!" "A 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 the festa, 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:
+
+               "Maju torna, maju veni
+               Cu li belli soi ciureri--"
+
+He tried to hum the tune, but it had left his memory. He longed to hear
+it once more under the olive-trees of the Sirens' Isle.
+
+Again his thought went to Hermione. Very soon she would be out there, far
+out on the silver of the sea. Had she wanted him to go with her? He knew
+that she had. Yet she had not asked him to go, had not hinted at his
+going. Even she had refused to let him go. And he had not pressed it.
+Something had held him back from insisting, something secret, and
+something secret had kept her from accepting his suggestion. She was
+going to her greatest friend, to the man she had known intimately, long
+before she had known him--Delarey--and he was left alone. In England he
+had never had a passing moment of jealousy of Artois; but now, to-night,
+mingled with his creeping resentment against the joys of the peasants, of
+those not far from him under the moon of Sicily, there was a sensation of
+jealousy which came from the knowledge that his wife was travelling to
+her friend. That friend might be dead, or she might nurse him back to
+life. Delarey thought of her by his bedside, ministering to him,
+performing the intimate offices of the attendant on a sick man, raising
+him up on his pillows, putting a cool hand on his burning forehead,
+sitting by him at night in the silence of a shadowy room, and quite
+alone.
+
+He thought of all this, and the Sicilian that was in him grew suddenly
+hot with a burning sense of anger, a burning desire for action,
+preventive or revengeful. It was quite unreasonable, as unreasonable as
+the vagrant impulse of a child, but it was strong as the full-grown
+determination of a man. Hermione had belonged to him. She was his. And
+the old Sicilian blood in him protested against that which would be if
+Artois were still alive when she reached Africa.
+
+But it was too late now. He could do nothing. He could only look at the
+shining sea on which the ship would bear her that very night.
+
+His inaction and solitude began to torture him. If he went in he knew he
+could not sleep. The mere thought of the festa would prevent him from
+sleeping. Again he looked at the lights of Castel Vecchio. He saw only
+one now, and imagined it set in the window of Pancrazio's house. He even
+fancied that down the mountain-side and across the ravine there floated
+to him the faint wail of the ceramella playing a dance measure.
+
+Suddenly he knew that he could not remain all night alone on the
+mountain-side.
+
+He went quickly into the cottage, got his soft hat, then went from room
+to room, closing the windows and barring the wooden shutters. When he had
+come out again upon the steps and locked the cottage door he stood for a
+moment hesitating with the large door-key in his hand. He said to himself
+that he was going to the festa at Castel Vecchio. Of course he was going
+there, to dance the country dances and join in the songs of Sicily. He
+slipped the key into his pocket and went down the steps to the terrace.
+But there he hesitated again. He took the key out of his pocket, looked
+at it as it lay in his hand, then put it down on the sill of the
+sitting-room window.
+
+"If any one comes, there isn't very much to steal," he thought. "And,
+perhaps--" Again he looked at the lights of Castel Vecchio, then down
+towards the sea. The star of the sea shone steadily and seemed to summon
+him. He left the key on the window-sill, with a quick gesture pulled his
+hat-brim down farther over his eyes, hastened along the terrace, and,
+turning to the left beyond the archway, took the path that led through
+the olive-trees towards Isola Bella and the sea.
+
+Through the wonderful silence of the night among the hills there came now
+a voice that was thrilling to his ears--the voice of youth by the sea
+calling to the youth that was in him.
+
+Hermione was travelling to her friend. Must he remain quite friendless?
+
+All the way down to the sea he heard the calling of the voice.
+
+
+
+X
+
+As dawn was breaking, Lucrezia and Gaspare climbed slowly up the
+mountain-side towards the cottage. Lucrezia's eyes were red, for she had
+just bidden good-bye to Sebastiano, who was sailing that day for the
+Lipari Isles, and she did not know how soon he would be back. Sebastiano
+had not cried. He loved change, and was radiant at the prospect of his
+voyage. But Lucrezia's heart was torn. She knew Sebastiano, knew his wild
+and adventurous spirit, his reckless passion for life, and the gifts it
+scatters at the feet of lusty youth. There were maidens in the Lipari
+Isles. They might be beautiful. She had scarcely been jealous of
+Sebastiano before her betrothal to him, for then she had had no rights
+over him, and she was filled with the spirit of humbleness that still
+dwells in the women of Sicily, the spirit that whispers "Man may do what
+he will." But now something had arisen within her to do battle with that
+spirit. She wanted Sebastiano for her very own, and the thought of his
+freedom when away tormented her.
+
+Gaspare comforted her in perfunctory fashion.
+
+"What does it matter?" he said. "When you are married you can keep him in
+the house, and make him spin the flax for you."
+
+And he laughed aloud. But when they drew near to the cottage he said:
+
+"Zitta, Lucrezia! The padrone is asleep. We must steal in softly and not
+waken him."
+
+On tiptoe they crept along the terrace.
+
+"He will have left the door open for us," whispered Gaspare. "He has the
+revolver beside him and will not have been afraid."
+
+But when they stood before the steps the door was shut. Gaspare tried it
+gently. It was locked.
+
+"Phew!" he whistled. "We cannot get in, for we cannot wake him."
+
+Lucrezia shivered. Sorrow had made her feel cold.
+
+"Mamma mia!" she began.
+
+But Gaspare's sharp eyes had spied the key lying on the window-sill. He
+darted to it and picked it up. Then he stared at the locked door and at
+Lucrezia.
+
+"But where is the padrone?" he said. "Oh, I know! He locked the door on
+the inside and then put the key out of the window. But why is the bedroom
+window shut? He always sleeps with it open!"
+
+Quickly he thrust the key into the lock, opened the door, and entered the
+dark sitting-room. Holding up a warning hand to keep Lucrezia quiet, he
+tiptoed to the bedroom door, opened it without noise, and disappeared,
+leaving Lucrezia outside. After a minute or two he came back.
+
+"It is all right. He is sleeping. Go to bed."
+
+Lucrezia turned to go.
+
+"And never mind getting up early to make the padrone's coffee," Gaspare
+added. "I will do it. I am not sleepy. I shall take the gun and go out
+after the birds."
+
+Lucrezia looked surprised. Gaspare was not in the habit of relieving her
+of her duties. On the contrary, he was a strict taskmaster. But she was
+tired and preoccupied. So she made no remark and went off to her room
+behind the house, walking heavily and untying the handkerchief that was
+round her head.
+
+When she had gone, Gaspare stood by the table, thinking deeply. He had
+lied to Lucrezia. The padrone was not asleep. His bed had not been slept
+in. Where had he gone? Where was he now?
+
+The Sicilian servant, if he cares for his padrone, feels as if he had a
+proprietor's interest in him. He belongs to his padrone and his padrone
+belongs to him. He will allow nobody to interfere with his possession. He
+is intensely jealous of any one who seeks to disturb the intimacy between
+his padrone and himself, or to enter into his padrone's life without
+frankly letting him know it and the reason for it. The departure of
+Hermione had given an additional impetus to Gaspare's always lively sense
+of proprietorship in Maurice. He felt as if he had been left in charge of
+his padrone, and had an almost sacred responsibility to deliver him up to
+Hermione happy and safe when she returned. This absence, therefore,
+startled and perturbed him--more--made him feel guilty of a lapse from
+his duty. Perhaps he should not have gone to the festa. True, he had
+asked the padrone to accompany him. But still--
+
+He went out onto the terrace and looked around him. The dawn was faint
+and pale. Wreaths of mist, like smoke trails, hung below him, obscuring
+the sea. The ghostly cone of Etna loomed into the sky, extricating itself
+from swaddling bands of clouds which shrouded its lower flanks. The air
+was chilly upon this height, and the aspect of things was gray and
+desolate, without temptation, without enchantment, to lure men out from
+their dwellings.
+
+What could have kept the padrone from his sleep till this hour?
+
+Gaspare shivered a little as he stared over the wall. He was
+thinking--thinking furiously. Although scarcely educated at all, he was
+exceedingly sharp-witted, and could read character almost as swiftly and
+surely as an Arab. At this moment he was busily recalling the book he had
+been reading for many weeks in Sicily, the book of his padrone's
+character, written out for him in words, in glances, in gestures, in
+likes and dislikes, most clearly in actions. Mentally he turned the
+leaves until he came to the night of the fishing, to the waning of the
+night, to the journey to the caves, to the dawn when he woke upon the
+sand and found that the padrone was not beside him. His brown hand
+tightened on the stick he held, his brown eyes stared with the glittering
+acuteness of a great bird's at the cloud trails hiding the sea below
+him--hiding the sea, and all that lay beside the sea.
+
+There was no one on the terrace. But there was a figure for a moment on
+the mountain-side, leaping downward. The ravine took it and hid it in a
+dark embrace. Gaspare had found what he sought, a clew to guide him. His
+hesitation was gone. In his uneducated and intuitive mind there was no
+longer any room for a doubt. He knew that his padrone was where he had
+been in that other dawn, when he slipped away from the cave where his
+companions were sleeping.
+
+Surefooted as a goat, and incited to abnormal activity by a driving
+spirit within him that throbbed with closely mingled curiosity, jealousy,
+and anger, Gaspare made short work of the path in the ravine. In a few
+minutes he came out on to the road by Isola Bella. On the shore was a
+group of fishermen, all of them friends of his, getting ready their
+fishing-tackle, and hauling down the boats to the gray sea for the
+morning's work. Some of them hailed him, but he took no notice, only
+pulled his soft hat down sideways over his cheek, and hurried on in the
+direction of Messina, keeping to the left side of the road and away from
+the shore, till he gained the summit of the hill from which the Caffe
+Berardi and the caves were visible. There he stopped for a moment and
+looked down. He saw no one upon the shore, but at some distance upon the
+sea there was a black dot, a fishing-boat. It was stationary. Gaspare
+knew that its occupant must be hauling in his net.
+
+"Salvatore is out then!" he muttered to himself, as he turned aside from
+the road onto the promontory, which was connected by the black wall of
+rock with the land where stood the house of the sirens. This wall,
+forbidding though it was, and descending sheer into the deep sea on
+either side, had no terrors for him. He dropped down to it with a sort of
+skilful carelessness, then squatted on a stone, and quickly unlaced his
+mountain boots, pulled his stockings off, slung them with the boots round
+his neck, and stood up on his bare feet. Then, balancing himself with his
+out-stretched arms, he stepped boldly upon the wall. It was very narrow.
+The sea surged through it. There was not space on it to walk
+straight-footed, even with only one foot at a time upon the rock. Gaspare
+was obliged to plant his feet sideways, the toes and heels pointing to
+the sea on either hand. But the length of the wall was short, and he went
+across it almost as quickly as if he had been walking upon the road.
+Heights and depths had no terrors for him in his confident youth. And he
+had been bred up among the rocks, and was a familiar friend of the sea. A
+drop into it would have only meant a morning bath. Having gained the
+farther side, he put on his stockings and boots, grasped his stick, and
+began to climb upward through the thickly growing trees towards the house
+of the sirens. His instinct had told him upon the terrace that the
+padrone was there. Uneducated people have often marvellously retentive
+memories for the things of every-day life. Gaspare remembered the
+padrone's question about the little light beside the sea, his answer to
+it, the way in which the padrone had looked towards the trees when, in
+the dawn, they stood upon the summit of the hill and he pointed out the
+caves where they were going to sleep. He remembered, too, from what
+direction the padrone came towards the caffe when the sun was up--and he
+knew.
+
+As he drew near to the cottage he walked carefully, though still swiftly,
+but when he reached it he paused, bent forward his head, and listened.
+He was in the tangle of coarse grass that grew right up to the north wall
+of the cottage, and close to the angle which hid from him the sea-side
+and the cottage door. At first he heard nothing except the faint murmur
+of the sea upon the rocks. His stillness now was as complete as had been
+his previous activity, and in the one he was as assured as in the other.
+Some five minutes passed. Again and again, with a measured monotony, came
+to him the regular lisp of the waves. The grass rustled against his legs
+as the little wind of morning pushed its way through it gently, and a
+bird chirped above his head in the olive-trees and was answered by
+another bird. And just then, as if in reply to the voices of the birds,
+he heard the sound of human voices. They were distant and faint almost as
+the lisp of the sea, and were surely coming towards him from the sea.
+
+When Gaspare realized that the speakers were not in the cottage he crept
+round the angle of the wall, slipped across the open space that fronted
+the cottage door, and, gaining the trees, stood still in almost exactly
+the place where Maurice had stood when he watched Maddalena in the dawn.
+
+The voices sounded again and nearer. There was a little laugh in a girl's
+voice, then the dry twang of the plucked strings of a guitar, then
+silence. After a minute the guitar strings twanged again, and a girl's
+voice began to sing a peasant song, "Zampagnaro."
+
+At the end of the verse there was an imitation of the ceramella by the
+voice, humming, or rather whining, bouche fermee. As it ceased a man's
+voice said:
+
+"Ancora! Ancora!"
+
+The girl's voice began the imitation again, and the man's voice joined in
+grotesquely, exaggerating the imitation farcically and closing it with a
+boyish shout.
+
+In response, standing under the trees, Gaspare shouted. He had meant to
+keep silence; but the twang of the guitar, with its suggestion of a
+festa, the singing voices, the youthful laughter, and the final
+exclamation ringing out in the dawn, overcame the angry and suspicious
+spirit that had hitherto dominated him. The boy's imp of fun was up and
+dancing within him. He could not drive it out or lay it to rest.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+His voice died away, and was answered by a silence that seemed like a
+startled thing holding its breath.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+He called again, lustily, leaped out from the trees, and went running
+across the open space to the edge of the plateau by the sea. A tiny path
+wound steeply down from here to the rocks below, and on it, just under
+the concealing crest of the land, stood the padrone with Maddalena. Their
+hands were linked together, as if they had caught at each other sharply
+for sympathy or help. Their faces were tense and their lips parted. But
+as they saw Gaspare's light figure leaping over the hill edge, his
+dancing eyes fixed shrewdly, with a sort of boyish scolding, upon them,
+their hands fell apart, their faces relaxed.
+
+"Gasparino!" said Maurice. "It was you who called!"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+He came up to them. Maddalena's oval face had flushed, and she dropped
+the full lids over her black eyes as she said:
+
+"Buon giorno, Gaspare."
+
+"Buon giorno, Donna Maddalena."
+
+Then they stood there for a moment in silence. Maurice was the first to
+speak again.
+
+"But why did you come here?" he said. "How did you know?"
+
+Already the sparkle of merriment had dropped out of Gaspare's face as the
+feeling of jealousy, of not having been completely trusted, returned to
+his mind.
+
+"Did not the signore wish me to know?" he said, almost gruffly, with a
+sort of sullen violence. "I am sorry."
+
+Maurice touched the back of his hand, giving it a gentle, half-humorous
+slap.
+
+"Don't be an ass, Gaspare. But how could you guess where I had gone?"
+
+"Where did you go before, signore, when you could not sleep?"
+
+At this thrust Maurice imitated Maddalena and reddened slightly. It
+seemed to him as if he had been living under glass while he had fancied
+himself enclosed in rock that was impenetrable by human eyes. He tried to
+laugh away his slight confusion.
+
+"Gaspare, you are the most birbante boy in Sicily!" he said. "You are
+like a Mago Africano."
+
+"Signorino, you should trust me," returned the boy, sullenly.
+
+His own words seemed to move him, as if their sound revealed to him the
+whole of the injury that had been inflicted upon his amour propre, and
+suddenly angry tears started into his eyes.
+
+"I thought I was a servant of confidence" (un servitore di confidenza),
+he added, bitterly.
+
+Maurice was amazed at the depth of feeling thus abruptly shown to him.
+This was the first time he had been permitted to look for a moment deep
+down into that strange volcano, a young and passionate Sicilian heart. As
+he looked, swift and short as was his glance, his amazement died away.
+Narcissus saw himself in the stream. Maurice saw, or believed he saw, his
+heart's image, trembling perhaps and indistinct, far down in the passion
+of Gaspare. So could he have been with a padrone had fate made his
+situation in life a different one. So could he have felt had something
+been concealed from him.
+
+Maurice said nothing in reply. Maddalena was there. They walked in
+silence to the cottage door, and there, rather like a detected
+school-boy, he bade her good-bye, and set out through the trees with
+Gaspare.
+
+"That's not the way, is it?" Maurice said, presently, as the boy turned
+to the left.
+
+"How did you come, signore?"
+
+"I!"
+
+He hesitated. Then he saw the uselessness of striving to keep up a
+master's pose with this servant of the sea and of the hills.
+
+"I came by water," he said, smiling. "I swam, Gasparino."
+
+The boy answered the smile, and suddenly the tension between them was
+broken, and they were at their ease again.
+
+"I will show you another way, signore, if you are not afraid."
+
+Maurice laughed out gayly.
+
+"The way of the rocks?" he said.
+
+"Si, signore. But you must go barefooted and be as nimble as a goat."
+
+"Do you doubt me, Gasparino?"
+
+He looked at the boy hard, with a deliberately quizzing kindness, that
+was gay but asked forgiveness, too, and surely promised amendment.
+
+"I have never doubted my padrone."
+
+They said nothing more till they were at the wall of rock. Then Gaspare
+seemed struck by hesitation.
+
+"Perhaps--" he began. "You are not accustomed to the rocks, signore,
+and--"
+
+"Silenzio!" cried Maurice, bending down and pulling off his boots and
+stockings.
+
+"Do like this, signore!"
+
+Gaspare slung his boots and stockings round his neck. Maurice imitated
+him.
+
+"And now give me your hand--so--without pulling."
+
+"But you hadn't--"
+
+"Give me your hand, signore!"
+
+It was an order. Maurice obeyed it, feeling that in these matters Gaspare
+had the right to command.
+
+"Walk as I do, signore, and keep step with me."
+
+"Bene!"
+
+"And look before you. Don't look down at the sea."
+
+"Va bene."
+
+A moment, and they were across. Maurice blew out his breath.
+
+"By Jove!" he said, in English.
+
+He sat down on the grass, put his hand on his knees, and looked back at
+the rock and at the precipices.
+
+"I'm glad I can do that!" he said.
+
+Something within him was revelling, was dancing a tarantella as the sun
+came up, lifting its blood-red rim above the sea-line in the east. He
+looked over the trees.
+
+"Maddalena saw us!" he cried.
+
+He had caught sight of her among the olive-trees watching them, with her
+two hands held flat against her breast.
+
+"Addio, Maddalena!"
+
+The girl started, waved her hand, drew back, and disappeared.
+
+"I'm glad she saw us."
+
+Gaspare laughed, but said nothing. They put on their boots and stockings,
+and started briskly off towards Monte Amato. When they had crossed the
+road, and gained the winding path that led eventually into the ravine,
+Maurice said:
+
+"Well, Gaspare?"
+
+"Well, signorino?"
+
+"Have you forgiven me?"
+
+"It is not for a servant to forgive his padrone, signorino," said the
+boy, but rather proudly.
+
+Maurice feared that his sense of injury was returning, and continued,
+hastily:
+
+"It was like this, Gaspare. When you and Lucrezia had gone I felt so dull
+all alone, and I thought, 'every one is singing and dancing and laughing
+except me.'"
+
+"But I asked you to accompany us, signorino," Gaspare exclaimed,
+reproachfully.
+
+"Yes, I know, but--"
+
+"But you thought we did not want you. Well, then, you do not know us!"
+
+"Now, Gaspare, don't be angry again. Remember that the padrona has gone
+away and that I depend on you for everything."
+
+At the last words Gaspare's face, which had been lowering, brightened up
+a little. But he was not yet entirely appeased.
+
+"You have Maddalena," he said.
+
+"She is only a girl."
+
+"Oh, girls are very nice."
+
+"Don't be ridiculous, Gaspare. I hardly know Maddalena."
+
+Gaspare laughed; not rudely, but as a boy laughs who is sure he knows the
+world from the outer shell to inner kernel.
+
+"Oh, signore, why did you go down to the sea instead of coming to the
+festa?"
+
+Maurice did not answer at once. He was asking himself Gaspare's question.
+Why had he gone to the Sirens' Isle? Gaspare continued:
+
+"May I say what I think, signore? You know I am Sicilian, and I know the
+Sicilians."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Strangers should be careful what they do in my country."
+
+"Madonna! You call me a stranger?"
+
+It was Maurice's turn to be angry. He spoke with sudden heat. The idea
+that he was a stranger--a straniero--in Sicily seemed to him
+ridiculous--almost offensive.
+
+"Well, signore, you have only been here a little while. I was born here
+and have never been anywhere else."
+
+"It is true. Go on then."
+
+"The men of Sicily are not like the English or the Germans. They are
+jealous of their women. I have been told that in your country, on festa
+days, if a man likes a girl and she likes him he can take her for a walk.
+Is it true?"
+
+"Quite true."
+
+"He cannot walk with her here. He cannot even walk with her down the
+street of Marechiaro alone. It would be a shame."
+
+"But there is no harm in it."
+
+"Who knows? It is not our custom. We walk with our friends and the girls
+walk with their friends. If Salvatore, the father of Maddalena, knew--"
+
+He did not finish his sentence, but, with sudden and startling violence,
+made the gesture of drawing out a knife and thrusting it upward into the
+body of an adversary. Maurice stopped on the path. He felt as if he had
+seen a murder.
+
+"Ecco!" said Gaspare, calmly, dropping his hand, and staring into
+Maurice's face with his enormous eyes, which never fell before the gaze
+of another.
+
+"But--but--I mean no harm to Maddalena."
+
+"It does not matter."
+
+"But she did not tell me. She is ready to talk with me."
+
+"She is a silly girl. She is flattered to see a stranger. She does not
+think. Girls never think."
+
+He spoke with utter contempt:
+
+"Have you seen Salvatore, signore?"
+
+"No--yes."
+
+"You have seen him?"
+
+"Not to speak to. When I came down the cottage was shut up. I waited--"
+
+"You hid, signore?"
+
+Maurice's face flushed. An angry word rose to his lips, but he checked it
+and laughed, remembering that he had to deal with a boy, and that
+Gaspare was devoted to him.
+
+"Well, I waited among the trees--birbante!"
+
+"And you saw Salvatore?"
+
+"He came out and went down to the fishing."
+
+"Salvatore is a terrible man. He used to beat his wife Teresa."
+
+"P'f! Would you have me be afraid of him?"
+
+Maurice's blood was up. Even his sense of romance was excited. He felt
+that he was in the coils of an adventure, and his heart leaped, but not
+with fear.
+
+"Fear is not for men. But the padrona has left you with me because she
+trusts me and because I know Sicily."
+
+It seemed to Maurice that he was with an inflexible chaperon, against
+whose dominion it would be difficult, if not useless, to struggle. They
+were walking on again, and had come into the ravine. Water was slipping
+down among the rocks, between the twisted trunks of the olive-trees. Its
+soft sound, and the cool dimness in this secret place, made Maurice
+suddenly realize that he had passed the night without sleep, and that he
+would be glad to rest. It was not the moment for combat, and it was not
+unpleasant, after all--so he phrased it in his mind--to be looked after,
+thought for, educated in the etiquette of the Enchanted Isle by a son of
+its soil, with its wild passions and its firm repressions linked together
+in his heart.
+
+"Gasparino," he said, meekly. "I want you to look after me. But don't be
+unkind to me. I'm older than you, I know, but I feel awfully young here,
+and I do want to have a little fun without doing any harm to anybody, or
+getting any harm myself. One thing I promise you, that I'll always trust
+you and tell you what I'm up to. There! Have you quite forgiven me now?"
+
+Gaspare's face became radiant. He felt that he had done his duty, and
+that he was now properly respected by one whom he looked up to and of
+whom he was not merely the servant, but also the lawful guardian.
+
+They went up to the cottage singing in the morning sunshine.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Maurice lifted his head lazily from the hands that served it as a pillow,
+and called out, sleepily:
+
+"Che cosa c'e?"
+
+"Where are you, signorino?"
+
+"Down here under the oak-trees."
+
+He sank back again, and looked up at the section of deep-blue sky that
+was visible through the leaves. How he loved the blue, and gloried in the
+first strong heat that girdled Sicily to-day, and whispered to his happy
+body that summer was near, the true and fearless summer that comes to
+southern lands. Through all his veins there crept a subtle sense of
+well-being, as if every drop of his blood were drowsily rejoicing. Three
+days had passed, had glided by, three radiant nights, warm, still,
+luxurious. And with each his sense of the south had increased, and with
+each his consciousness of being nearer to the breast of Sicily. In those
+days and nights he had not looked into a book or glanced at a paper. What
+had he done? He scarcely knew. He had lived and felt about him the
+fingers of the sun touching him like a lover. And he had chattered idly
+to Gaspare about Sicilian things, always Sicilian things; about the fairs
+and the festivals, Capo d'Anno and Carnevale, martedi grasso with its
+_Tavulata_, the solemn family banquet at which all the relations assemble
+and eat in company, the feasts of the different saints, the peasant
+marriages and baptisms, the superstitions--Gaspare did not call them
+so--that are alive in Sicily, and that will surely live till Sicily is
+no more; the fear of the evil-eye and of spells, and the best means of
+warding them off, the "guaj di lu linu," the interpretation of dreams,
+the power of the Mafia, the legends of the brigands, and the vanished
+glory of Musolino. Gaspare talked without reserve to his padrone, as to
+another Sicilian, and Maurice was never weary of listening. All that was
+of Sicily caught his mind and heart, was full of meaning to him, and of
+irresistible fascination. He had heard the call of the blood once for all
+and had once for all responded to it.
+
+But the nights he had loved best. For then he slept under the stars. When
+ten o'clock struck he and Gaspare carried out one of the white beds onto
+the terrace, and he slipped into it and lay looking up at the clear sky,
+and at the dimness of the mountain flank, and at the still silhouettes of
+the trees, till sleep took him, while Gaspare, rolled up in a rug of many
+colors, snuggled up on the seat by the wall with his head on a cushion
+brought for him by the respectful Lucrezia. And they awoke at dawn to see
+the last star fade above the cone of Etna, and the first spears of the
+sun thrust up out of the stillness of the sea.
+
+"Signorino, ecco la posta!"
+
+And Gaspare came running down from the terrace, the wide brim of his
+white linen hat flapping round his sun-browned face.
+
+"I don't want it, Gaspare. I don't want anything."
+
+"But I think there's a letter from the signora!"
+
+"From Africa?"
+
+Maurice sat up and held out his hand.
+
+"Yes, it is from Kairouan. Sit down, Gaspare, and I'll tell you what the
+padrona says."
+
+Gaspare squatted on his haunches like an Oriental, not touching the
+ground with his body, and looked eagerly at the letter that had come
+across the sea. He adored his padrona, and was longing for news of her.
+Already he had begun to send her picture post-cards, laboriously written
+over. "Tanti saluti carissima Signora Pertruni, a rividici, e suno il suo
+servo fidelisimo per sempre--Martucci Gaspare. Adio! Adio! Ciao! Ciao!"
+What would she say? And what message would she send to him? His eyes
+sparkled with affectionate expectation.
+
+                                      "HOTEL DE FRANCE, KAIROUAN.
+
+     MY DEAREST,--I cannot write very much, for all my moments ought to
+     be given up to nursing Emile. Thank God, I arrived in time. Oh,
+     Maurice, when I saw him I can't tell you how thankful I was that I
+     had not hesitated to make the journey, that I had acted at once on
+     my first impulse to come here. And how I blessed God for having
+     given me an unselfish husband who trusted me completely, and who
+     could understand what true friendship between man and woman means,
+     and what one owes to a friend. You might so easily have
+     misunderstood, and you are so blessedly understanding. Thank you,
+     dearest, for seeing that it was right of me to go, and for thinking
+     of nothing but that. I feel so proud of you, and so proud to be
+     your wife. Well, I caught the train at Tunis mercifully, and got
+     here at evening. He is frightfully ill. I hardly recognized him.
+     But his mind is quite clear, though he suffers terribly. He was
+     poisoned by eating some tinned food, and peritonitis has set in. We
+     can't tell yet whether he will live or die. When he saw me come in
+     he gave me such a look of gratitude, although he was writhing with
+     pain, that I couldn't help crying. It made me feel so ashamed of
+     having had any hesitation in my heart about coming away from our
+     home and our happiness. And it was difficult to give it all up, to
+     come out of paradise. That last night I felt as if I simply
+     couldn't leave you, my darling. But I'm glad and thankful I've done
+     it. I have to do everything for him. The doctor's rather an ass,
+     very French and excitable, but he does his best. But I have to see
+     to everything, and be always there to put on the poultices and the
+     ice, and--poor fellow, he does suffer so, but he's awfully brave
+     and determined to live. He says he will live if it's only to prove
+     that I came in time to save him. And yet, when I look at him, I
+     feel as if--but I won't give up hope. The heat here is terrible,
+     and tries him very much now he is so desperately ill, and the
+     flies--but I don't want to bother you with my troubles. They're not
+     very great--only one. Do you guess what that is? I scarcely dare to
+     think of Sicily. Whenever I do I feel such a horrible ache in my
+     heart. It seems to me as if I had not seen your face or touched
+     your hand for centuries, and sometimes--and that's the worst of
+     all--as if I never should again, as if our time together and our
+     love were a beautiful dream, and God would never allow me to dream
+     it again. That's a little morbid, I know, but I think it's always
+     like that with a great happiness, a happiness that is quite
+     complete. It seems almost a miracle to have had it even for a
+     moment, and one can scarcely believe that one will be allowed to
+     have it again. But, please God, we will. We'll sit on the terrace
+     again together, and see the stars come out, and--The doctor's come
+     and I must stop. I'll write again almost directly. Good-night, my
+     dearest. Buon riposo. Do you remember when you first heard that?
+     Somehow, since then I always connect the words with you. I won't
+     send my love, because it's all in Sicily with you. I'll send it
+     instead to Gaspare. Tell him I feel happy that he is with the
+     padrone, because I know how faithful and devoted he is. Tanti
+     saluti a Lucrezia. Oh, Maurice, pray that I may soon be back. You
+     do want me, don't you?
+                                                     HERMIONE."
+
+Maurice looked up from the letter and met Gaspare's questioning eyes.
+
+"There's something for you," he said.
+
+And he read in Italian Hermione's message. Gaspare beamed with pride and
+pleasure.
+
+"And the sick signore?" he asked. "Is he better?"
+
+Maurice explained how things were.
+
+"The signora is longing to come back to us," he said.
+
+"Of course she is," said Gaspare, calmly.
+
+Then suddenly he jumped up.
+
+"Signorino," he said. "I am going to write a letter to the signora. She
+will like to have a letter from me. She will think she is in Sicily."
+
+"And when you have finished, I will write," said Maurice.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+And Gaspare ran off up the hill towards the cottage, leaving his master
+alone.
+
+Maurice began to read the letter again, slowly. It made him feel almost
+as if he were with Hermione. He seemed to see her as he read, and he
+smiled. How good she was and true, and how enthusiastic! When he had
+finished the second reading of the letter he laid it down, and put his
+hands behind his head again, and looked up at the quivering blue. Then he
+thought of Artois. He remembered his tall figure, his robust limbs, his
+handsome, powerful face. It was strange to think that he was desperately
+ill, perhaps dying. Death--what must that be like? How deep the blue
+looked, as if there were thousands of miles of it, as if it stretched on
+and on forever! Artois, perhaps, was dying, but he felt as if he could
+never die, never even be ill. He stretched his body on the warm ground.
+The blue seemed to deny the fact of death. He tried to imagine Artois in
+bed in the heat of Africa, with the flies buzzing round him. Then he
+looked again at the letter, and reread that part in which Hermione wrote
+of her duties as sick-nurse.
+
+"I have to see to everything, and be always there to put on the poultices
+and the ice."
+
+He read those words again and again, and once more he was conscious of a
+stirring of anger, of revolt, such as he had felt on the night after
+Hermione's departure when he was alone on the terrace. She was his wife,
+his woman. What right had she to be tending another man? His imagination
+began to work quickly now, and he frowned as he looked up at the blue. He
+forgot all the rest of Hermione's letter, all her love of him and her
+longing to be back in Sicily with him, and thought only of her friendship
+for Artois, of her ministrations to Artois. And something within him
+sickened at the thought of the intimacy between patient and nurse, raged
+against it, till he felt revengeful. The wild unreasonableness of his
+feeling did not occur to him now. He hated that his wife should be
+performing these offices for Artois; he hated that she had chosen to go
+to him, that she had considered it to be her duty to go.
+
+Had it been only a sense of duty that had called her to Africa?
+
+When he asked himself this question he could not hesitate what answer to
+give. Even this new jealousy, this jealousy of the Sicilian within him,
+could not trick him into the belief that Hermione had wanted to leave
+him.
+
+Yet his feeling of bitterness, of being wronged, persisted and grew.
+
+When, after a very long time, Gaspare came to show him a letter written
+in large, round hand, he was still hot with the sense of injury. And a
+new question was beginning to torment him. What must Artois think?
+
+"Aren't you going to write, signorino?" asked Gaspare, when Maurice had
+read his letter and approved it.
+
+"I?" he said.
+
+He saw an expression of surprise on Gaspare's face.
+
+"Yes, of course. I'll write now. Help me up. I feel so lazy!"
+
+Gaspare seized his hands and pulled, laughing. Maurice stood up and
+stretched.
+
+"You are more lazy than I, signore," said Gaspare. "Shall I write for
+you, too?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+He spoke abstractedly.
+
+"Don't you know what to say?"
+
+Maurice looked at him swiftly. The boy had divined the truth. In his
+present mood it would be difficult for him to write to Hermione. Still,
+he must do it. He went up to the cottage and sat down at the
+writing-table with Hermione's letter beside him.
+
+He read it again carefully, then began to write. Now he was faintly aware
+of the unreason of his previous mood and quite resolved not to express
+it, but while he was writing of his every-day life in Sicily a vision of
+the sick-room in Africa came before him again. He saw his wife shut in
+with Artois, tending him. It was night, warm and dark. The sick man was
+hot with fever, and Hermione bent over him and laid her cool hand on his
+forehead.
+
+Abruptly Maurice finished his letter and thrust it into an envelope.
+
+"Here, Gaspare!" he said. "Take the donkey and ride down with these to
+the post."
+
+"How quick you have been, signore! I believe my letter to the signora is
+longer than yours."
+
+"Perhaps it is. I don't know. Off with you!"
+
+When Gaspare was gone, Maurice felt restless, almost as he had felt on
+the night when he had been left alone on the terrace. Then he had been
+companioned by a sensation of desertion, and had longed to break out into
+some new life, to take an ally against the secret enemy who was attacking
+him. He had wanted to have his Emile Artois as Hermione had hers. That
+was the truth of the matter. And his want had led him down to the sea.
+And now again he looked towards the sea, and again there was a call from
+it that summoned him.
+
+He had not seen Maddalena since Gaspare came to seek him in the Sirens'
+Isle. He had scarcely wanted to see her. The days had glided by in the
+company of Gaspare, and no moment of them had been heavy or had lagged
+upon its way.
+
+But now he heard again the call from the sea.
+
+Hermione was with her friend. Why should not he have his? But he did not
+go down the path to the ravine, for he thought of Gaspare. He had tricked
+him once, while he slept in the cave, and once Gaspare had tracked him to
+the sirens' house. They had spoken of the matter of Maddalena. He knew
+Gaspare. If he went off now to see Maddalena the boy would think that the
+sending him to the post was a pretext, that he had been deliberately got
+out of the way. Such a crime could never be forgiven. Maurice knew enough
+about the Sicilian character to be fully aware of that. And what had he
+to hide? Nothing. He must wait for Gaspare, and then he could set out for
+the sea.
+
+It seemed to him a long time before he saw Tito, the donkey, tripping
+among the stones, and heard Gaspare's voice hailing him from below. He
+was impatient to be off, and he shouted out:
+
+"Presto, Gaspare, presto!"
+
+He saw the boy's arm swing as he tapped Tito behind with his switch, and
+the donkey's legs moving in a canter.
+
+"What is it, signorino? Has anything happened?"
+
+"No. But--Gaspare, I'm going down to the sea."
+
+"To bathe?"
+
+"I may bathe. I'm not sure. It depends upon how I go."
+
+"You are going to the Casa delle Sirene?"
+
+Maurice nodded.
+
+"I didn't care to go off while you were away."
+
+"Do you wish me to come with you, signorino?"
+
+The boy's great eyes were searching him, yet he did not feel
+uncomfortable, although he wished to stand well with Gaspare. They were
+near akin, although different in rank and education. Between their minds
+there was a freemasonry of the south.
+
+"Do you want to come?" he said.
+
+"It's as you like, signore."
+
+He was silent for a moment; then he added:
+
+"Salvatore might be there now. Do you want him to see you?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+A project began to form in his mind. If he took Gaspare with him they
+might go to the cottage more naturally. Gaspare knew Salvatore and could
+introduce him, could say--well, that he wanted sometimes to go out
+fishing and would take Salvatore's boat. Salvatore would see a prospect
+of money. And he--Maurice--did want to go out fishing. Suddenly he knew
+it. His spirits rose and he clapped Gaspare on the back.
+
+"Of course I do. I want to know Salvatore. Come along. We'll take his
+boat one day and go out fishing."
+
+Gaspare's grave face relaxed in a sly smile.
+
+"Signorino!" he said, shaking his hand to and fro close to his nose.
+"Birbante!"
+
+There was a world of meaning in his voice. Maurice laughed joyously. He
+began to feel like an ingenious school-boy who was going to have a lark.
+There was neither thought of evil nor even a secret stirring of desire
+for it in him.
+
+"A rivederci, Lucrezia!" he cried.
+
+And they set off.
+
+When they were not far from the sea, Gaspare said:
+
+"Signorino, why do you like to come here? What is the good of it?"
+
+They had been walking in silence. Evidently these questions were the
+result of a process of thought which had been going on in the boy's mind.
+
+"The good!" said Maurice. "What is the harm?"
+
+"Well, here in Sicily, when a man goes to see a girl it is because he
+wants to love her."
+
+"In England it is different, Gaspare. In England men and women can be
+friends. Why not?"
+
+"You want just to be a friend of Maddalena?"
+
+"Of course. I like to talk to the people. I want to understand them. Why
+shouldn't I be friends with Maddalena as--as I am with Lucrezia?"
+
+"Oh, Lucrezia is your servant."
+
+"It's all the same."
+
+"But perhaps Maddalena doesn't know. We are Sicilians here, signore."
+
+"What do you mean? That Maddalena might--nonsense, Gaspare!"
+
+There was a sound as of sudden pleasure, even sudden triumph, in his
+voice.
+
+"Are you sure you understand our girls, signore?"
+
+"If Maddalena does like me there's no harm in it. She knows who I am now.
+She knows I--she knows there is the signora."
+
+"Si, signore. There is the signora. She is in Africa, but she is coming
+back."
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"When the sick signore gets well?"
+
+Maurice said nothing. He felt sure Gaspare was wondering again, wondering
+that Hermione was in Africa.
+
+"I cannot understand how it is in England," continued the boy. "Here it
+is all quite different."
+
+Again jealousy stirred in Maurice and a sensation almost of shame. For a
+moment he felt like a Sicilian husband at whom his neighbors point the
+two fingers of scorn, and he said something in his wrath which was
+unworthy.
+
+"You see how it is," he said. "If the signora can go to Africa to see her
+friend, I can come down here to see mine. That is how it is with the
+English."
+
+He did not even try to keep the jealousy out of his voice, his manner.
+Gaspare leaped to it.
+
+"You did not like the signora to go to Africa!"
+
+"Oh, she will come back. It's all right," Maurice answered, hastily.
+"But, while she is there, it would be absurd if I might not speak to any
+one."
+
+Gaspare's burden of doubt, perhaps laid on his young shoulders by his
+loyalty to his padrona, was evidently lightened.
+
+"I see, signore," he said. "You can each have a friend. But have you
+explained to Maddalena?"
+
+"If you think it necessary, I will explain."
+
+"It would be better, because she is Sicilian and she must think you love
+her."
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+The boy looked at him keenly and smiled.
+
+"You would like her to think that?"
+
+Maurice denied it vigorously, but Gaspare only shook his head and said:
+
+"I know, I know. Girls are nicest when they think that, because they are
+pleased and they want us to go on. You think I see nothing, signorino,
+but I saw it all in Maddalena's face. Per Dio!"
+
+And he laughed aloud, with the delight of a boy who has discovered
+something, and feels that he is clever and a man. And Maurice laughed
+too, not without a pride that was joyous. The heart of his youth, the
+wild heart, bounded within him, and the glory of the sun, and the
+passionate blue of the sea seemed suddenly deeper, more intense, more
+sympathetic, as if they felt with him, as if they knew the rapture of
+youth, as if they were created to call it forth, to condone its
+carelessness, to urge it to some almost fierce fulfilment.
+
+"Salvatore is there, signorino."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I saw the smoke from his pipe. Look, there it is again!"
+
+A tiny trail of smoke curled up; and faded in the blue.
+
+"I will go first because of Maddalena. Girls are silly. If I do this at
+her she will understand. If not she may show her father you have been
+here before."
+
+He closed one eye in a large and expressive wink.
+
+"Birbante!"
+
+"It is good to be birbante sometimes."
+
+He went out from the trees and Maurice heard his voice, then a man's,
+then Maddalena's. He waited where he was till he heard Gaspare say:
+
+"The padrone is just behind. Signorino, where are you?"
+
+"Here!" he answered, coming into the open with a careless air.
+
+Before the cottage door in the sunshine a great fishing-net was drying,
+fastened to two wooden stakes. Near it stood Salvatore, dressed in a
+dark-blue jersey, with a soft black hat tilted over his left ear, above
+which was stuck a yellow flower. Maddalena was in the doorway looking
+very demure. It was evident that the wink of Gaspare had been seen and
+comprehended. She stole a glance at Maurice but did not move. Her father
+took off his hat with an almost wildly polite gesture, and said, in a
+loud voice:
+
+"Buona sera, signore."
+
+"Buona sera," replied Maurice, holding out his hand.
+
+Salvatore took it in a large grasp.
+
+"You are the signore who lives up on Monte Amato with the English lady?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I know. She has gone to Africa."
+
+He stared at Maurice while he spoke, with small, twinkling eyes, round
+which was a minute and intricate web of wrinkles, and again Maurice felt
+almost--or was it quite?--ashamed. What were these Sicilians thinking of
+him?
+
+"The signora will be back almost directly," he said. "Is this your
+daughter?"
+
+"Yes, Maddalena. Bring a chair for the signore, Maddalena."
+
+Maddalena obeyed. There was a slight flush on her face and she did not
+look at Maurice. Gaspare stood pulling gently at the stretched-out net,
+and smiling. That he enjoyed the mild deceit of the situation was
+evident. Maurice, too, felt amused and quite at his ease now. His
+sensation of shame had fleeted away, leaving only a conviction that
+Hermione's absence gave him a right to snatch all the pleasure he could
+from the hands of the passing hour.
+
+He drew out his cigar-case and offered it to Salvatore.
+
+"One day I want to come fishing with you if you'll take me," he said.
+
+Salvatore looked eager. A prospect of money floated before him:
+
+"I can show you fine sport, signore," he answered, taking one of the long
+Havanas and examining it with almost voluptuous interest as he turned it
+round and round in his salty, brown fingers. "But you should come out at
+dawn, and it is far from the mountain to the sea."
+
+"Couldn't I sleep here, so as to be ready?"
+
+He stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking at her feet, and twisting
+the front of her short dress, but her lips were twitching with a smile
+which she tried to repress.
+
+"Couldn't I sleep here to-night?" he added, boldly.
+
+Salvatore looked more eager. He loved money almost as an Arab loves it,
+with anxious greed. Doubtless Arab blood ran in his veins. It was easy to
+see from whom Maddalena had inherited her Eastern appearance. She
+reproduced, on a diminished scale, her father's outline of face, but that
+which was gentle, mysterious, and alluring in her, in him was informed
+with a rugged wildness. There was something bird-like and predatory in
+his boldly curving nose with its narrow nostrils, in his hard-lipped
+mouth, full of splendid teeth, in his sharp and pushing chin. His whole
+body, wide-shouldered and deep-chested, as befitted a man of the sea,
+looked savage and fierce, but full of an intensity of manhood that was
+striking, and his gestures and movements, the glance of his penetrating
+eyes, the turn of his well-poised head, revealed a primitive and
+passionate nature, a nature with something of the dagger in it, steely,
+sharp, and deadly.
+
+"But, signore, our home is very poor. Look, signore!"
+
+A turkey strutted out through the doorway, elongating its neck and
+looking nervously intent.
+
+"Ps--sh--sh--sh!"
+
+He shooed it away, furiously waving his arms.
+
+"And what could you eat? There is only bread and wine."
+
+"And the yellow cheese!" said Maurice.
+
+"The--?" Salvatore looked sharply interrogative.
+
+"I mean, there is always cheese, isn't there, in Sicily, cheese and
+macaroni? But if there isn't, it's all right. Anything will do for me,
+and I'll buy all the fish we take from you, and Maddalena here shall cook
+it for us when we come back from the sea. Will you, Maddalena?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The answer came in a very small voice.
+
+"The signore is too good."
+
+Salvatore was looking openly voracious now.
+
+"I can sleep on the floor."
+
+"No, signore. We have beds, we have two fine beds. Come in and see."
+
+With not a little pride he led Maurice into the cottage, and showed him
+the bed on which he had already slept.
+
+"That will be for the signore, Gaspare."
+
+"Si--e molto bello."
+
+"Maddalena and I--we will sleep in the outer room."
+
+"And I, Salvatore?" demanded the boy.
+
+"You! Do you stay too?"
+
+"Of course. Don't I stay, signore?"
+
+"Yes, if Lucrezia won't be frightened."
+
+"It does not matter if she is. When we do not come back she will keep
+Guglielmo, the contadino."
+
+"Of course you must stay. You can sleep with me. And to-night we'll play
+cards and sing and dance. Have you got any cards, Salvatore?"
+
+"Si, signore. They are dirty, but--"
+
+"That's all right. And we'll sit outside and tell stories, stories of
+brigands and the sea. Salvatore, when you know me, you'll know I'm a true
+Sicilian."
+
+He grasped Salvatore's hand, but he looked at Maddalena.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+Night had come to the Sirens' Isle--a night that was warm, gentle, and
+caressing. In the cottage two candles were lit, and the wick was burning
+in the glass before the Madonna. Outside the cottage door, on the flat
+bit of ground that faced the wide sea, Salvatore and his daughter,
+Maurice and Gaspare, were seated round the table finishing their simple
+meal, for which Salvatore had many times apologized. Their merry voices,
+their hearty laughter rang out in the darkness, and below the sea made
+answer, murmuring against the rocks.
+
+At the same moment in an Arab house Hermione bent over a sick man,
+praying against death, whose footsteps she seemed already to hear coming
+into the room and approaching the bed on which he tossed, white with
+agony. And when he was quiet for a little and ceased from moving, she sat
+with her hand on his and thought of Sicily, and pictured her husband
+alone under the stars upon the terrace before the priest's house, and
+imagined him thinking of her. The dry leaves of a palm-tree under the
+window of the room creaked in the light wind that blew over the flats,
+and she strove to hear the delicate rustling of the leaves of
+olive-trees.
+
+Salvatore had little food to offer his guests, only bread, cheese, and
+small, black olives; but there was plenty of good red wine, and when the
+time of brindisi was come Salvatore and Gaspare called for health after
+health, and rivalled each other in wild poetic efforts, improvising
+extravagant compliments to Maurice, to the absent signora, to Maddalena,
+and even to themselves. And with each toast the wine went down till
+Maurice called a halt.
+
+"I am a real Sicilian," he said. "But if I drink any more I shall be
+under the table. Get out the cards, Salvatore. Sette e mezzo, and I'll
+put down the stakes. No one to go above twenty-five centesimi, with fifty
+for the doubling. Gaspare's sure to win. He always does. And I've just
+one cigar apiece. There's no wind. Bring out the candles and let's play
+out here."
+
+Gaspare ran for the candles while Salvatore got the cards, well-thumbed
+and dirty. Maddalena's long eyes were dancing. Such a festa as this was
+rare in her life, for, dwelling far from the village, she seldom went to
+any dance or festivity. Her blood was warm with the wine and with joy,
+and the youth in her seemed to flow like the sea in a flood-tide.
+Scarcely ever before had she seen her harsh father so riotously gay, so
+easy with a stranger, and she knew in her heart that this was her
+festival. Maurice's merry and ardent eyes told her that, and Gaspare's
+smiling glances of boyish understanding. She felt excited, almost
+light-headed, childishly proud of herself. If only some of the girls of
+Marechiaro could see, could know!
+
+When the cards were thrown upon the table, and Maurice had dealt out a
+lira to each one of the players as stakes, and cried, "Maddalena and I'll
+share against you, Salvatore, and Gaspare!" she felt that she had nothing
+more to wish for, that she was perfectly happy. But she was happier still
+when, after a series of games, Maurice pushed back his chair and said:
+
+"I've had enough. Salvatore, you are like Gaspare, you have the devil's
+luck. Together you can't be beaten. But now you play against each other
+and let's see who wins. I'll put down twenty-five lire. Play till one of
+you's won every soldo of it. Play all night if you like."
+
+And he counted out the little paper notes on the table, giving two to
+Salvatore and two to Gaspare, and putting one under a candlestick.
+
+"I'll keep the score," he added, pulling out a pencil and a sheet of
+paper. "No play higher than fifty, with a lira when one of you makes
+'sette e mezzo' with under four cards."
+
+"Per Dio!" cried Gaspare, flushed with excitement. "Avanti, Salvatore!"
+
+"Avanti, Avanti!" cried Salvatore, in answer, pulling his chair close up
+to the table, and leaning forward, looking like a handsome bird of prey
+in the faint candlelight.
+
+They cut for deal and began to play, while Maddalena and Maurice watched.
+
+When Sicilians gamble they forget everything but the game and the money
+which it brings to them or takes from them. Salvatore and Gaspare were at
+once passionately intent on their cards, and as the night drew on and
+fortune favored first one and then the other, they lost all thought of
+everything except the twenty-five lire which were at stake. When
+Maddalena slipped away into the darkness they did not notice her
+departure, and when Maurice laid down the paper on which he had tried to
+keep the score, and followed her, they were indifferent. They needed no
+score-keeper, for they had Sicilian memories for money matters. Over the
+table they leaned, the two candles, now burning low, illuminating their
+intense faces, their violent eyes, their brown hands that dealt and
+gathered up the cards, and held them warily, alert for the cheating that
+in Sicily, when possible, is ever part of the game.
+
+"Carta da cinquanta!"
+
+They had forgotten Maurice's limit for the stakes.
+
+"Carta da cento!"
+
+Their voices died away from Maurice's ears as he stole through the
+darkness seeking Maddalena.
+
+Where had she gone, and why? The last question he could surely answer,
+for as she stole past him silently, her long, mysterious eyes, that
+seemed to hold in their depths some enigma of the East, had rested on his
+with a glance that was an invitation. They had not boldly summoned him.
+They had lured him, as an echo might, pathetic in its thrilling frailty.
+And now, as he walked softly over the dry grass, he thought of those eyes
+as he had first seen them in the pale light that had preceded the dawn.
+Then they had been full of curiosity, like a young animal's. Now surely
+they were changed. Once they had asked a question. They delivered a
+summons to-night. What was in them to-night? The mystery of young
+maidenhood, southern, sunlit, on the threshold of experience, waking to
+curious knowledge, to a definite consciousness of the meaning of its
+dreams, of the truth of its desires.
+
+When he was out of hearing of the card-players Maurice stood still. He
+felt the breath of the sea on his face. He heard the murmur of the sea
+everywhere around him, a murmur that in its level monotony excited him,
+thrilled him, as the level monotony of desert music excites the African
+in the still places of the sand. His pulses were beating, and there was
+an almost savage light in his eyes. Something in the atmosphere of the
+sea-bound retreat made him feel emancipated, as if he had stepped out of
+the prison of civilized life into a larger, more thoughtless existence,
+an existence for which his inner nature fitted him, for which he had
+surely been meant all these years that he had lived, unconscious of what
+he really was and of what he really needed.
+
+"How happy I could have been as a Sicilian fisherman!" he thought. "How
+happy I could be now!"
+
+"St! St!"
+
+He looked round quickly.
+
+"St! St!"
+
+It must be Maddalena, but where was she? He moved forward till he was at
+the edge of the land where the tiny path wound steeply downward to the
+sea. There she was standing with her face turned in his direction, and
+her lips opened to repeat the little summoning sound.
+
+"How did you know I was there?" he said, whispering, as he joined her.
+"Did you hear me come?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"Then--"
+
+"Signorino, I felt that you were there."
+
+He smiled. It pleased him to think that he threw out something, some
+invisible thread, perhaps, that reached her and told her of his nearness.
+Such communication made sympathy. He did not say it to himself, but his
+sensation to-night was that everything was in sympathy with him, the
+night with its stars, the sea with its airs and voices, Maddalena with
+her long eyes and her brown hands, and her knowledge of his presence when
+she did not see or hear him.
+
+"Let us go down to the sea," he said.
+
+He longed to be nearer to that low and level sound that moved and excited
+him in the night.
+
+"Father's boat is there," she said. "It is so calm to-night that he did
+not bring it round into the bay."
+
+"If we go out in it for a minute, will he mind?"
+
+A sly look came into her face.
+
+"He will not know," she said. "With all that money Gaspare and he will
+play till dawn. Per Dio, signore, you are birbante!"
+
+She gave a little low laugh.
+
+"So you think I--"
+
+He stopped. What need was there to go on? She had read him and was openly
+rejoicing in what she thought his slyness.
+
+"And my father," she added, "is a fox of the sea, signore. Ask Gaspare if
+there is another who is like him. You will see! When they stop playing at
+dawn the twenty-five lire will be in his pocket!"
+
+She spoke with pride.
+
+"But Gaspare is so lucky," said Maurice.
+
+"Gaspare is only a boy. How can he cheat better than my father?"
+
+"They cheat, then!"
+
+"Of course, when they can. Why not, madonna!"
+
+Maurice burst out laughing.
+
+"And you call me birbante!" he said.
+
+"To know what my father loves best! Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+She shook her out-stretched forefinger to and fro near her nose, smiling,
+with her head a little on one side like a crafty child.
+
+"But why, Maddalena--why should I wish your father to play cards till the
+dawn. Tell me that! Why should not I wish him, all of us, to go to bed?"
+
+"You are not sleepy, signorino!"
+
+"I shall be in the morning when it's time to fish."
+
+"Then perhaps you will not fish."
+
+"But I must. That is why I have stayed here to-night, to be ready to go
+to sea in the morning."
+
+She said nothing, only smiled again. He felt a longing to shake her in
+joke. She was such a child now. And yet a few minutes ago her dark eyes
+had lured him, and he had felt almost as if in seeking her he sought a
+mystery.
+
+"Don't you believe me?" he asked.
+
+But she only answered, with her little gesture of smiling rebuke:
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+He did not protest, for now they were down by the sea, and saw the
+fishing-boats swaying gently on the water.
+
+"Get in Maddalena. I will row."
+
+He untied the rope, while she stepped lightly in, then he pushed the boat
+off, jumping in himself from the rocks.
+
+"You are like a fisherman, signore," said Maddalena.
+
+He smiled and drew the great bladed oars slowly through the calm water,
+leaning towards her with each stroke and looking into her eyes.
+
+"I wish I were really a fisherman," he said, "like your father!"
+
+"Why, signore?" she asked, in astonishment.
+
+"Because it's a free life, because it's a life I should love."
+
+She still looked at him with surprise.
+
+"But a fisherman has few soldi, signorino."
+
+"Maddalena," he said, letting the oars drift in the water, "there's only
+one good thing in the world, and that is to be free in a life that is
+natural to one."
+
+He drew up his feet onto the wooden bench and clasped his hands round his
+knees, and sat thus, looking at her while she faced him in the stern of
+the boat. He had not turned the boat round. So Maddalena had her face
+towards the land, while his was set towards the open sea.
+
+"It isn't having many soldi that makes happiness," he went on. "Gaspare
+thinks it is, and Lucrezia, and I dare say your father would--"
+
+"Oh yes, signore! In Sicily we all think so!"
+
+"And so they do in England. But it isn't true."
+
+"But if you have many soldi you can do anything."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"No you can't. I have plenty of soldi, but I can't always live here, I
+can't always live as I do now. Some day I shall have to go away from
+Sicily--I shall have to go back and live in London."
+
+As he said the last words he seemed to see London rise up before him in
+the night, with shadowy domes and towers and chimneys; he seemed to hear
+through the exquisite silence of night upon the sea the mutter of its
+many voices.
+
+"It's beastly there! It's beastly!"
+
+And he set his teeth almost viciously.
+
+"Why must you go, then, signorino?"
+
+"Why? Oh, I have work to do."
+
+"But if you are rich why must you work?"
+
+"Well--I--I can't explain in Italian. But my father expects me to."
+
+"To get more rich?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose."
+
+"But if you are rich why cannot you live as you please?"
+
+"I don't know, Maddalena. But the rich scarcely ever live really as they
+please, I think. Their soldi won't let them, perhaps."
+
+"I don't understand, signore."
+
+"Well, a man must do something, must get on, and if I lived always here I
+should do nothing but enjoy myself."
+
+He was silent for a minute. Then he said:
+
+"And that's all I want to do, just to enjoy myself here in the sun."
+
+"Are you happy here, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, tremendously happy."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why--because it's Sicily here! Aren't you happy?"
+
+"I don't know, signorino."
+
+She said it with simplicity and looked at him almost as if she were
+inquiring of him whether she were happy or not. That look tempted him.
+
+"Don't you know whether you are happy to-night?" he asked, putting an
+emphasis on the last word, and looking at her more steadily, almost
+cruelly.
+
+"Oh, to-night--it is a festa."
+
+"A festa? Why?"
+
+"Why? Because it is different from other nights. On other nights I am
+alone with my father."
+
+"And to-night you are alone with me. Does that make it a festa?"
+
+She looked down.
+
+"I don't know, signorino."
+
+The childish merriment and slyness had gone out of her now, and there was
+a softness almost of sentimentality in her attitude, as she drooped her
+head and moved one hand to and fro on the gunwale of the boat, touching
+the wood, now here, now there, as if she were picking up something and
+dropping it gently into the sea.
+
+Suddenly Maurice wondered about Maddalena. He wondered whether she had
+ever had a Sicilian lover, whether she had one now.
+
+"You are not 'promised,' are you, Maddalena?" he asked, leaning a little
+nearer to her. He saw the red come into her brown skin. She shook her
+head without looking up or speaking.
+
+"I wonder why," he said. "I think--I think there must be men who want
+you."
+
+She slightly raised her head.
+
+"Oh yes, there are, signore. But--but I must wait till my father chooses
+one."
+
+"Your father will choose the man who is to be your husband?"
+
+"Of course, signore."
+
+"But perhaps you won't like him."
+
+"Oh, I shall have to like him, signore."
+
+She did not speak with any bitterness or sarcasm, but with perfect
+simplicity. A feeling of pity that was certainly not Sicilian but that
+came from the English blood in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena
+looked so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so ready to be
+cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with the ardor that is the tender
+cruelty of passion, that her childlike submission to the Sicilian code
+woke in him an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some
+hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his
+fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make her toil
+till her beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled
+withered, sun-dried hag, while she was yet young in years.
+
+"I wish," he said--"I wish, when you have to marry, I could choose your
+husband, Maddalena."
+
+She lifted her head quite up and regarded him with wonder.
+
+"You, signorino! Why?"
+
+"Because I would choose a man who would be very good to you, who would
+love you and work for you and always think of you, and never look at
+another woman. That is how your husband should be."
+
+She looked more wondering.
+
+"Are you like that, then, signore?" she asked. "With the signora?"
+
+Maurice unclasped his hands from his knees, and dropped his feet down
+from the bench.
+
+"I!" he said, in a voice that had changed. "Oh--yes--I don't know."
+
+He took the oars again and began to row farther out to sea.
+
+"I was talking about you," he said, almost roughly.
+
+"I have never seen your signora," said Maddalena. "What is she like?"
+Maurice saw Hermione before him in the night, tall, flat, with her long
+arms, her rugged, intelligent face, her enthusiastic brown eyes.
+
+"Is she pretty?" continued Maddalena. "Is she as young as I am?"
+
+"She is good, Maddalena," Maurice answered.
+
+"Is she santa?"
+
+"I don't mean that. But she is good to every one."
+
+"But is she pretty, too?" she persisted. "And young?"
+
+"She is not at all old. Some day you shall see--"
+
+He checked himself. He had been going to say, "Some day you shall see
+her."
+
+"And she is very clever," he said, after a moment.
+
+"Clever?" said Maddalena, evidently not understanding what he meant.
+
+"She can understand many things and she has read many books."
+
+"But what is the good of that? Why should a girl read many books?"
+
+"She is not a girl."
+
+"Not a girl!"
+
+She looked at him with amazed eyes and her voice was full of amazement.
+
+"How old are you, signorino?" she asked.
+
+"How old do you think?"
+
+She considered him carefully for a long time.
+
+"Old enough to make the visit," she said, at length.
+
+"The visit?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What? Oh, do you mean to be a soldier?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"That would be twenty, wouldn't it?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I am older than that. I am twenty-four."
+
+"Truly?"
+
+"Truly."
+
+"And is the signora twenty-four, too?"
+
+"Maddalena!" Maurice exclaimed, with a sudden impatience that was almost
+fierce. "Why do you keep on talking about the signora to-night? This is
+your festa. The signora is in Africa, a long way off--there--across the
+sea." He stretched out his arm, and pointed towards the wide waters above
+which the stars were watching. "When she comes back you can see her, if
+you wish--but now--"
+
+"When is she coming back?" asked the girl.
+
+There was an odd pertinacity in her character, almost an obstinacy,
+despite her young softness and gentleness.
+
+"I don't know," Maurice said, with difficulty controlling his gathering
+impatience.
+
+"Why did she go away?"
+
+"To nurse some one who is ill."
+
+"She went all alone across the sea?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Maddalena turned and looked into the dimness of the sea with a sort of
+awe.
+
+"I should be afraid," she said, after a pause.
+
+And she shivered slightly.
+
+Maurice had let go the oars again. He felt a longing to put his arm round
+her when he saw her shiver. The night created many longings in him, a
+confusion of longings, of which he was just becoming aware.
+
+"You are a child," he said, "and have never been away from your 'paese.'"
+
+"Yes, I have."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I have been to the fair of San Felice."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Oh--San Felice! And did you go in the train?"
+
+"Oh no, signore. I went on a donkey. It was last year, in June. It was
+beautiful. There were women there in blue silk dresses with ear-rings as
+long as that"--she measured their length in the air with her brown
+fingers--"and there was a boy from Napoli, a real Napolitano, who sang
+and danced as we do not dance here. I was very happy that day. And I was
+given an image of Sant' Abbondio."
+
+She looked at him with a sort of dignity, as if expecting him to be
+impressed.
+
+"Carissima!" he whispered, almost under his breath.
+
+Her little air of pride, as of a travelled person, enchanted him, even
+touched him, he scarcely knew why, as he had never been enchanted or
+touched by any London beauty.
+
+"I wish I had been at the fair with you. I would have given you--"
+
+"What, signorino?" she interrupted, eagerly.
+
+"A blue silk dress and a pair of ear-rings longer--much longer--than
+those women wore."
+
+"Really, signorino? Really?"
+
+"Really and truly! Do you doubt me?"
+
+"No."
+
+She sighed.
+
+"How I wish you had been there! But this year--"
+
+She stopped, hesitating.
+
+"Yes--this year?"
+
+"In June there will be the fair again."
+
+He moved from his seat, softly and swiftly, turned the boat's prow
+towards the open sea, then went and sat down by her in the stern.
+
+"We will go there," he said, "you and I and Gaspare--"
+
+"And my father."
+
+"All of us together."
+
+"And if the signora is back?"
+
+Maurice was conscious of a desire that startled him like a sudden stab
+from something small and sharp--the desire that on that day Hermione
+should not be with him in Sicily.
+
+"I dare say the signora will not be back."
+
+"But if she is, will she come, too?"
+
+"Do you think you would like it better if she came?"
+
+He was so close to her now that his shoulder touched hers. Their faces
+were set seaward and were kissed by the breath of the sea. Their eyes saw
+the same stars and were kissed by the light of the stars. And the subtle
+murmur of the tide spoke to them both as if they were one.
+
+"Do you?" he repeated. "Do you think so?"
+
+"Chi lo sa?" she responded.
+
+He thought, when she said that, that her voice sounded less simple than
+before.
+
+"You do know!" he said.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You do!" he repeated.
+
+He stretched out his hand and took her hand. He had to take it.
+
+"Why don't you tell me?"
+
+She had turned her head away from him, and now, speaking as if to the
+sea, she said:
+
+"Perhaps if she was there you could not give me the blue silk dress and
+the--and the ear-rings. Perhaps she would not like it."
+
+For a moment he thought he was disappointed by her answer. Then he knew
+that he loved it, for its utter naturalness, its laughable naivete. It
+seemed, too, to set him right in his own eyes, to sweep away a creeping
+feeling that had been beginning to trouble him. He was playing with a
+child. That was all. There was no harm in it. And when he had kissed her
+in the dawn he had been kissing a child, playfully, kindly, as a big
+brother might. And if he kissed her now it would mean nothing to her. And
+if it did mean something--just a little more--to him, that did not
+matter.
+
+"Bambina mia!" he said.
+
+"I am not a bambina," she said, turning towards him again.
+
+"Yes you are."
+
+"Then you are a bambino."
+
+"Why not? I feel like a boy to-night, like a naughty little boy."
+
+"Naughty, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, because I want to do something that I ought not to do."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"This, Maddalena."
+
+And he kissed her. It was the first time he had kissed her in darkness,
+for on his second visit to the sirens' house he had only taken her hand
+and held it, and that was nothing. The kiss in the dawn had been light,
+gay, a sort of laughing good-bye to a kind hostess who was of a class
+that, he supposed, thought little of kisses. But this kiss in the night,
+on the sea, was different. Only when he had given it did he understand
+how different it was, how much more it meant to him. For Maddalena
+returned it gently with her warm young lips, and her response stirred
+something at his heart that was surely the very essence of the life
+within him.
+
+He held her hands.
+
+"Maddalena!" he said, and there was in his voice a startled sound.
+"Maddalena!"
+
+Again Hermione had risen up before him in the night, almost as one who
+walked upon the sea. He was conscious of wrong-doing. The innocence of
+his relation with Maddalena seemed suddenly to be tarnished, and the
+happiness of the starry night to be clouded. He felt like one who, in
+summer, becomes aware of a heaviness creeping into the atmosphere, the
+message of a coming tempest that will presently transform the face of
+nature. Surely there was a mist before the faces of the stars.
+
+She said nothing, only looked at him as if she wanted to know many things
+which only he could tell her, which he had begun to tell her. That was
+her fascination for his leaping youth, his wild heart of youth--this
+ignorance and this desire to know. He had sat in spirit at the feet of
+Hermione and loved her with a sort of boyish humbleness. Now one sat at
+his feet. And the attitude woke up in him a desire that was fierce in its
+intensity--the desire to teach Maddalena the great realities of love.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+Faintly there came to them a cry across the sea.
+
+"Gaspare!" Maurice said.
+
+He turned his head. In the darkness, high up, he saw a light, descending,
+ascending, then describing a wild circle.
+
+"Hi--yi--yi--yi!"
+
+"Row back, signorino! They have done playing, and my father will be
+angry."
+
+He moved, took the oars, and sent the boat towards the island. The
+physical exertion calmed him, restored him to himself.
+
+"After all," he thought, "there is no harm in it."
+
+And he laughed.
+
+"Which has won, Maddalena?" he said, looking back at her over his
+shoulder, for he was standing up and rowing with his face towards the
+land.
+
+"I hope it is my father, signorino. If he has got the money he will not
+be angry; but if Gaspare has it--"
+
+"Your father is a fox of the sea, and can cheat better than a boy. Don't
+be frightened."
+
+When they reached the land, Salvatore and Gaspare met them. Gaspare's
+face was glum, but Salvatore's small eyes were sparkling.
+
+"I have won it all--all!" he said. "Ecco!"
+
+And he held out his hand with the notes.
+
+"Salvatore is birbante!" said Gaspare, sullenly. "He did not win it
+fairly. I saw him--"
+
+"Never mind, Gaspare!" said Maurice.
+
+He put his hand on the boy's shoulder.
+
+"To-morrow I'll give you the same," he whispered.
+
+"And now," he added, aloud, "let's go to bed. I've been rowing Maddalena
+round the island and I'm tired. I shall sleep like a top."
+
+As they went up the steep path he took Salvatore familiarly by the arm.
+
+"You are too clever, Salvatore," he said. "You play too well for
+Gaspare."
+
+Salvatore chuckled and handled the five-lire notes voluptuously.
+
+"Cci basu li manu!" he said. "Cci basu li manu!"
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Maurice lay on the big bed in the inner room of the siren's house, under
+the tiny light that burned before Maria Addolorata. The door of the house
+was shut, and he heard no more the murmur of the sea. Gaspare was curled
+up on the floor, on a bed made of some old sacking, with his head buried
+in his jacket, which he had taken off to use as a pillow. In the far room
+Maddalena and her father were asleep. Maurice could hear their breathing,
+Maddalena's light and faint, Salvatore's heavy and whistling, and
+degenerating now and then into a sort of stifled snore. But sleep did not
+come to Maurice. His eyes were open, and his clasped hands supported his
+head. He was thinking, thinking almost angrily.
+
+He loved joy as few Englishmen love it, but as many southerners love it.
+His nature needed joy, was made to be joyous. And such natures resent the
+intrusion into their existence of any complications which make for
+tragedy as northern natures seldom resent anything. To-night Maurice had
+a grievance against fate, and he was considering it wrathfully and not
+without confusion.
+
+Since he had kissed Maddalena in the night he was disturbed, almost
+unhappy. And yet he was surely face to face with something that was more
+than happiness. The dancing faun was dimly aware that in his nature there
+was not only the capacity for gayety, for the performance of the
+tarantella, but also a capacity for violence which he had never been
+conscious of when he was in England. It had surely been developed within
+him by the sun, by the coming of the heat in this delicious land. It was
+like an intoxication of the blood, something that went to head as well as
+heart. He wondered what it meant, what it might lead him to. Perhaps he
+had been faintly aware of its beginnings on that day when jealousy dawned
+within him as he thought of his wife, his woman, nursing her friend in
+Africa. Now it was gathering strength like a stream flooded by rains, but
+it was taking a different direction in its course.
+
+He turned upon the pillow so that he could see the light burning before
+the Madonna. The face of the Madonna was faintly visible--a long, meek
+face with downcast eyes. Maddalena crossed herself often when she looked
+at that face. Maurice put up his hand to make the sign, then dropped it
+with a heavy sigh. He was not a Catholic. His religion--what was it?
+Sunworship perhaps, the worship of the body, the worship of whim. He did
+not know or care much. He felt so full of life and energy that the far,
+far future after death scarcely interested him. The present was his
+concern, the present after that kiss in the night. He had loved Hermione.
+Surely he loved her now. He did love her now. And yet when he had kissed
+her he had never been shaken by the headstrong sensation that had hold of
+him to-night, the desire to run wild in love. He looked up to Hermione.
+The feeling of reverence had been a governing factor in his love for her.
+Now it seemed to him that a feeling of reverence was a barrier in the
+path of love, something to create awe, admiration, respect, but scarcely
+the passion that irresistibly draws man to woman. And yet he did love
+Hermione. He was confused, horribly confused.
+
+For he knew that his longing was towards Maddalena.
+
+He would like to rise up in the dawn, to take her in his arms, to carry
+her off in a boat upon the sea, or to set her on a mule and lead her up
+far away into the recesses of the mountains. By rocky paths he would lead
+her, beyond the olives and the vines, beyond the last cottage of the
+contadini, up to some eyrie from which they could look down upon the
+sunlit world. He wanted to be in wildness with her, inexorably divided
+from all the trammels of civilization. A desire of savagery had hold upon
+him to-night. He did not go into detail. He did not think of how they
+would pass their days. Everything presented itself to him broadly,
+tumultuously, with a surging, onward movement of almost desperate
+advance.
+
+He wanted to teach those dark, inquiring young eyes all that they asked
+to know, to set in them the light of knowledge, to make them a woman's
+eyes.
+
+And that he could never do.
+
+His whole body was throbbing with heat, and tingling with a desire of
+movement, of activity. The knowledge that all this beating energy was
+doomed to uselessness, was born to do nothing, tortured him.
+
+He tried to think steadily of Hermione, but he found the effort a
+difficult one. She was remote from his body, and that physical remoteness
+seemed to set her far from his spirit, too. In him, though he did not
+know it, was awake to-night the fickleness of the south, of the southern
+spirit that forgets so quickly what is no longer near to the southern
+body. The sun makes bodily men, makes very strong the chariot of the
+flesh. Sight and touch are needful, the actions of the body, to keep the
+truly southern spirit true. Maurice could neither touch nor see Hermione.
+In her unselfishness she had committed the error of dividing herself from
+him. The natural consequences of that self-sacrifice were springing up
+now like the little yellow flowers in the grasses of the lemon groves.
+With all her keen intelligence she made the mistake of the enthusiast,
+that of reading into those whom she loved her own shining qualities, of
+seeing her own sincerities, her own faithfulness, her own strength, her
+own utter loyalty looking out on her from them. She would probably have
+denied that this was so, but so it was. At this very moment in Africa,
+while she watched at the bedside of Artois, she was thinking of her
+husband's love for her, loyalty to her, and silently blessing him for it;
+she was thanking God that she had drawn such a prize in the lottery of
+life. And had she been already separated from Maurice for six months she
+would never have dreamed of doubting his perfect loyalty now that he had
+once loved her and taken her to be his. The "all in all or not at all"
+nature had been given to Hermione. She must live, rejoice, suffer, die,
+according to that nature. She knew much, but she did not know how to hold
+herself back, how to be cautious where she loved, how to dissect the
+thing she delighted in. She would never know that, so she would never
+really know her husband, as Artois might learn to know him, even had
+already known him. She would never fully understand the tremendous
+barriers set up between people by the different strains of blood in them,
+the stern dividing lines that are drawn between the different races of
+the earth. Her nature told her that love can conquer all things. She was
+too enthusiastic to be always far-seeing.
+
+So now, while Maurice lay beneath the tiny light in the house of the
+sirens and was shaken by the wildness of desire, and thought of a
+mountain pilgrimage far up towards the sun with Maddalena in his arms,
+she sat by Artois's bed and smiled to herself as she pictured the house
+of the priest, watched over by the stars of Sicily, and by her many
+prayers. Maurice was there, she knew, waiting for her return, longing for
+it as she longed for it. Artois turned on his pillow wearily, saw her,
+and smiled.
+
+"You oughtn't to be here," he whispered. "But I am glad you are here."
+
+"And I am glad, I am thankful I am here!" she said, truly.
+
+"If there is a God," he said, "He will bless you for this!"
+
+"Hush! You must try to sleep."
+
+She laid her hand in his.
+
+"God has blessed me," she thought, "for all my poor little attempts at
+goodness, how far, far more than I deserve!"
+
+And the gratitude within her was almost like an ache, like a beautiful
+pain of the heart.
+
+In the morning Maurice put to sea with Gaspare and Salvatore. He knew the
+silvery calm of dawn on a day of sirocco. Everything was very still, in a
+warm and heavy stillness of silver that made the sweat run down at the
+least movement or effort. Masses of white, feathery vapors floated low in
+the sky above the sea, concealing the flanks of the mountains, but
+leaving their summits clear. And these vapors, hanging like veils with
+tattered edges, created a strange privacy upon the sea, an atmosphere of
+eternal mysteries. As the boat went out from the shore, urged by the
+powerful arms of Salvatore, its occupants were silent. The merriment and
+the ardor of the night, the passion of cards and of desire, were gone, as
+if they had been sucked up into the smoky wonder of the clouds, or sucked
+down into the silver wonder of the sea.
+
+Gaspare looked drowsy and less happy than usual. He had not yet recovered
+from his indignation at the success of Salvatore's cheating, and Maurice,
+who had not slept, felt the bounding life, the bounding fire of his youth
+held in check as by the action of a spell. The carelessness of
+excitement, of passion, was replaced by another carelessness--the
+carelessness of dream. It seemed to him now as if nothing mattered or
+ever could matter. On the calm silver of a hushed and breathless sea,
+beneath dense white vapors that hid the sky, he was going out slowly,
+almost noiselessly, to a fate of which he knew nothing, to a quiet
+emptiness, to a region which held no voices to call him this way or that,
+no hands to hold him, no eyes to regard him. His face was damp with
+sweat. He leaned over the gunwale and trailed his hand in the sea. It
+seemed to him unnaturally warm. He glanced up at the clouds. Heaven was
+blotted out. Was there a heaven? Last night he had thought there must
+be--but that was long ago. Was he sad? He scarcely knew. He was dull, as
+if the blood in him had run almost dry. He was like a sapless tree.
+Hermione and Maddalena--what were they? Shadows rather than women. He
+looked steadily at the sea. Was it the same element upon which he had
+been only a few hours ago under the stars with Maddalena? He could
+scarcely believe that it was the same. Sirocco had him fast, sirocco that
+leaves many Sicilians unchanged, unaffected, but that binds the stranger
+with cords of cotton wool which keep him like a net of steel.
+
+Gaspare lay down in the bottom of the boat, buried his face in his arms,
+and gave himself again to sleep. Salvatore looked at him, and then at
+Maurice, and smiled with a fine irony.
+
+"He thought he would win, signore."
+
+"Cosa?" said Maurice, startled by the sound of a voice.
+
+"He thought that he could play better than I, signore."
+
+Salvatore closed one eye, and stuck his tongue a little out of the left
+side of his mouth, then drew it in with a clicking noise.
+
+"No one gets the better of me," he said. "They may try. Many have tried,
+but in the end--"
+
+He shook his head, took his right hand from the oar and flapped it up and
+down, then brought it downward with force, as if beating some one, or
+something, to his feet.
+
+"I see," Maurice said, dully. "I see."
+
+He thought to himself that he had been cleverer than Salvatore the
+preceding night, but he felt no sense of triumph. He had divined the
+fisherman's passion and turned it to his purpose. But what of that? Let
+the man rejoice, if he could, in this dream. Let all men do what they
+wished to do so long as he could be undisturbed. He looked again at the
+sea, dropped his hand into it once more.
+
+"Shall I let down a line, signore?"
+
+Salvatore's keen eyes were upon him. He shook his head.
+
+"Not yet. I--" He hesitated.
+
+The still silver of the sea drew him. He touched his forehead with his
+hand and felt the dampness on it.
+
+"I'm going in," he said.
+
+"Can you swim, signore?"
+
+"Yes, like a fish. Don't follow me with the boat. Just let me swim out
+and come back. If I want you I'll call. But don't follow me."
+
+Salvatore nodded appreciatively. He liked a good swimmer, a real man of
+the sea.
+
+"And don't wake Gaspare, or he'll be after me."
+
+"Va bene!"
+
+Maurice stripped off his clothes, all the time looking at the sea. Then
+he sat down on the gunwale of the boat with his feet in the water.
+Salvatore had stopped rowing. Gaspare still slept.
+
+It was curious to be going to give one's self to this silent silver thing
+that waited so calmly for the gift. He felt a sort of dull voluptuousness
+stealing over him as he stared at the water. He wanted to get away from
+his companions, from the boat, to be quite alone with sirocco.
+
+"Addio Salvatore!" he said, in a low voice.
+
+"A rivederci, signore."
+
+He let himself down slowly into the water, feet foremost, and swam
+slowly away into the dream that lay before him.
+
+Even now that he was in it the water felt strangely warm. He had not let
+his head go under, and the sweat was still on his face. The boat lay
+behind him. He did not think of it. He had forgotten it. He felt himself
+to be alone, utterly alone with the sea.
+
+He had always loved the sea, but in a boyish, wholly natural way, as a
+delightful element, health-giving, pleasure-giving, associating it with
+holiday times, with bathing, fishing, boating, with sails on moonlight
+nights, with yacht-races about the Isle of Wight in the company of gay
+comrades. This sea of Sicily seemed different to him to-day from other
+seas, more mysterious and more fascinating, a sea of sirens about a
+Sirens' Isle. Mechanically he swam through it, scarcely moving his arms,
+with his chin low in the water--out towards the horizon-line.
+
+He was swimming towards Africa.
+
+Presently that thought came into his mind, that he was swimming towards
+Africa and Hermione, and away from Maddalena. It seemed to him, then, as
+if the two women on the opposite shores of this sea must know, Hermione
+that he was coming to her, Maddalena that he was abandoning her, and he
+began to think of them both as intent upon his journey, the one feeling
+him approach, the other feeling him recede. He swam more slowly. A
+curious melancholy had overtaken him, a deep depression of the spirit,
+such as often alternates in the Sicilian character with the lively gayety
+that is sent down upon its children by the sun. This lonely progress in
+the sea was prophetic. He must leave Maddalena. His friendship with her
+must come to an end, and soon. Hermione would return, and then, in no
+long time, they would leave the Casa del Prete and go back to England.
+They would settle down somewhere, probably in London, and he would take
+up his work with his father, and the Sicilian dream would be over.
+
+The vapors that hid the sky seemed to drop a little lower down towards
+the sea, as if they were going to enclose him.
+
+The Sicilian dream would be over. Was that possible? He felt as if the
+earth of Sicily would not let him go, as if, should the earth resign him,
+the sea of Sicily would keep him. He dwelt on this last fancy, this
+keeping of him by the sea. That would be strange, a quiet end to all
+things. Never before had he consciously contemplated his own death. The
+deep melancholy poured into him by sirocco caused him to do so now.
+Almost voluptuously he thought of death, a death in the sea of Sicily
+near the rocks of the isle of the sirens. The light would be kindled in
+the sirens' house and his eyes would not see it. They would be closed by
+the cold fingers of the sea. And Maddalena? The first time she had seen
+him she had seen him sinking in the sea. How strange if it should be so
+at the end, if the last time she saw him she saw him sinking in the sea.
+She had cried out. Would she cry out again or would she keep silence? He
+wondered. For a moment he felt as if it were ordained that thus he should
+die, and he let his body sink in the water, throwing up his hands. He
+went down, very far down, but he felt that Maddalena's eyes followed him
+and that in them he saw terrors enthroned.
+
+Gaspare stirred in the boat, lifted his head from his arms and looked
+sleepily around him. He saw Salvatore lighting a pipe, bending forward
+over a spluttering match which he held in a cage made of his joined
+hands. He glanced away from him still sleepily, seeking the padrone, but
+he saw only the empty seats of the boat, the oars, the coiled-up nets,
+and lines for the fish.
+
+"Dove--?" he began.
+
+He sat up, stared wildly round.
+
+"Dov'e il padrone?" he cried out, shrilly.
+
+Salvatore started and dropped the match. Gaspare sprang at him.
+
+"Dov'e il padrone? Dov'e il padrone?"
+
+"Sangue di--" began Salvatore.
+
+But the oath died upon his lips. His keen eyes had swept the sea and
+perceived that it was empty. From its silver the black dot which he had
+been admiringly watching had disappeared. Gaspare had waked, had asked
+his fierce question just as Maurice threw up his hands and sank down in
+his travesty of death.
+
+"He was there! Madonna! He was there swimming a moment ago!" exclaimed
+Salvatore.
+
+As he spoke he seized the oars, and with furious strokes propelled the
+boat in the direction Maurice had taken. But Gaspare would not wait. His
+instinct forbade him to remain inactive.
+
+"May the Madonna turn her face from thee in the hour of thy death!" he
+yelled at Salvatore.
+
+Then, with all his clothes on, he went over the side into the sea.
+
+Maurice was an accomplished swimmer, and had ardently practised swimming
+under water when he was a boy. He could hold his breath for an
+exceptionally long time, and now he strove to beat all his previous
+records. With a few strokes he came up from the depths of the sea towards
+the surface, then began swimming under water, swimming vigorously, though
+in what direction he knew not. At last he felt the imperative need of
+air, and, coming up into the light again, he gasped, shook his head,
+lifted his eyelids that were heavy with the pressure of the water, heard
+a shrill cry, and felt a hand grasp him fiercely.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+"Gaspare!" he gulped.
+
+He had not fully drawn breath yet.
+
+"Madonna! Madonna!"
+
+The hand still held him. The fingers were dug into his flesh. Then he
+heard a shout, and the boat came up with Salvatore leaning over its side,
+glaring down at him with fierce anxiety. He grasped the gunwale with both
+hands. Gaspare trod water, caught him by the legs, and violently assisted
+him upward. He tumbled over the side into the boat. Gaspare came after
+him, sank down in the bottom of the boat, caught him by the arms, stared
+into his face, saw him smiling.
+
+"Sta bene Lei?" he cried. "Sta bene?"
+
+"Benissimo."
+
+The boy let go of him and, still staring at him, burst into a passion of
+tears that seemed almost angry.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it? What's the matter?"
+
+He put out his hand to touch the boy's dripping clothes.
+
+"What has happened?"
+
+"Niente! Niente!" said Gaspare, between violent sobs. "Mamma mia! Mamma
+mia!"
+
+He threw himself down in the bottom of the boat and wept stormily,
+without shame, without any attempt to check or conceal his emotion. As in
+the tarantella he had given himself up utterly to joy, so now he gave
+himself up utterly to something that seemed like despair. He cried
+loudly. His whole body shook. The sea-water ran down from his matted hair
+and mingled with the tears that rushed over his brown cheeks.
+
+"What is it?" Maurice asked of Salvatore.
+
+"He thought the sea had taken you, signore."
+
+"That was it? Gaspare--"
+
+"Let him alone. Per Dio, signore, you gave me a fright, too."
+
+"I was only swimming under water."
+
+He looked at Gaspare. He longed to do something to comfort him, but he
+realized that such violence could not be checked by anything. It must
+wear itself out.
+
+"And he thought I was dead!"
+
+"Per Dio! And if you had been!"
+
+He wrinkled up his face and spat.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Has he got a knife on him?"
+
+He threw out his hand towards Gaspare.
+
+"I don't know to-day. He generally has."
+
+"I should have had it in me by now," said Salvatore.
+
+And he smiled at the weeping boy almost sweetly, as if he could have
+found it in his heart to caress such a murderer.
+
+"Row in to land," Maurice said.
+
+He began to put on his clothes. Salvatore turned the boat round and they
+drew near to the rocks. The vapors were lifting now, gathering themselves
+up to reveal the blue of the sky, but the sea was still gray and
+mysterious, and the land looked like a land in a dream. Presently Gaspare
+put his fists to his eyes, lifted his head, and sat up. He looked at his
+master gloomily, as if in rebuke, and under this glance Maurice began to
+feel guilty, as if he had done something wrong in yielding to his strange
+impulses in the sea.
+
+"I was only swimming under water, Gaspare," he said, apologetically.
+
+The boy said nothing.
+
+"I know now," continued Maurice, "that I shall never come to any harm
+with you to look after me."
+
+Still Gaspare said nothing. He sat there on the floor of the boat with
+his dripping clothes clinging to his body, staring before him as if he
+were too deeply immersed in gloomy thoughts to hear what was being said
+to him.
+
+"Gaspare!" Maurice exclaimed, moved by a sudden impulse. "Do you think
+you would be very unhappy away from your 'paese'?"
+
+Gaspare shifted forward suddenly. A light gleamed in his eyes.
+
+"D'you think you could be happy with me in England?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Si, signore!"
+
+"When we have to go away from Sicily I shall ask the signora to let me
+take you with us."
+
+Gaspare said nothing, but he looked at Salvatore, and his wet face was
+like a song of pride and triumph.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+That day, ere he started with Gaspare for the house of the priest,
+Maurice made a promise to Maddalena. He pledged himself to go with her
+and her father to the great fair of San Felice, which takes place
+annually in the early days of June, when the throng of tourists has
+departed, and the long heats of the summer have not yet fully set in. He
+gave this promise in the presence of Salvatore and Gaspare, and while he
+did so he was making up his mind to something. That day at the fair
+should be the day of his farewell to Maddalena. Hermione must surely be
+coming back in June. It was impossible that she could remain in Kairouan
+later. The fury of the African summer would force her to leave the sacred
+city, her mission of salvation either accomplished or rendered forever
+futile by the death of her friend. And then, when Hermione came, within a
+short time no doubt they would start for England, taking Gaspare with
+them. For Maurice really meant to keep the boy in their service. After
+the strange scene of the morning he felt as if Gaspare were one of the
+family, a retainer with whose devoted protection he could never dispense.
+Hermione, he was sure, would not object.
+
+Hermione would not object. As he thought that, Maurice was conscious of a
+feeling such as sometimes moves a child, upon whom a parent or guardian
+has laid a gently restraining hand, violently to shrug his shoulders and
+twist his body in the effort to get away and run wild in freedom. He knew
+how utterly unreasonable and contemptible his sensation was, yet he had
+it. The sun had bred in him not merely a passion for complete personal
+liberty, but for something more, for lawlessness. For a moment he envied
+Gaspare, the peasant boy, whose ardent youth was burdened with so few
+duties to society, with so few obligations.
+
+What was expected of Gaspare? Only a willing service, well paid, which he
+could leave forever at any moment he pleased. To his family he must, no
+doubt, give some of his earnings, but in return he was looked up to by
+all, even by his father, as a little god. And in everything else was not
+he free, wonderfully free in this island of the south, able to be
+careless, unrestrained, wild as a young hawk, yet to remain uncondemned,
+unwondered at?
+
+And he--Maurice?
+
+He thought of Hermione's ardent and tenderly observant eyes with a sort
+of terror. If she could know or even suspect his feelings of the previous
+night, what a tragedy he would be at once involved in! The very splendor
+of Hermione's nature, the generous nobility of her character, would make
+that tragedy the more poignant. She felt with such intensity, she thought
+she had so much. Careless though his own nature was, doubly careless here
+in Sicily, Maurice almost sickened at the idea of her ever suspecting the
+truth, that he was capable of being strongly drawn towards a girl like
+Maddalena, that he could feel as if a peasant who could neither read nor
+write caught at something within him that was like the essence of his
+life, like the core of that by which he enjoyed, suffered, desired.
+
+But, of course, she would never suspect. And he laughed at himself, and
+made the promise about the fair, and, having made it and his resolution
+in regard to it, almost violently resolved to take no thought for the
+morrow, but to live carelessly and with gayety the days that lay before
+him, the few more days of his utter freedom in Sicily.
+
+After all, he was doing no wrong. He had lived and was going to live
+innocently. And now that he realized things, realized himself, he would
+be reasonable. He would be careless, gay--yes, but not reckless, not
+utterly reckless as he felt inclined to be.
+
+"What day of June is the fair?" he asked, looking at Maddalena.
+
+"The 11th of June, signore," said Salvatore. "There will be many donkeys
+there--good donkeys."
+
+Gaspare began to look fierce.
+
+"I think of buying a donkey," added Salvatore, carelessly, with his
+small, shrewd eyes fixed upon Maurice's face.
+
+Gaspare muttered something unintelligible.
+
+"How much do they cost?" said Maurice.
+
+"For a hundred lire you can get a very good donkey. It would be useful to
+Maddalena. She could go to the village sometimes then--she could go to
+Marechiaro to gossip with the neighbors."
+
+"Has Maddalena broken her legs--Madonna!" burst forth Gaspare.
+
+"Come along, Gaspare!" said Maurice, hastily.
+
+He bade good-bye to the fisherman and his daughter, and set off with
+Gaspare through the trees.
+
+"Be nice to Salvatore," said Maurice, as they went down towards the rocky
+wall.
+
+"But he wants to make you give him a donkey, signorino. You do not know
+him. When he is with you at the fair he will--"
+
+"Never mind. I say, Gaspare, I want--I want that day at the fair to be a
+real festa. Don't let's have any row on that day."
+
+Gaspare looked at him with surprised, inquiring eyes, as if struck by his
+serious voice, by the insisting pressure in it.
+
+"Why that day specially, signorino?" he asked, after a pause.
+
+"Oh, well--it will be my last day of--I mean that the signora will be
+coming back from Africa by then, and we shall--"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"We sha'n't be able to run quite so wild as we do now, you see. And,
+besides, we shall be going to England very soon then."
+
+Gaspare's face lighted up.
+
+"Shall I see London, signorino?"
+
+"Yes," said Maurice.
+
+He felt a sickness at his heart.
+
+"I should like to live in London always," said Gaspare, excitedly.
+
+"In London! You don't know it. In London you will scarcely ever see the
+sun."
+
+"Aren't there theatres in London, signorino?"
+
+"Theatres? Yes, of course. But there is no sea, Gaspare, there are no
+mountains."
+
+"Are there many soldiers? Are there beautiful women?"
+
+"Oh, there are plenty of soldiers and women."
+
+"I should like always to live in London," repeated Gaspare, firmly.
+
+"Well--perhaps you will. But--remember--we are all to be happy at the
+fair of San Felice."
+
+"Si, signore. But be careful, or Salvatore will make you buy him a
+donkey. He had a wine-shop once, long ago, in Marechiaro, and the
+wine--Per Dio, it was always vino battezzato!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Salvatore always put water in it. He is cattivo--and when he is angry--"
+
+"I know. You told me. But it doesn't matter. We shall soon be going away,
+and then we sha'n't see him any more."
+
+"Signorino?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You--do you want to stay here always?"
+
+"I like being here."
+
+"Why do you want to stay?"
+
+For once Maurice felt as if he could not meet the boy's great, steady
+eyes frankly. He looked away.
+
+"I like the sun," he answered. "I love it! I should like to live in the
+sunshine forever."
+
+"And I should like to live always in London," reiterated Gaspare. "You
+want to live here because you have always been in London, and I want to
+live in London because I have always been here. Ecco!"
+
+Maurice tried to laugh.
+
+"Perhaps that is it. We wish for what we can't have. Dio mio!"
+
+He threw out his arms.
+
+"But, anyhow, I've not done with Sicily yet! Come on, Gaspare! Now for
+the rocks! Ciao! Ciao! Ciao! Morettina bella ciao!"
+
+He burst out into a song, but his voice hardly rang true, and Gaspare
+looked at him again with a keen inquiry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Artois was not yet destined to die. He said that Hermione would not let
+him die, that with her by his side it was useless for Death to approach
+him, to desire him, to claim him. Perhaps her courage gave to him the
+will to struggle against his enemy. The French doctor, deeply, almost
+sentimentally interested in the ardent woman who spoke his language with
+perfection and carried out such instructions of his as she considered
+sensible, with delicate care and strong thoroughness, thought and said
+so.
+
+"But for madame," he said to Artois, "you would have died, monsieur. And
+why? Because till she came you had not the will to live. And it is the
+will to live that assists the doctor."
+
+"I cannot be so ungallant as to die now," Artois replied, with a feeble
+but not sad smile. "Were I to do so, madame would think me ungrateful.
+No, I shall live. I feel now that I am going to live."
+
+And, in fact, from the night of Maurice's visit with Gaspare to the house
+of the sirens he began to get better. The inflammation abated, the
+temperature fell till it was normal, the agony died away gradually from
+the tormented body, and slowly, very slowly, the strength that had ebbed
+began to return. One day, when the doctor said that there was no more
+danger of any relapse, Artois called Hermione and told her that now she
+must think no more of him, but of herself; that she must pack up her
+trunk and go back to her husband.
+
+"You have saved me, and I have killed your honeymoon," he said, rather
+sadly. "That will always be a regret in my life. But, now go, my dear
+friend, and try to assuage your husband's wrath against me. How he must
+hate me!"
+
+"Why, Emile?"
+
+"Are you really a woman? Yes, I know that. No man could have tended me as
+you have. Yet, being a woman, how can you ask that question?"
+
+"Maurice understands. He is blessedly understanding."
+
+"Don't try his blessed comprehension of you and of me too far. You must
+go, indeed."
+
+"I will go."
+
+A shadow that he tried to keep back flitted across Artois's pale face,
+over which the unkempt beard straggled in a way that would have appalled
+his Parisian barber. Hermione saw it.
+
+"I will go," she repeated, quietly, "when I can take you with me."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Hush! You are not to argue. Haven't you an utter contempt for those who
+do things by halves? Well, I have. When you can travel we'll go
+together."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"To Sicily. It will be hot there, but after this it will seem cool as the
+Garden of Eden under those trees where--but you remember! And there is
+always the breeze from the sea. And then from there, very soon, you can
+get a ship from Messina and go back to France, to Marseilles. Don't talk,
+Emile. I am writing to-night to tell Maurice."
+
+And she left the room with quick softness.
+
+Artois did not protest. He told himself that he had not the strength to
+struggle against the tenderness that surrounded him, that made it sweet
+to return to life. But he wondered silently how Maurice would receive
+him, how the dancing faun was bearing, would bear, this interference with
+his new happiness.
+
+"When I am in Sicily I shall see at once, I shall know," he thought. "But
+till then--"
+
+And he gave up the faint attempt to analyze the possible feelings of
+another, and sank again into the curious peace of convalescence.
+
+And Hermione wrote to her husband, telling him of her plan, calling upon
+him with the fearless enthusiasm that was characteristic of her to
+welcome it and to rejoice, with her, in Artois's returning health and
+speedy presence in Sicily.
+
+Maurice read this letter on the terrace alone. Gaspare had gone down on
+the donkey to Marechiaro to buy a bottle of Marsala, which Lucrezia
+demanded for the making of a zampaglione, and Lucrezia was upon the
+mountain-side spreading linen to dry in the sun. It was nearly the end of
+May now, and the trees in the ravine were thick with all their leaves.
+The stream that ran down through the shadows towards the sea was a tiny
+trickle of water, and the long, black snakes were coming boldly forth
+from their winter hiding-places to sun themselves among the bowlders that
+skirted the mountain tracks.
+
+"I can't tell for certain," Hermione wrote, "how soon we shall arrive,
+but Emile is picking up strength every day, and I think, I pray, it may
+not be long. I dare to hope that we shall be with you about the second
+week of June. Oh, Maurice, something in me is almost mad with joy, is
+like Gaspare dancing the tarantella, when I think of coming up the
+mountain-side again with you as I came that first day, that first day of
+my real life. Tell Sebastiano he must play the 'Pastorale' to welcome me.
+And you--but I seem to feel your dear welcome here, to feel your hands
+holding mine, to see your eyes looking at me like Sicily. Isn't it
+strange? I feel out here in Africa as if you were Sicily. But you are,
+indeed, for me. You are Sicily, you are the sun, you are everything that
+means joy to me, that means music, that means hope and peace. Buon
+riposo, my dearest one. Can you feel--can you--how happy I am to-night?"
+
+The second week in June! Maurice stood holding the letter in his hand.
+The fair of San Felice would take place during the second week in June.
+That was what he was thinking, not of Artois's convalescence, not of his
+coming to Sicily. If Hermione arrived before June 11th, could he go to
+the fair with Maddalena? He might go, of course. He might tell Hermione.
+She would say "Go!" She believed in him and had never tried to curb his
+freedom. A less suspicious woman than she was had surely never lived. But
+if she were in Sicily, if he knew that she was there in the house of the
+priest, waiting to welcome him at night when he came back from the fair,
+it would--it would--He laid the letter down. There was a burning heat of
+impatience, of anxiety, within him. Now that he had received this letter
+he understood with what intensity he had been looking forward to this day
+at the fair, to this last festa of his Sicilian life.
+
+"Perhaps they will not come so soon!" he said to him self. "Perhaps they
+will not be here."
+
+And then he began to think of Artois, to realize the fact that he was
+coming with Hermione, that he would be part of the final remnant of these
+Sicilian days.
+
+His feeling towards Artois in London had been sympathetic, even almost
+reverential. He had looked at him as if through Hermione's eyes, had
+regarded him with a sort of boyish reverence. Hermione had said that
+Artois was a great man, and Maurice had felt that he was a great man, had
+mentally sat at his feet. Perhaps in London he would be ready to sit at
+his feet again. But was he ready to sit at his feet here in Sicily? As he
+thought of Artois's penetrating eyes and cool, intellectual face, of his
+air of authority, of his close intimacy with Hermione, he felt almost
+afraid of him. He did not want Artois to come here to Sicily. He hated
+his coming. He almost dreaded it as the coming of a spy. The presence of
+Artois would surely take away all the savor of this wild, free life,
+would import into it an element of the library, of the shut room, of that
+intellectual existence which Maurice was learning to think of as almost
+hateful.
+
+And Hermione called upon him to rejoice with her over the fact that
+Artois would be able to accompany her. How she misunderstood him! Good
+God! how she misunderstood him! It seemed really as if she believed that
+his mind was cast in precisely the same mould as her own, as if she
+thought that because she and he were married they must think and feel
+always alike. How absurd that was, and how impossible!
+
+A sense of being near a prison door came upon him. He threw Hermione's
+letter onto the writing-table, and went out into the sun.
+
+When Gaspare returned that evening Maurice told him the news from Africa.
+The boy's face lit up.
+
+"Oh, then shall we go to London?" he said.
+
+"Why not?" Maurice exclaimed, almost violently. "It will all be
+different! Yes, we had better go to London!"
+
+"Signorino."
+
+"Well, what is it, Gaspare?"
+
+"You do not like that signore to come here."
+
+"I--why not? Yes, I--"
+
+"No, signorino. I can see in your face that you do not like it. Your face
+got quite black just now. But if you do not like it why do you let him
+come? You are the padrone here."
+
+"You don't understand. The signore is a friend of mine."
+
+"But you said he was the friend of the signora."
+
+"So he is. He is the friend of both of us."
+
+Gaspare said nothing for a moment. His mind was working busily. At last
+he said:
+
+"Then Maddalena--when the signora comes will she be the friend of the
+signora, as well as your friend?"
+
+"Maddalena--that has nothing to do with it."
+
+"But Maddalena is your friend!"
+
+"That's quite different."
+
+"I do not understand how it is in England," Gaspare said, gravely.
+"But"--and he nodded his head wisely and spread out his hands--"I
+understand many things, signorino, perhaps more than you think. You do
+not want the signore to come. You are angry at his coming."
+
+"He is a very kind signore," said Maurice, hastily. "And he can speak
+dialetto."
+
+Gaspare smiled and shook his head again. But he did not say anything
+more. For a moment Maurice had an impulse to speak to him frankly, to
+admit him into the intimacy of a friend. He was a Sicilian, although he
+was only a boy. He was Sicilian and he would understand.
+
+"Gaspare," he began.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"As you understand so much--"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"Perhaps you--" He checked himself, realizing that he was on the edge of
+doing an outrageous thing. "You must know that the friends of the signora
+are my friends and that I am always glad to welcome them."
+
+"Va bene, signorino! Va bene!"
+
+The boy began to look glum, understanding at once that he was being
+played with.
+
+"I must go to give Tito his food."
+
+And he stuck his hands in his pockets and went away round the corner of
+the cottage, whistling the tune of the "Canzone di Marechiaro."
+
+Maurice began to feel as if he were in the dark, but as if he were being
+watched there. He wondered how clearly Gaspare read him, how much he
+knew. And Artois? When he came, with his watchful eyes, there would be
+another observer of the Sicilian change. He did not much mind Gaspare,
+but he would hate Artois. He grew hot at the mere thought of Artois being
+there with him, observing, analyzing, playing the literary man's part in
+this out-door life of the mountains and of the sea.
+
+"I'm not a specimen," he said to himself, "and I'm damned if I'll be
+treated as one!"
+
+It did not occur to him that he was anticipating that which might never
+happen. He was as unreasonable as a boy who foresees possible
+interference with his pleasures.
+
+This decision of Hermione to bring with her to Sicily Artois, and its
+communication to Maurice, pushed him on to the recklessness which he had
+previously resolved to hold in check. Had Hermione been returning to him
+alone he would have felt that a gay and thoughtless holiday time was
+coming to an end, but he must have felt, too, that only tenderness and
+strong affection were crossing the sea from Africa to bind him in chains
+that already he had worn with happiness and peace. But the knowledge that
+with Hermione was coming Artois gave to him a definite vision of
+something that was like a cage. Without consciously saying it to himself,
+he had in London been vaguely aware of Artois's coldness of feeling
+towards him. Had any one spoken of it to him he would probably have
+denied that this was so. There are hidden things in a man that he himself
+does not say to himself that he knows of. But Maurice's vision of a cage
+was conjured up by Artois's mental attitude towards him in London, the
+attitude of the observer who might, in certain circumstances, be cruel,
+who was secretly ready to be cruel. And, anticipating the unpleasant
+probable, he threw himself with the greater violence into the enjoyment
+of his few more days of complete liberty.
+
+He wrote to Hermione, expressing as naturally as he could his ready
+acquiescence in her project, and then gave himself up to the
+light-heartedness that came with the flying moments of these last days of
+emancipation in the sun. His mood was akin to the mood of the rich man,
+"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The music, he knew, must
+presently fail. The tarantella must come to an end. Well, then he would
+dance with his whole soul. He would not husband his breath nor save his
+strength. He would be thoughtless because for a moment he had thought too
+much, too much for his nature of the dancing faun who had been given for
+a brief space of time his rightful heritage.
+
+Each day now he went down to the sea.
+
+"How hot it is!" he would say to Gaspare. "If I don't have a bath I shall
+be suffocated."
+
+"Si, signore. At what time shall we go?"
+
+"After the siesta. It will be glorious in the sea to-day."
+
+"Si, signore, it is good to be in the sea."
+
+The boy smiled, at last would sometimes laugh. He loved his padrona, but
+he was a male and a Sicilian. And the signora had gone across the sea to
+her friend. These visits to the sea seemed to him very natural. He would
+have done the same as his padrone in similar circumstances with a light
+heart, with no sense of doing wrong. Only sometimes he raised a warning
+voice.
+
+"Signorino," he would say, "do not forget what I have told you."
+
+"What, Gaspare?"
+
+"Salvatore is birbante. You think he likes you."
+
+"Why shouldn't he like me?"
+
+"You are a forestiere. To him you are as nothing. But he likes your
+money."
+
+"Well, then? I don't care whether he likes me or not. What does it
+matter?"
+
+"Be careful, signorino. The Sicilian has a long hand. Every one knows
+that. Even the Napoletano knows that. I have a friend who was a soldier
+at Naples, and--"
+
+"Come, now, Gaspare! What reason will there ever be for Salvatore to turn
+against me?"
+
+"Va bene, signorino, va bene! But Salvatore is a bad man when he thinks
+any one has tried to do him a wrong. He has blood in his eyes then, and
+when we Sicilians see through blood we do not care what we do--no, not if
+all the world is looking at us."
+
+"I shall do no wrong to Salvatore. What do you mean?"
+
+"Niente, signorino, niente!"
+
+"Stick the cloth on Tito, and put something in the pannier. Al mare! Al
+mare!"
+
+The boy's warning rang in deaf ears. For Maurice really meant what he
+said. He was reckless, perhaps, but he was going to wrong no one, neither
+Salvatore, nor Hermione, nor Maddalena. The coming of Artois drove him
+into the arms of pleasure, but it would never drive him into the arms of
+sin. For it was surely no sin to make a little love in this land of the
+sun, to touch a girl's hand, to snatch a kiss sometimes from the soft
+lips of a girl, from whom he would never ask anything more, whatever
+leaping desire might prompt him.
+
+And Salvatore was always at hand. He seldom put to sea in these days
+unless Maurice went with him in the boat. His greedy eyes shone with a
+light of satisfaction when he saw Tito coming along the dusty white road
+from Isola Bella, and at night, when he crossed himself superstitiously
+before Maria Addolorata, he murmured a prayer that more strangers might
+be wafted to his "Paese," many strangers with money in their pockets and
+folly in their hearts. Then let the sea be empty of fish and the wind of
+the storm break up his boat--it would not matter. He would still live
+well. He might even at the last have money in the bank at Marechiaro,
+houses in the village, a larger wine-shop than Oreste in the Corso.
+
+But he kept his small eyes wide open and seldom let Maddalena be long
+alone with the forestiere, and this supervision began to irritate
+Maurice, to make him at last feel hostile to Salvatore. He remembered
+Gaspare's words about the fisherman--"To him you are as nothing. But he
+likes your money"--and a longing to trick this fox of the sea, who wanted
+to take all and make no return, came to him.
+
+"Why can one never be free in this world?" he thought, almost angrily.
+"Why must there always be some one on the watch to see what one is doing,
+to interfere with one's pleasure?"
+
+He began presently almost to hate Salvatore, who evidently thought that
+Maurice was ready to wrong him, and who, nevertheless, grasped greedily
+at every soldo that came from the stranger's pocket, and touted
+perpetually for more.
+
+His attitude was hideous. Maurice pretended not to notice it, and was
+careful to keep on the most friendly possible terms with him. But, while
+they acted their parts, the secret sense of enmity grew steadily in the
+two men, as things grow in the sun. When Maurice saw the fisherman, with
+a smiling, bird's face, coming to meet him as he climbed up through the
+trees to the sirens' house, he sometimes longed to strike him. And when
+Maurice went away with Gaspare in the night towards the white road where
+Tito, tied to a stake, was waiting to carry the empty pannier that had
+contained a supper up the mountain to the house of the priest, Salvatore
+stood handling his money, and murmuring:
+
+"Maledetto straniero! Madonna! Ma io sono piu birbante di Lei, mille
+volte piu birbante, Dio mio!"
+
+And he laughed as he went towards the sirens' house. It amused him to
+think that a stranger, an "Inglese," fancied that he could play with a
+Sicilian, who had never been "worsted," even by one of his own
+countrymen.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Maurice had begun to dread the arrival of the post. Artois was rapidly
+recovering his strength, and in each of her letters Hermione wrote with a
+more glowing certainty of her speedy return to Sicily, bringing the
+invalid with her. Would they come before June 11th, the day of the fair?
+That was the question which preoccupied Maurice, which began to haunt
+him, and set a light of anxiety in his eyes when he saw Antonino climbing
+up the mountain-side with the letter-bag slung over his shoulder. He felt
+as if he could not forego this last festa. When it was over, when the
+lights had gone out in the houses of San Felice, and the music was
+silent, and the last rocket had burst in the sky, showering down its
+sparks towards the gaping faces of the peasants, he would be ready to
+give up this free, unintellectual life, this life in which his youth ran
+wild. He would resign himself to the inevitable, return to the existence
+in which, till now, he had found happiness, and try to find it there once
+more, try to forget the strange voices that had called him, the strange
+impulses that had prompted him. He would go back to his old self, and
+seek pleasure in the old paths, where he walked with those whom society
+would call his "equals," and did not spend his days with men who wrung
+their scant livelihood from the breast of the earth and from the breast
+of the sea, with women whose eyes, perhaps, were full of flickering
+fires, but who had never turned the leaves of a printed book, or traced a
+word upon paper. He would sit again at the feet of people who were
+cleverer and more full of knowledge than himself, and look up to them
+with reverence.
+
+But he must have his festa first. He counted upon that. He desired that
+so strongly, almost so fiercely, that he felt as if he could not bear to
+be thwarted, as if, should fate interfere between him and the fulfilment
+of this longing, he might do something almost desperate. He looked
+forward to the fair with something of the eagerness and the anticipation
+of a child expectant of strange marvels, of wonderful and mysterious
+happenings, and the name San Felice rang in his ears with a music that
+was magical, suggesting curious joys.
+
+He often talked about the fair to Gaspare, asking him many questions
+which the boy was nothing loath to answer.
+
+To Gaspare the fair of San Felice was the great event of the Sicilian
+year. He had only been to it twice; the first time when he was but ten
+years old, and was taken by an uncle who had gone to seek his fortune in
+South America, and had come back for a year to his native land to spend
+some of the money he had earned as a cook, and afterwards as a restaurant
+proprietor, in Buenos Ayres; the second time when he was sixteen, and had
+succeeded in saving up a little of the money given to him by travellers
+whom he had accompanied as a guide on their excursions. And these two
+days had been red-letter days in his life. His eyes shone with excitement
+when he spoke of the festivities at San Felice, of the bands of
+music--there were three "musics" in the village; of the village beauties
+who sauntered slowly up and down, dressed in brocades and adorned with
+jewels which had been hoarded in the family chests for generations, and
+were only taken out to be worn at the fair and at wedding-feasts; of the
+booths where all the desirable things of the world were exposed for
+sale--rings, watches, chains, looking-glasses, clocks that sang and
+chimed with bells like church towers, yellow shoes, and caps of all
+colors, handkerchiefs, and shawls with fringes that, when worn, drooped
+almost to the ground; ballads written by native poets, relating the life
+and the trial of Musolino, the famous brigand, his noble address to his
+captors, and his despair when he was condemned to eternal confinement;
+and the adventures of Giuseppe Moroni, called "Il Niccheri"
+(illetterato), composed in eight-lined verses, and full of the most
+startling and passionate occurrences. There were donkeys, too--donkeys
+from all parts of Sicily, mules from Girgenti, decorated with
+red-and-yellow harness, with pyramids of plumes and bells upon their
+heads, painted carts with pictures of the miracles of the saints and the
+conquests of the Saracens, turkeys and hens, and even cages containing
+yellow birds that came from islands far away and that sang with the
+sweetness of the angels. The ristoranti were crowded with people, playing
+cards and eating delicious food, and outside upon the pavements were
+dozens of little tables at which you could sit, drinking syrups of
+beautiful hues and watching at your ease the marvels of the show. Here
+came boys from Naples to sing and dance, peddlers with shining knives and
+elegant walking-sticks for sale, fortune-tellers with your fate already
+printed and neatly folded in an envelope, sometimes a pigeon-man with a
+high black hat, who made his doves hop from shoulder to shoulder along a
+row of school-children, or a man with a monkey that played antics to the
+sound of a grinding organ, and that was dressed up in a red worsted
+jacket and a pair of cloth trousers. And there were shooting-galleries
+and puppet-shows and dancing-rooms, and at night, when the darkness came,
+there were giuochi di fuoco which lit up the whole sky, till you could
+see Etna quite plainly.
+
+"E' veramente un paradiso!" concluded Gaspare.
+
+"A paradise!" echoed Maurice. "A paradise! I say, Gaspare, why can't we
+always live in paradise? Why can't life be one long festa?"
+
+"Non lo so, signore. And the signora? Do you think she will be here for
+the fair?"
+
+"I don't know. But if she is here, I am not sure that she will come to
+see it."
+
+"Why not, signorino? Will she stay with the sick signore?"
+
+"Perhaps. But I don't think she will be here. She does not say she will
+be here."
+
+"Do you want her to be here, signorino?" Gaspare asked, abruptly.
+
+"Why do you ask such a question? Of course I am happy, very happy, when
+the signora is here."
+
+As he said the words Maurice remembered how happy he had been in the
+house of the priest alone with Hermione. Indeed, he had thought that he
+was perfectly happy, that he had nothing left to wish for. But that
+seemed long ago. He wondered if he could ever again feel that sense of
+perfect contentment. He could scarcely believe so. A certain feverishness
+had stolen into his Sicilian life. He felt often like a man in suspense,
+uncertain of the future, almost apprehensive. He no longer danced the
+tarantella with the careless abandon of a boy. And yet he sometimes had a
+strange consciousness that he was near to something that might bring to
+him a joy such as he had never yet experienced.
+
+"I wish I knew what day Hermione is arriving," he thought, almost
+fretfully. "I wish she wouldn't keep me hung up in this condition of
+uncertainty. She seems to think that I have nothing to do but just wait
+here upon the pleasure of Artois."
+
+With that last thought the old sense of injury rose in him again. This
+friend of Hermione's was spoiling everything, was being put before every
+one. It was really monstrous that even during their honeymoon this old
+friendship should intrude, should be allowed to govern their actions and
+disturb their serenity. Now that Artois was out of danger Maurice began
+to forget how ill he had been, began sometimes to doubt whether he had
+ever been so ill as Hermione supposed. Perhaps Artois was one of those
+men who liked to have a clever woman at his beck and call. These literary
+fellows were often terribly exigent, eaten up with the sense of their own
+importance. But he, Maurice, was not going to allow himself to be made a
+cat's-paw of. He would make Artois understand that he was not going to
+permit his life to be interfered with by any one.
+
+"I'll let him see that when he comes," he said to himself. "I'll take a
+strong line. A man must be the master of his own life if he's worth
+anything. These Sicilians understand that."
+
+He began secretly to admire what before he had thought almost hateful,
+the strong Arab characteristics that linger on in many Sicilians, to
+think almost weak and unmanly the Western attitude to woman.
+
+"I will be master," he said to himself again. "All these Sicilians are
+wondering that I ever let Hermione go to Africa. Perhaps they think I'm a
+muff to have given in about it. And now, when Hermione comes back with a
+man, they'll suppose--God knows what they won't imagine!"
+
+He had begun so to identify himself with the Sicilians about Marechiaro
+that he cared what they thought, was becoming sensitive to their opinion
+of him as if he had been one of themselves. One day Gaspare told him a
+story of a contadino who had bought a house in the village, but who,
+being unable to complete the payment, had been turned out into the
+street.
+
+"And now, signorino," Gaspare concluded, "they are all laughing at him in
+Marechiaro. He dare not show himself any more in the Piazza. When a man
+cannot go any more into the Piazza--Madonna!"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands in a gesture of
+contemptuous pity.
+
+"E' finito!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Certo!" said Maurice.
+
+He was resolved that he would never be in such a case. Hermione, he felt
+now, did not understand the Sicilians as he understood them. If she did
+she would not bring back Artois from Africa, she would not arrive openly
+with him. But surely she ought to understand that such an action would
+make people wonder, would be likely to make them think that Artois was
+something more than her friend. And then Maurice thought of the day of
+their arrival, of his own descent to the station, to wait upon the
+platform for the train. Artois was not going to stay in the house of the
+priest. That was impossible, as there was no guest-room. He would put up
+at the hotel in Marechiaro. But that would make little difference. He was
+to arrive with Hermione. Every one would know that she had spent all this
+time with him in Africa. Maurice grew hot as he thought of the smiles on
+the Sicilian faces, of the looks of astonishment at the strange doings of
+the forestieri. Hermione's enthusiastic kindness was bringing her husband
+almost to shame. It was a pity that people were sometimes thoughtless in
+their eager desire to be generous and sympathetic.
+
+One day, when Maurice had been brooding over this matter of the
+Sicilian's view of Hermione's proceedings, the spirit moved him to go
+down on foot to Marechiaro to see if there were any letters for him at
+the post. It was now June 7th. In four days would come the fair. As the
+time for it drew near, his anxiety lest anything should interfere to
+prevent his going to it with Maddalena increased, and each day at post
+time he was filled with a fever of impatience to know whether there
+would be a letter from Africa or not. Antonino generally appeared about
+four o'clock, but the letters were in the village long before then, and
+this afternoon Maurice felt that he could not wait for the boy's coming.
+He had a conviction that there was a letter, a decisive letter from
+Hermione, fixing at last the date of her arrival with Artois. He must
+have it in his hands at the first possible moment. If he went himself to
+the post he would know the truth at least an hour and a half sooner than
+if he waited in the house of the priest. He resolved, therefore, to go,
+got his hat and stick, and set out, after telling Gaspare, who was
+watching for birds with his gun, that he was going for a stroll on the
+mountain-side and might be away for a couple of hours.
+
+It was a brilliant afternoon. The landscape looked hard in the fiery
+sunshine, the shapes of the mountains fierce and relentless, the dry
+watercourses almost bitter in their barrenness. Already the devastation
+of the summer was beginning to be apparent. All tenderness had gone from
+the higher slopes of the mountains which, jocund in spring and in autumn
+with growing crops, were now bare and brown, and seamed like the hide of
+a tropical reptile gleaming with metallic hues. The lower slopes were
+still panoplied with the green of vines and of trees, but the ground
+beneath the trees was arid. The sun was coming into his dominion with
+pride and cruelty, like a conqueror who loots the land he takes to be his
+own.
+
+But Maurice did not mind the change, which drove the tourists northward,
+and left Sicily to its own people. He even rejoiced in it. As each day
+the heat increased he was conscious of an increasing exultation, such as
+surely the snakes and the lizards feel as they come out of their
+hiding-places into the golden light. He was filled with a glorious sense
+of expansion, as if his capabilities grew larger, as if they were
+developed by heat like certain plants. None of the miseries that afflict
+many people in the violent summers which govern southern lands were his.
+His skin did not peel, his eyes did not become inflamed, nor did his head
+ache under the action of the burning rays. They came to him like brothers
+and he rejoiced in their company. To-day, as he descended to Marechiaro,
+he revelled in the sun. Its ruthlessness made him feel ruthless. He was
+conscious of that. At this moment he was in absolutely perfect physical
+health. His body was lithe and supple, yet his legs and arms were hard
+with springing muscle. His warm blood sang through his veins like music
+through the pipes of an organ. His eyes shone with the superb animation
+of youth that is radiantly sound. For, despite his anxiety, his sometimes
+almost fretful irritation when he thought about the coming of Artois and
+the passing of his own freedom, there were moments when he felt as if he
+could leap with the sheer joy of life, as if he could lift up his arms
+and burst forth into a wild song of praise to his divinity, the sun. And
+this grand condition of health made him feel ruthless, as the man who
+conquers and enters a city in triumph feels ruthless. As he trod down
+towards Marechiaro to-day, thinking of the letter that perhaps awaited
+him, it seemed to him that it would be monstrous if anything, if any one,
+were to interfere with his day of joy, the day he was looking forward to
+with such eager anticipation. He felt inclined to trample over
+opposition. Yet what could he do if, by some evil chance, Hermione and
+Artois arrived the day before the fair, or on the very day of the fair?
+He hurried his steps. He wanted to be in the village, to know whether
+there was a letter for him from Africa.
+
+When he came into the village it was about half-past two o'clock, and the
+long, narrow main street was deserted. The owners of some of the
+antiquity shops had already put up their shutters for the summer. Other
+shops, still open, showed gaping doorways, through which no travellers
+passed. Inside, the proprietors were dozing among their red brocades,
+their pottery, their Sicilian jewelry and obscure pictures thick with
+dust, guarded by squadrons of large, black flies, which droned on walls
+and ceilings, crept over the tiled floors, and clung to the draperies and
+laces which lay upon the cabinets. In the shady little rooms of the
+barbers small boys in linen jackets kept a drowsy vigil for the
+proprietors, who were sleeping in some dark corner of bedchamber or
+wine-shop. But no customer came to send them flying. The sun made the
+beards push on the brown Sicilian faces, but no one wanted to be shaved
+before the evening fell. Two or three lads lounged by on their way to the
+sea with towels and bathing-drawers over their arms. A few women were
+spinning flax on the door-lintels, or filling buckets of water from the
+fountain. A few children were trying to play mysterious games in the
+narrow alleys that led downward to the sea and upward to the mountains on
+the left and right of the street. A donkey brayed under an archway as if
+to summon its master from his siesta. A cat stole along the gutter, and
+vanished into a hole beneath a shut door. But the village was almost like
+a dead village, slain by the sun in his carelessness of pride.
+
+On his way to the post Maurice passed through the Piazza that was the
+glory of Marechiaro and the place of assemblage for its people. Here the
+music sounded on festa days before the stone steps that led up to the
+church of San Giuseppe. Here was the principal caffe, the Caffe Nuovo,
+where granite and ices were to be had, delicious yellow cakes, and
+chocolate made up into shapes of crowing cocks, of pigs, of little men
+with hats, and of saints with flowing robes. Here, too, was the club,
+with chairs and sofas now covered with white, and long tables adorned
+with illustrated journals and the papers of Catania, of Messina, and
+Palermo. But at this hour the caffe was closed and the club was empty.
+For the sun beat down with fury upon the open space with its tiled
+pavement, and the seats let into the wall that sheltered the Piazza from
+the precipice that frowned above the sea were untenanted by loungers. As
+Maurice went by he thought of Gaspare's words, "When a man cannot go any
+more into the Piazza--Madonna, it is finished!" This was the place where
+the public opinion of Marechiaro was formed, where fame was made and
+characters were taken away. He paused for an instant by the church, then
+went on under the clock tower and came to the post.
+
+"Any letters for me, Don Paolo?" he asked of the postmaster.
+
+The old man saluted him languidly through the peep-hole.
+
+"Si, signore, ce ne sono."
+
+He turned to seek for them while Maurice waited. He heard the flies
+buzzing. Their noise was loud in his ears. His heart beat strongly and he
+was gnawed by suspense. Never before had he felt so anxious, so impatient
+to know anything as he was now to know if among the letters there was one
+from Hermione.
+
+"Ecco, signore!"
+
+"Grazie!"
+
+Maurice took the packet.
+
+"A rivederci!"
+
+"A rivederlo, signore."
+
+He went away down the street. But now he had his letters he did not look
+at them immediately. Something held him back from looking at them until
+he had come again into the Piazza. It was still deserted. He went over to
+the seat by the wall, and sat down sideways, so that he could look over
+the wall to the sea immediately below him. Then, very slowly, he drew out
+his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, lit it, and began to smoke like
+a man who was at ease and idle. He glanced over the wall. At the foot of
+the precipice by the sea was the station of Cattaro, at which Hermione
+and Artois would arrive when they came. He could see the platform, some
+trucks of merchandise standing on the rails, the white road winding by
+towards San Felice and Etna. After a long look down he turned at last to
+the packet from the post which he had laid upon the hot stone at his
+side. The _Times_, the "Pink 'un," the _Illustrated London News_, and
+three letters. The first was obviously a bill forwarded from London. The
+second was also from England. He recognized the handwriting of his
+mother. The third? He turned it over. Yes, it was from Hermione. His
+instinct had not deceived him. He was certain, too, that it did not
+deceive him now. He was certain that this was the letter that fixed the
+date of her coming with Artois. He opened the two other letters and
+glanced over them, and then at last he tore the covering from Hermione's.
+A swift, searching look was enough. The letter dropped from his hand to
+the seat. He had seen these words:
+
+"Isn't it splendid? Emile may leave at once. But there is no good boat
+till the tenth. We shall take that, and be at Cattaro on the eleventh at
+five o'clock in the afternoon...."
+
+"Isn't it splendid?"
+
+For a moment he sat quite still in the glare of the sun, mentally
+repeating to himself these words of his wife. So the inevitable had
+happened. For he felt it was inevitable. Fate was against him. He was not
+to have his pleasure.
+
+"Signorino! Come sta lei? Lei sta bene?"
+
+He started and looked up. He had heard no footstep. Salvatore stood by
+him, smiling at him, Salvatore with bare feet, and a fish-basket slung
+over his arm.
+
+"Buon giorno, Salvatore!" he answered, with an effort.
+
+Salvatore looked at Maurice's cigarette, put down the basket, and sat
+down on the seat by Maurice's side.
+
+"I haven't smoked to-day, signore," he began. "Dio mio! But it must be
+good to have plenty of soldi!"
+
+"Ecco!"
+
+Maurice held out his cigarette-case.
+
+"Take two--three!"
+
+"Grazie, signore, mille grazie!"
+
+He took them greedily.
+
+"And the fair, signorino--only four days now to the fair! I have been to
+order the donkeys for me and Maddalena."
+
+"Davvero?" Maurice said, mechanically.
+
+"Si, signore. From Angelo of the mill. He wanted fifteen lire, but I
+laughed at him. I was with him a good hour and I got them for nine. Per
+Dio! Fifteen lire and to a Siciliano! For he didn't know you were coming.
+I took care not to tell him that."
+
+"Oh, you took care not to tell him that I was coming!"
+
+Maurice was looking over the wall at the platform of the station far down
+below. He seemed to see himself upon it, waiting for the train to glide
+in on the day of the fair, waiting among the smiling Sicilian facchini.
+
+"Si, signore. Was not I right?"
+
+"Quite right."
+
+"Per Dio, signore, these are good cigarettes. Where do they come from?"
+
+"From Cairo, in Egypt."
+
+"Egitto! They must cost a lot."
+
+He edged nearer to Maurice.
+
+"You must be very happy, signorino."
+
+"I!" Maurice laughed. "Madonna! Why?"
+
+"Because you are so rich!"
+
+There was a fawning sound in the fisherman's voice, a fawning look in his
+small, screwed-up eyes.
+
+"To you it would be nothing to buy all the donkeys at the fair of San
+Felice."
+
+Maurice moved ever so little away from him.
+
+"Ah, signorino, if I had been born you how happy I should be!"
+
+And he heaved a great sigh and puffed at the cigarette voluptuously.
+
+Maurice said nothing. He was still looking at the railway platform. And
+now he seemed to see the train gliding in on the day of the fair of San
+Felice.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+"Well, what is it, Salvatore?"
+
+"I have ordered the donkeys for ten o'clock. Then we can go quietly. They
+will be at Isola Bella at ten o'clock. I shall bring Maddalena round in
+the boat."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Salvatore chuckled.
+
+"She has got a surprise for you, signore."
+
+"A surprise?"
+
+"Per Dio!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+His voice was listless, but now he looked at Salvatore.
+
+"I ought not to tell you, signore. But--if I do--you won't ever tell
+her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"A new gown, signorino, a beautiful new gown, made by Maria Compagni here
+in the Corso. Will you be at Isola Bella with Gaspare by ten o'clock on
+the day, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, Salvatore!" Maurice said, in a loud, firm, almost angry voice. "I
+will be there. Don't doubt it. Addio Salvatore!"
+
+He got up.
+
+"A rivederci, signore. Ma--"
+
+He got up, too, and bent to pick up his fish-basket.
+
+"No, don't come with me. I'm going up now, straight up by the Castello."
+
+"In all this heat? But it's steep there, signore, and the path is all
+covered with stones. You'll never--"
+
+"That doesn't matter. I like the sun. Addio!"
+
+"And this evening, signorino? You are coming to bathe this evening?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't think so. Don't wait for me. Go to sea if you want
+to!"
+
+"Birbanti!" muttered the fisherman, as he watched Maurice stride away
+across the Piazza, and strike up the mountain-side by the tiny path that
+led to the Castello. "You want to get me out of the way, do you?
+Birbanti! Ah, you fine strangers from England! You think to come here and
+find men that are babies, do you? men that--"
+
+He went off noiselessly on his bare feet, muttering to himself with the
+half-smoked cigarette in his lean, brown hand.
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice climbed rapidly up the steep track over the stones in
+the eye of the sun. He had not lied to Salvatore. While the fisherman had
+been speaking to him he had come to a decision. A disgraceful decision he
+knew it to be, but he would keep to it. Nothing should prevent him from
+keeping to it. He would be at Isola Bella on the day of the fair. He
+would go to San Felice. He would stay there till the last rocket burst in
+the sky over Etna, till the last song had been sung, the last toast
+shouted, the last tarantella danced, the last--kiss given--the last, the
+very last. He would ignore this message from Africa. He would pretend he
+had never received it. He would lie about it. Yes, he would lie--but he
+would have his pleasure. He was determined upon that, and nothing should
+shake him, no qualms of conscience, no voices within him, no memories of
+past days, no promptings of duty.
+
+He hurried up the stony path. He did not feel the sun upon him. The sweat
+poured down over his face, his body. He did not know it. His heart was
+set hard, and he felt villanous, but he felt quite sure what he was going
+to do, quite sure that he was going to the fair despite that letter.
+
+When he reached the priest's house he felt exhausted. Without knowing it
+he had come up the mountain at a racing pace. But he was not tired merely
+because of that. He sank down in a chair in the sitting-room. Lucrezia
+came and peeped at him.
+
+"Where is Gaspare?" he asked, putting his hand instinctively over the
+pocket in which were the letters.
+
+"He is still out after the birds, signore. He has shot five already."
+
+"Poor little wretches! And he's still out?"
+
+"Si, signore. He has gone on to Don Peppino's terreno now. There are many
+birds there. How hot you are, signorino! Shall I--"
+
+"No, no. Nothing, Lucrezia! Leave me alone!"
+
+She disappeared.
+
+Then Maurice drew the letters from his pocket and slowly spread out
+Hermione's in his lap. He had not read it through yet. He had only
+glanced at it and seen what he had feared to see. Now he read it word by
+word, very slowly and carefully. When he had come to the end he kept it
+on his knee and sat for some time quite still.
+
+In the letter Hermione asked him to go to the Hotel Regina Margherita at
+Marechiaro, and engage two good rooms facing the sea for Artois, a
+bedroom and a sitting-room. They were to be ready for the eleventh. She
+wrote with her usual splendid frankness. Her soul was made of sincerity
+as a sovereign is made of gold.
+
+"I know"--these were her words--"I know you will try and make Emile's
+coming to Sicily a little festa. Don't think I imagine you are personally
+delighted at his coming, though I am sure you are delighted at his
+recovery. He is my old friend, not yours, and I am not such a fool as to
+suppose that you can care for him at all as I do, who have known him
+intimately and proved his loyalty and his nobility of nature. But I
+think, I am certain, Maurice, that you will make his coming a festa for
+my sake. He has suffered very much. He is as weak almost as a child
+still. There's something tremendously pathetic in the weakness of body of
+a man so brilliant in mind, so powerful of soul. It goes right to my
+heart as I think it would go to yours. Let us make his return to life
+beautiful and blessed. Sha'n't we? Put flowers in the rooms for me, won't
+you? Make them look homey. Put some books about. But I needn't tell you.
+We are one, you and I, and I needn't tell you any more. It would be like
+telling things to myself--as unnecessary as teaching an organ-grinder how
+to turn the handle of his organ! Oh, Maurice, I can laugh to-day! I could
+almost--_I_--get up and dance the tarantella all alone here in my little,
+bare room with no books and scarcely any flowers. And at the station show
+Emile he is welcome. He is a little diffident at coming. He fancies
+perhaps he will be in the way. But one look of yours, one grasp of your
+hand will drive it all out of him! God bless you, my dearest. How he has
+blessed me in giving you to me!"
+
+As Maurice sat there, under his skin, burned deep brown by the sun, there
+rose a hot flush of red! Yes, he reddened at the thought of what he was
+going to do, but still he meant to do it. He could not forego his
+pleasure. He could not. There was something wild and imperious within him
+that defied his better self at this moment. But the better self was not
+dead. It was even startlingly alive, enough alive to stand almost aghast
+at that which was going, it knew, to dominate it--to dominate it for a
+time, but only for a time. On that he was resolved, as he was resolved to
+have this one pleasure to which he had looked forward, to which he was
+looking forward now. Men often mentally put a period to their sinning.
+Maurice put a period to his sinning as he sat staring at the letter on
+his knees. And the period which he put was the day of the fair at San
+Felice. After that day this book of his wild youth was to be closed
+forever.
+
+After the day of the fair he would live rightly, sincerely, meeting as it
+deserved to be met the utter sincerity of his wife. He would be, after
+that date, entirely straight with her. He loved her. As he looked at her
+letter he felt that he did love, must love, such love as hers. He was not
+a bad man, but he was a wilful man. The wild heart of youth in him was
+wilful. Well, after San Felice, he would control that wilfulness of his
+heart, he would discipline it. He would do more, he would forget that it
+existed. After San Felice!
+
+With a sigh, like that of a burdened man, he got up, took the letter in
+his hand, and went out up the mountain-side. There he tore the letter and
+its envelope into fragments, and hid the fragments in a heap of stones
+hot with the sun.
+
+When Gaspare came in that evening with a string of little birds in his
+hand and asked Maurice if there were any letter from Africa to say when
+the signora would arrive, Maurice answered "No."
+
+"Then the signora will not be here for the fair, signorino?" said the
+boy.
+
+"I don't suppose--no, Gaspare, she will not be here for the fair."
+
+"She would have written by now if she were coming.
+
+"Yes, if she were coming she would certainly have written by now."
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Are you ready?"
+
+It was Gaspare's voice shouting vivaciously from the sunny terrace, where
+Tito and another donkey, gayly caparisoned and decorated with flowers and
+little streamers of colored ribbon, were waiting before the steps.
+
+"Si, si! I'm coming in a moment!" replied Maurice's voice from the
+bedroom.
+
+Lucrezia stood by the wall looking very dismal. She longed to go to the
+fair, and that made her sad. But there was also another reason for her
+depression. Sebastiano was still away, and for many days he had not
+written to her. This was bad enough. But there was something worse. News
+had come to Marechiaro from a sailor of Messina, a friend of
+Sebastiano's, that Sebastiano was lingering in the Lipari Isles because
+he had found a girl there, a pretty girl called Teodora Amalfi, to whom
+he was paying attentions. And although Lucrezia laughed at the story, and
+pretended to disbelieve it, her heart was rent by jealousy and despair,
+and a longing to travel away, to cross the sea, to tear her lover from
+temptation, to--to speak for a few moments quietly--oh, very
+quietly--with this Teodora. Even now, while she stared at the donkeys,
+and at Gaspare in his festa suit, with two large, pink roses above his
+ears, she put up her hands instinctively to her own ears, as if to pluck
+the ear-rings out of them, as the Sicilian women of the lower classes do,
+deliberately, sternly, before they begin to fight their rivals, women who
+have taken their lovers or their husbands from them.
+
+Ah, if she were only in the Lipari Isles she would speak with Teodora
+Amalfi, speak with her till the blood flowed! She set her teeth, and her
+face looked almost old in the sunshine.
+
+"Coraggio, Lucrezia!" laughed Gaspare. "He will come back some day
+when--when he has sold enough to the people of the isles! But where is
+the padrone, Dio mio? Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Maurice appeared at the sitting-room door and came slowly down the steps.
+
+Gaspare stared. "Eccomi!"
+
+"Why, signorino, what is the matter? What has happened?"
+
+"Happened? Nothing!"
+
+"Then why do you look so black?"
+
+"I! It's the shadow of the awning on my face."
+
+He smiled. He kept on smiling.
+
+"I say, Gasparino, how splendid the donkeys are! And you, too!"
+
+He took hold of the boy by the shoulders and turned him round.
+
+"Per Bacco! We shall make a fine show at the fair! I've got money, lot's
+of money, to spend!"
+
+He showed his portfolio, full of dirty notes. Gaspare's eyes began to
+sparkle.
+
+"Wait, signorino!"
+
+He lifted his hands to Maurice's striped flannel jacket and thrust two
+large bunches of flowers and ferns into the two button-holes, to right
+and left.
+
+"Bravo! Now, then."
+
+"No, no, signorino! Wait!"
+
+"More flowers! But where--what, over my ears, too!"
+
+He began to laugh.
+
+"But--"
+
+"Si, signore, si! To-day you must be a real Siciliano!"
+
+"Va bene!"
+
+He bent down his head to be decorated.
+
+"Pouf! They tickle! There, then! Now let's be off!"
+
+He leaped onto Tito's back. Gaspare sprang up on the other donkey.
+
+"Addio, Lucrezia!"
+
+Maurice turned to her.
+
+"Don't leave the house to-day."
+
+"No, signore," said poor Lucrezia, in a deplorable voice.
+
+"Mind, now! Don't go down to Marechiaro this afternoon."
+
+There was an odd sound, almost of pleading, in his voice.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"I trust you to be here--remember."
+
+"Va bene, signorino!"
+
+"Ah--a--a--ah!" shouted Gaspare.
+
+They were off.
+
+"Signorino," said Gaspare, presently, when they were in the shadow of the
+ravine, "why did you say all that to Lucrezia?"
+
+"All what?"
+
+"All that about not leaving the house to-day?"
+
+"Oh--why--it's better to have some one there."
+
+"Si, signore. But why to-day specially?"
+
+"I don't know. There's no particular reason."
+
+"I thought there was."
+
+"No, of course not. How could there be?"
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+"If Lucrezia goes down to the village they'll be filling her ears with
+that stupid gossip about Sebastiano and that girl--Teodora."
+
+"It was for Lucrezia then, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, for Lucrezia. She's miserable enough already. I don't want her to
+be a spectacle when--when the signora returns."
+
+"I wonder when she is coming? I wonder why she has not written all these
+days?"
+
+"Oh, she'll soon come. We shall--we shall very soon have her here with
+us."
+
+He tried to speak naturally, but found the effort difficult, knowing what
+he knew, that in the evening of that day Hermione would arrive at the
+house of the priest and find no preparations made for her return, no one
+to welcome her but Lucrezia--if, indeed, Lucrezia obeyed his orders and
+refrained from descending to the village on the chance of hearing some
+fresh news of her fickle lover. And Artois! There were no rooms engaged
+for him at the Hotel Regina Margherita. There were no flowers, no books.
+Maurice tingled--his whole body tingled for a moment--and he felt like a
+man guilty of some mean crime and arraigned before all the world. Then he
+struck Tito with his switch, and began to gallop down the steep path at a
+breakneck pace, sticking his feet far out upon either side. He would
+forget. He would put away these thoughts that were tormenting him. He
+would enjoy this day of pleasure for which he had sacrificed so much, for
+which he had trampled down his self-respect in the dust.
+
+When they reached the road by Isola Bella, Salvatore's boat was just
+coming round the point, vigorously propelled by the fisherman's strong
+arms over the radiant sea. It was a magnificent day, very hot but not
+sultry, free from sirocco. The sky was deep blue, a passionate, exciting
+blue that seemed vocal, as if it were saying thrilling things to the
+world that lay beneath it. The waveless sea was purple, a sea, indeed, of
+legend, a wine-dark, lustrous, silken sea. Into it, just here along this
+magic coast, was surely gathered all the wonder of color of all the
+southern seas. They must be blanched to make this marvel of glory, this
+immense jewel of God. And the lemon groves were thick along the sea. And
+the orange-trees stood in their decorative squadrons drinking in the
+rays of the sun with an ecstatic submission. And Etna, snowless Etna,
+rose to heaven out of this morning world, with its base in the purple
+glory and its feather of smoke in the calling blue, child of the sea-god
+and of the god that looks down from the height, majestically calm in the
+riot of splendor that set the feet of June dancing in a great tarantella.
+
+As Maurice saw the wonder of sea and sky, the boat coming in over the
+sea, with Maddalena in the stern holding a bouquet of flowers, his heart
+leaped up and he forgot for a moment the shadow in himself, the shadow of
+his own unworthiness. He sprang off the donkey.
+
+"I'll go down to meet them!" he cried. "Catch hold of Tito, Gaspare!"
+
+The railway line ran along the sea, between road and beach. He had to
+cross it. In doing so one of his feet struck the metal rail, which gave
+out a dry sound. He looked down, suddenly recalled to a reality other
+than the splendor of the morning, the rapture of this careless festa day.
+And again he was conscious of the shadow. Along this line, in a few
+hours, would come the train bearing Hermione and Artois. Hermione would
+be at the window, eagerly looking out, full of happy anticipation,
+leaning to catch the first sight of his face, to receive and return his
+smile of welcome. What would her face be like when--? But Salvatore was
+hailing him from the sea. Maddalena was waving her hand. The thing was
+done. The die was cast. He had chosen his lot. Fiercely he put away from
+him the thought of Hermione, lifted his voice in an answering hail, his
+hand in a salutation which he tried to make carelessly joyous. The boat
+glided in between the flat rocks. And then--then he was able to forget.
+For Maddalena's long eyes were looking into his, with the joyousness of a
+child's, and yet with something of the expectation of a woman's, too. And
+her brown face was alive with a new and delicious self-consciousness,
+asking him to praise her for the surprise she had prepared, in his honor
+surely, specially for him, and not for her comrades and the public of the
+fair.
+
+"Maddalena!" he exclaimed.
+
+He put out his hands to help her out. She stood on the gunwale of the
+boat and jumped lightly down, with a little laugh, onto the beach.
+
+"Maddalena! Per Dio! Ma che bellezza!"
+
+She laughed again, and stood there on the stones before him smiling and
+watching him, with her head a little on one side, and the hand that held
+the tight bouquet of roses and ferns, round as a ring and red as dawn, up
+to her lips, as if a sudden impulse prompted her now to conceal something
+of her pleasure.
+
+"Le piace?"
+
+It came to him softly over the roses.
+
+Maurice said nothing, but took her hand and looked at her. Salvatore was
+fastening up the boat and putting the oars into their places, and getting
+his jacket and hat.
+
+What a transformation it was, making an almost new Maddalena! This
+festival dress was really quite wonderful. He felt inclined to touch it
+here and there, to turn Maddalena round for new aspects, as a child turns
+round a marvellous doll.
+
+Maddalena wore a tudischina, a bodice of blue cotton velvet, ornamented
+with yellow silken fringes, and opening over the breast to show a section
+of snowy white edged with little buttons of sparkling steel. Her
+petticoat--the sinava--was of pea-green silk and thread, and was
+partially covered by an apron, a real coquette of an apron, white and
+green, with little pockets and puckers, and a green rosette where the
+strings met round the supple waist. Her sleeves were of white muslin,
+bound with yellow silk ribbons, and her stockings were blue, the color of
+the bodice. On her feet were shining shoes of black leather, neatly tied
+with small, black ribbons, and over her shoulders was a lovely shawl of
+blue and white with a pattern of flowers. She wore nothing on her head,
+but in her ears were heavy ear-rings, and round her neck was a thin
+silver chain with bright-blue stones threaded on it here and there.
+
+"Maddalena!" Maurice said, at last. "You are a queen to-day!"
+
+He stopped, then he added:
+
+"No, you are a siren to-day, the siren I once fancied you might be."
+
+"A siren, signorino? What is that?"
+
+"An enchantress of the sea with a voice that makes men--that makes men
+feel they cannot go, they cannot leave it."
+
+Maddalena lifted the roses a little higher to hide her face, but Maurice
+saw that her eyes were still smiling, and it seemed to him that she
+looked even more radiantly happy than when she had taken his hands to
+spring down to the beach.
+
+Now Salvatore came up in his glory of a dark-blue suit, with a gay shirt
+of pink-and-white striped cotton, fastened at the throat with long, pink
+strings that had tasselled ends, a scarlet bow-tie with a brass anchor
+and the Italian flag thrust through it, yellow shoes, and a black hat,
+placed well over the left ear. Upon the forefinger of his left hand he
+displayed a thick snake-ring of tarnished metal, and he had a large,
+overblown rose in his button-hole. His mustaches had been carefully
+waxed, his hair cropped, and his hawklike, subtle, and yet violent face
+well washed for the great occasion. With bold familiarity he seized
+Maurice's hand.
+
+"Buon giorno, signore. Come sta lei?"
+
+"Benissimo."
+
+"And Maddalena, signore? What do you think of Maddalena?"
+
+He looked at his girl with a certain pride, and then back at Maurice
+searchingly.
+
+"Maddalena is beautiful to-day," Maurice answered, quickly. He did not
+want to discuss her with her father, whom he longed to be rid of, whom he
+meant to get rid of if possible at the fair. Surely it would be easy to
+give him the slip there. He would be drinking with his companions, other
+fishermen and contadini, or playing cards, or--yes, that was an idea!
+
+"Salvatore!" Maurice exclaimed, catching hold of the fisherman's arm.
+
+"Signore?"
+
+"There'll be donkeys at the fair, eh?"
+
+"Donkeys--per Dio! Why, last year there were over sixty, and--"
+
+"And isn't there a donkey auction sometimes, towards the end of the day,
+when they go cheap?"
+
+"Si, signore! Si, signore!"
+
+The fisherman's greedy little eyes were fixed on Maurice with keen
+interrogation.
+
+"Don't let us forget that," Maurice said, returning his gaze. "You're a
+good judge of a donkey?"
+
+Salvatore laughed.
+
+"Per Bacco! There won't be a man at San Felice that can beat me at that!"
+
+"Then perhaps you can do something for me. Perhaps you can buy me a
+donkey. Didn't I speak of it before?"
+
+"Si, signore. For the signora to ride when she comes back from Africa?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"For a lady to ride," Maurice answered, looking at Maddalena.
+
+Salvatore made a clicking noise with his tongue, a noise that suggested
+eating. Then he spat vigorously and took from his jacket-pocket a long,
+black cigar. This was evidently going to be a great day for him.
+
+"Avanti, signorino! Avanti!"
+
+Gaspare was shouting and waving his hat frantically from the road.
+
+"Come along, Maddalena!"
+
+They left the beach and climbed the bank, Maddalena walking carefully in
+the shining shoes, and holding her green skirt well away from the bushes
+with both hands. Maurice hurried across the railway line without looking
+at it. He wanted to forget it. He was determined to forget it, and what
+it was bringing to Cattaro that afternoon. They reached the group of four
+donkeys which were standing patiently in the dusty white road.
+
+"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Gaspare, as Maddalena came full into his sight.
+"Madre mia! But you are like a burgisa dressed for the wedding-day, Donna
+Maddalena!"
+
+He wagged his head at her till the big roses above his ears shook like
+flowers in a wind.
+
+"Ora basta, ch' e tardu: jamu ad accumpagnari li Zitti!" he continued,
+pronouncing the time-honored sentence which, at a rustic wedding, gives
+the signal to the musicians to stop their playing, and to the assembled
+company the hint that the moment has come to escort the bride to the new
+home which her bridegroom has prepared for her.
+
+Maddalena laughed and blushed all over her face, and Salvatore shouted
+out a verse of a marriage song in high favor at Sicilian weddings:
+
+               "E cu saluti a li Zituzzi novi!
+               Chi bellu 'nguaggiamentu furtunatu!
+               Firma la menti, custanti lu cori,
+               E si cci arriva a lu jornu biatu--"
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice helped Maddalena onto her donkey, and paid and
+dismissed the boy who had brought it and Salvatore's beast from
+Marechiaro. Then he took out his watch.
+
+"A quarter-past ten," he said. "Off we go! Now, Gaspare--uno! due! tre!"
+
+They leaped simultaneously onto their donkeys, Salvatore clambered up on
+his, and the little cavalcade started off on the long, white road that
+ran close along the sea, Maddalena and Maurice in the van, Salvatore and
+Gaspare behind. Just at first they all kept close together, but Sicilians
+are very careful of their festa clothes, and soon Salvatore and Gaspare
+dropped farther behind to avoid the clouds of dust stirred up by the
+tripping feet of the donkeys in front. Their chattering voices died away,
+and when Maurice looked back he saw them at a distance which rendered his
+privacy with Maddalena more complete than anything he had dared to hope
+for so early in the day. Yet now that they were thus alone he felt as if
+he had nothing to say to her. He did not feel exactly constrained, but it
+seemed to him that, to-day, he could not talk the familiar commonplaces
+to her, or pay her obvious compliments. They might, they would please
+her, but something in himself would resent them. This was to be such a
+great day. He had wanted it with such ardor, he had been so afraid of
+missing it, he had gained it at the cost of so much self-respect, that it
+ought to be extraordinary from dawn to dark, and he and Maddalena to be
+unusual, intense--something, at least, more eager, more happy, more
+intimate than usual in it.
+
+And then, too, as he looked at her riding along by the sea, with her
+young head held rather high and a smile of innocent pride in her eyes, he
+remembered that this day was their good-bye. Maddalena did not know that.
+Probably she did not think about the future. But he knew it. They might
+meet again. They would doubtless meet again. But it would all be
+different. He would be a serious married man, who could no longer frolic
+as if he were still a boy like Gaspare. This was the last day of his
+intimate friendship with Maddalena.
+
+That seemed to him very strange. He had become accustomed to her society,
+to her naive curiosity, her girlish, simple gayety, so accustomed to it
+all that he could not imagine life without it, could scarcely realize
+what life had been before he knew Maddalena. It seemed to him that he
+must have always known Maddalena. And she--what did she feel about that?
+
+"Maddalena!" he said.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+She turned her head and glanced at him, smiling, as if she were sure of
+hearing something pleasant. To-day, in her pretty festa dress, she looked
+intended for happiness. Everything about her conveyed the suggestion that
+she was expectant of joy. The expression in her eyes was a summons to the
+world to be very kind and good to her, to give her only pleasant things,
+things that could not harm her.
+
+"Maddalena, do you feel as if you had known me long?"
+
+She nodded her head.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"How long?"
+
+She spread out one hand with the fingers held apart.
+
+"Oh, signore--but always! I feel as if I had known you always."
+
+"And yet it's only a few days."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+She acquiesced calmly. The problem did not seem to puzzle her, the
+problem of this feeling so ill-founded. It was so. Very well, then--so it
+was.
+
+"And," he went on, "do you feel as if you would always know me?"
+
+"Si, signore. Of course."
+
+"But I shall go away, I am going away."
+
+For a moment her face clouded. But the influence of joy was very strong
+upon her to-day, and the cloud passed.
+
+"But you will come back, signorino. You will always come back."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+A pretty slyness crept into her face, showed in the curve of the young
+lips, in the expression of the young eyes.
+
+"Because you like to be here, because you like the Siciliani. Isn't it
+true?"
+
+"Yes," he said, almost passionately. "It's true! Ah, Maddalena--"
+
+But at this moment a group of people from Marechiaro suddenly appeared
+upon the road beside them, having descended from the village by a
+mountain-path. There were exclamations, salutations. Maddalena's gown was
+carefully examined by the women of the party. The men exchanged
+compliments with Maurice. Then Salvatore and Gaspare, seeing friends,
+came galloping up, shouting, in a cloud of dust. A cavalcade was formed,
+and henceforth Maurice was unable to exchange any more confidences with
+Maddalena. He felt vexed at first, but the boisterous merriment of all
+these people, their glowing anticipation of pleasure, soon infected him.
+His heart was lightened of its burden and the spirit of the careless boy
+awoke in him. He would take no thought for the morrow, he would be able
+to take no thought so long as he was in this jocund company. As they
+trotted forward in a white mist along the shining sea Maurice was one of
+the gayest among them. No laugh rang out more frequently than his, no
+voice chatted more vivaciously. The conscious effort which at first he
+had to make seemed to give him an impetus, to send him onward with a rush
+so that he outdistanced his companions. Had any one observed him closely
+during that ride to the fair he might well have thought that here was a
+nature given over to happiness, a nature that was utterly sunny in the
+sun.
+
+They passed through the town of Cattaro, where was the station for
+Marechiaro. For a moment Maurice felt a pang of self-contempt, and of
+something more, of something that was tender, pitiful even, as he thought
+of Hermione's expectation disappointed. But it died away, or he thrust
+it away. The long street was full of people, either preparing to start
+for the fair themselves or standing at their doors to watch their friends
+start. Donkeys were being saddled and decorated with flowers. Tall,
+painted carts were being harnessed to mules. Visions of men being
+lathered and shaved, of women having their hair dressed or their hair
+searched, Sicilian fashion, of youths trying to curl upward scarcely born
+mustaches, of children being hastily attired in clothes which made them
+wriggle and squint, came to the eyes from houses in which privacy was not
+so much scorned as unthought of, utterly unknown. Turkeys strolled in and
+out among the toilet-makers. Pigs accompanied their mistresses from
+doorway to doorway as dogs accompany the women of other countries. And
+the cavalcade of the people of Marechiaro was hailed from all sides with
+pleasantries and promises to meet at the fair, with broad jokes or
+respectful salutations. Many a "Benedicite!" or "C'ci basu li mano!"
+greeted Maurice. Many a berretto was lifted from heads that he had never
+seen to his knowledge before. He was made to feel by all that he was
+among friends, and as he returned the smiles and salutations he
+remembered the saying Hermione had repeated: "Every Sicilian, even if he
+wears a long cap and sleeps in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman," and
+he thought it very true.
+
+It seemed as if they would never get away from the street. At every
+moment they halted. One man begged them to wait a moment till his donkey
+was saddled, so that he might join them. Another, a wine-shop keeper,
+insisted on Maurice's testing his moscato, and thereupon Maurice felt
+obliged to order glasses all round, to the great delight of Gaspare, who
+always felt himself to be glorified by the generosity of his padrone, and
+who promptly took the proceedings in charge, measured out the wine in
+appropriate quantities, handed it about, and constituted himself master
+of the ceremony. Already, at eleven o'clock, brindisi were invented, and
+Maurice was called upon to "drop into poetry." Then Maddalena caught
+sight of some girl friends, and must needs show them all her finery. For
+this purpose she solemnly dismounted from her donkey to be closely
+examined on the pavement, turned about, shook forth her pea-green skirt,
+took off her chain for more minute inspection, and measured the silken
+fringes of her shawl in order to compare them with other shawls which
+were hastily brought out from a house near-by.
+
+But Gaspare, always a little ruthless with women, soon tired of such
+vanities.
+
+"Avanti! Avanti!" he shouted. "Dio mio! Le donne sono pazze! Andiamo!
+Andiamo!"
+
+He hustled Maddalena, who yielded, blushing and laughing, to his
+importunities, and at last they were really off again, and drowned in a
+sea of odor as they passed some buildings where lemons were being packed
+to be shipped away from Sicily. This smell seemed to Maurice to be the
+very breath of the island. He drank it in eagerly. Lemons, lemons, and
+the sun! Oranges, lemons, yellow flowers under the lemons, and the sun!
+Always yellow, pale yellow, gold yellow, red-gold yellow, and white, and
+silver-white, the white of the roads, the silver-white of dusty olive
+leaves, and green, the dark, lustrous, polished green of orange leaves,
+and purple and blue, the purple of sea, the blue of sky. What a riot of
+talk it was, and what a riot of color! It made Maurice feel almost drunk.
+It was heady, this island of the south--heady in the summer-time. It had
+a powerful influence, an influence that was surely an excuse for much.
+Ah, the stay-at-homes, who condemned the far-off passions and violences
+of men! What did they know of the various truths of the world? How should
+one in Clapham judge one at the fair of San Felice? Avanti! Avanti!
+Avanti along the blinding white road by the sea, to the village on which
+great Etna looked down, not harshly for all its majesty. Nature
+understood. And God, who made Nature, who was behind Nature--did not He
+understand? There is forgiveness surely in great hearts, though the small
+hearts have no space to hold it.
+
+Something like this Maurice thought for a moment, ere a large
+thoughtlessness swept over him, bred of the sun and the odors, the
+movement, the cries and laughter of his companions, the gay gown and the
+happy glances of Maddalena, even of the white dust that whirled up from
+the feet of the cantering donkeys.
+
+And so, ever laughing, ever joking, gayly, almost tumultuously, they
+rushed upon the fair.
+
+San Felice is a large village in the plain at the foot of Etna. It lies
+near the sea between Catania and Messina, but beyond the black and
+forbidding lava land. Its patron saint, Protettore di San Felice, is
+Sant' Onofrio, and this was his festival. In the large, old church in the
+square, which was the centre of the life of the fiera, his image,
+smothered in paint, sumptuously decorated with red and gold and bunches
+of artificial flowers, was exposed under a canopy with pillars; and thin
+squares of paper reproducing its formal charms--the oval face with large
+eyes and small, straight nose, the ample forehead, crowned with hair that
+was brought down to a point in the centre, the undulating, divided beard
+descending upon the breast, one hand holding a book, the other upraised
+in a blessing--were sold for a soldo to all who would buy them.
+
+The first thing the party from Isola Bella and from Marechiaro did, when
+they had stabled their donkeys at Don Leontini's, in the Via Bocca di
+Leone, was to pay the visit of etiquette to Sant' Onofrio. Their laughter
+was stilled at the church doorway, through which women and men draped in
+shawls, lads and little children, were coming and going. Their faces
+assumed expressions of superstitious reverence and devotion. And, going
+up one by one to the large image of the saint, they contemplated it with
+awe, touched its hand or the hem of its robe, made the sign of the cross,
+and retreated, feeling that they were blessed for the day.
+
+Maddalena approached the saint with Maurice and Gaspare. She and Gaspare
+touched the hand that held the book, made the sign of the cross, then
+stared at Maurice to see why he did nothing. He quickly followed their
+example. Maddalena, who was pulling some of the roses from her tight
+bouquet, whispered to him:
+
+"Sant' Onofrio will bring us good-fortune."
+
+"Davvero?" he whispered back.
+
+"Si! Si!" said Gaspare, nodding his head.
+
+While Maddalena laid her flowers upon the lap of the saint, Gaspare
+bought from a boy three sheets of paper containing Sant' Onofrio's
+reproduction, and three more showing the effigies of San Filadelfo, Sant'
+Alfio, and San Cirino.
+
+"Ecco, Donna Maddalena! Ecco, signorino!"
+
+He distributed his purchases, keeping two for himself. These last he very
+carefully and solemnly folded up and bestowed in the inner pocket of his
+jacket, which contained a leather portfolio, given to him by Maurice to
+carry his money in.
+
+"Ecco!" he said, once more, as he buttoned the flap of the pocket as a
+precaution against thieves.
+
+And with that final exclamation he dismissed all serious thoughts.
+
+"Mangiamo, signorino!" he said. "Ora basta!"
+
+And they went forth into the sunshine. Salvatore was talking to some
+fishermen from Catania upon the steps. They cast curious glances at
+Maurice as he came out with Maddalena, and, when Salvatore went off with
+his daughter and the forestiere, they laughed among themselves and
+exchanged some remarks that were evidently merry. But Maurice did not
+heed them. He was not a self-conscious man. And Maddalena was far too
+happy to suppose that any one could be saying nasty things about her.
+
+"Where are we going to eat?" asked Maurice.
+
+"This way, this way, signorino!" replied Gaspare, elbowing a passage
+through the crowd. "You must follow me. I know where to go. I have many
+friends here."
+
+The truth of this statement was speedily made manifest. Almost every
+third person they met saluted Gaspare, some kissing him upon both cheeks,
+others grasping his hand, others taking him familiarly by the arm. Among
+the last was a tall boy with jet-black, curly hair and a long, pale face,
+whom Gaspare promptly presented to his padrone, by the name of Amedeo
+Buccini.
+
+"Amedeo is a parrucchiere, signorino," he said, "and my compare, and the
+best dancer in San Felice. May he eat with us?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+Gaspare informed Amedeo, who took off his hat, held it in his hand, and
+smiled all over his face with pleasure.
+
+"Yes, Gaspare is my compare, signore," he affirmed. "Compare, compare,
+compareddu"--he glanced at Gaspare, who joined in with him:
+
+               "Compare, compare, compareddu,
+               Io ti voglio molto bene,
+               Mangiamo sempre insieme--
+               Mangiamo carne e riso
+               E andiamo in Paradiso!"
+
+"Carne e riso--si!" cried Maurice, laughing. "But Paradise! Must you go
+to Paradise directly afterwards, before the dancing and before the
+procession and before the fireworks?"
+
+"No, signore," said Gaspare. "When we are very old, when we cannot dance
+any more--non e vero, Amedeo?--then we will go to Paradiso."
+
+"Yes," agreed the tall boy, quite seriously, "then we will go to
+Paradiso."
+
+"And I, too," said Maurice; "and Maddalena, but not till then."
+
+What a long time away that would be!
+
+"Here is the ristorante!"
+
+They had reached a long room with doors open onto the square, opposite to
+the rows of booths which were set up under the shadow of the church.
+Outside of it were many small tables and numbers of chairs on which
+people were sitting, contemplating the movement of the crowd of buyers
+and sellers, smoking, drinking syrups, gazzosa, and eating ices and flat
+biscuits.
+
+Gaspare guided them through the throng to a long table set on a sanded
+floor.
+
+"Ecco, signorino!"
+
+He installed Maurice at the top of the table.
+
+"And you sit here, Donna Maddalena."
+
+He placed her at Maurice's right hand, and was going to sit down himself
+on the left, when Salvatore roughly pushed in before him, seized the
+chair, sat in it, and leaned his arms on the table with a loud laugh that
+sounded defiant. An ugly look came into Gaspare's face.
+
+"Macche--" he began, angrily.
+
+But Maurice silenced him with a quick look.
+
+"Gaspare, you come here, by Maddalena!"
+
+"Ma--"
+
+"Come along, Gasparino, and tell us what we are to have. You must order
+everything. Where's the cameriere? Cameriere! Cameriere!"
+
+He struck on his glass with a fork. A waiter came running.
+
+"Don Gaspare will order for us all," said Maurice to him, pointing to
+Gaspare.
+
+His diplomacy was successful. Gaspare's face cleared, and in a moment he
+was immersed in an eager colloquy with the waiter, another friend of his
+from Marechiaro. Amedeo Buccini took a place by Gaspare, and all those
+from Marechiaro, who evidently considered that they belonged to the
+Inglese's party for the day, arranged themselves as they pleased and
+waited anxiously for the coming of the macaroni.
+
+A certain formality now reigned over the assembly. The movement of the
+road in the outside world by the sea had stirred the blood, had loosened
+tongues and quickened spirits. But a meal in a restaurant, with a rich
+English signore presiding at the head of the table, was an unaccustomed
+ceremony. Dark faces that had been lit up with laughter now looked almost
+ludicrously discreet. Brown hands which had been in constant activity,
+talking as plainly, and more expressively, than voices, now lay limply
+upon the white cloth or were placed upon knees motionless as the knees of
+statues. And all eyes were turned towards the giver of the feast, mutely
+demanding of him a signal of conduct to guide his inquiring guests. But
+Maurice, too, felt for the moment tongue-tied. He was very sensitive to
+influences, and his present position, between Maddalena and her father,
+created within him a certain confusion of feelings, an odd sensation of
+being between two conflicting elements. He was conscious of affection and
+of enmity, both close to him, both strong, the one ready to show itself,
+the other determined to remain in hiding. He glanced at Salvatore, and
+met the fisherman's keen gaze. Behind the instant smile in the glittering
+eyes he divined, rather than saw, the shadow of his hatred. And for a
+moment he wondered. Why should Salvatore hate him? It was reasonable to
+hate a man for a wrong done, even for a wrong deliberately contemplated
+with intention--the intention of committing it. But he had done no real
+wrong to Salvatore. Nor had he any evil intention with regard to him or
+his. So far he had only brought pleasure into their lives, his life and
+Maddalena's--pleasure and money. If there had been any secret pain
+engendered by their mutual intercourse it was his. And this day was the
+last of their intimacy, though Salvatore and Maddalena did not know it.
+Suddenly a desire, an almost weak desire, came to him to banish
+Salvatore's distrust of him, a distrust which he was more conscious of at
+this moment than ever before.
+
+He did not know of the muttered comments of the fishermen from Catania as
+he and Maddalena passed down the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio.
+But Salvatore's sharp ears had caught them and the laughter that followed
+them, and his hot blood was on fire. The words, the laughter had touched
+his sensitive Sicilian pride--the pride of the man who means never to be
+banished from the Piazza--as a knife touches a raw wound. And as Maurice
+had set a limit to his sinning--his insincerity to Hermione, his betrayal
+of her complete trust in him, nothing more--so Salvatore now, while he
+sat at meat with the Inglese, mentally put a limit to his own
+complaisance, a complaisance which had been born of his intense avarice.
+To-day he would get all he could out of the Inglese--money, food, wine, a
+donkey--who knew what? And then--good-bye to soft speeches. Those
+fishermen, his friends, his comrades, his world, in fact, should have
+their mouths shut once for all. He knew how to look after his girl, and
+they should know that he knew, they and all Marechiaro, and all San
+Felice, and all Cattaro. His limit, like Maurice's, was that day of the
+fair, and it was nearly reached. For the hours were hurrying towards the
+night and farewells.
+
+Moved by his abrupt desire to stand well with everybody during this last
+festa, Maurice began to speak to Salvatore of the donkey auction. When
+would it begin?
+
+"Chi lo sa?"
+
+No one knew. In Sicily all feasts are movable. Even mass may begin an
+hour too late or an hour too early. One thought the donkey auction would
+start at fourteen, another at sixteen o'clock. Gaspare was imperiously
+certain, over the macaroni, which had now made its appearance, that the
+hour was seventeen. There were to be other auctions, auctions of
+wonderful things. A clock that played music--the "Marcia Reale" and the
+"Tre Colori"--was to be put up; suits of clothes, too; boots, hats, a
+chair that rocked like a boat on the sea, a revolver ornamented with
+ivory. Already--no one knew when, for no one had missed him--he had been
+to view these treasures. As he spoke of them tongues were loosed and eyes
+shone with excitement. Money was in the air. Prices were passionately
+discussed, values debated. All down the table went the words "soldi,"
+"lire," "lire sterline," "biglietti da cinque," "biglietti da dieci."
+Salvatore's hatred died away, suffocated for the moment under the weight
+of his avarice. A donkey--yes, he meant to get a donkey with the
+stranger's money. But why stop there? Why not have the clock and the
+rocking-chair and the revolver? His sharpness of the Sicilian, a
+sharpness almost as keen and sure as that of the Arab, divined the
+intensity, the recklessness alive in the Englishman to-day, bred of that
+limit, "my last day of the careless life," to which his own limit was
+twin-brother, but of which he knew nothing. And as Maurice was intense
+to-day, because there were so few hours left to him for intensity, so was
+Salvatore intense in a different way, but for a similar reason. They were
+walking in step without being aware of it. Or were they not rather racing
+neck to neck, like passionate opponents?
+
+There was little time. Then they must use what there was to the full.
+They must not let one single moment find them lazy, indifferent.
+
+[Illustration: "'I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,' SHE SAID"]
+
+Under the cover of the flood of talk Maurice turned to Maddalena. She was
+taking no part in it, but was eating her macaroni gently, as if it
+were a new and wonderful food. So Maurice thought as he looked at her.
+To-day there was something strange, almost pathetic, to him in Maddalena,
+a softness, an innocent refinement that made him imagine her in another
+life than hers, and with other companions, in a life as free but less
+hard, with companions as natural but less ruthless to women.
+
+"Maddalena," he said to her. "They all want to buy things at the
+auction."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I, signorino?"
+
+"Yes, don't you want to buy something?"
+
+He was testing her, testing her memory. She looked at him above her fork,
+from which the macaroni streamed down.
+
+"I am content without anything, signorino," she said.
+
+"Without the blue dress and the ear-rings, longer than that?" He measured
+imaginary ear-rings in the air. "Have you forgotten, Maddalena?"
+
+She blushed and bent over her plate. She had not forgotten. All the day
+since she rose at dawn she had been thinking of Maurice's old promise.
+But she did not know that he remembered it, and his remembrance of it
+came to her now as a lovely surprise. He bent his head down nearer to
+her.
+
+"When they are all at the auction, we will go to buy the blue dress and
+the ear-rings," he almost whispered. "We will go by ourselves. Shall we?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Her voice was very small and her cheeks still held their flush. She
+glanced, with eyes that were unusually conscious, to right and left of
+her, to see if the neighbors had noticed their colloquy. And that look of
+consciousness made Maurice suddenly understand that this limit which he
+had put to his sinning--so he had called it with a sort of angry mental
+sincerity, summoned, perhaps, to match the tremendous sincerity of his
+wife which he was meeting with a lie to-day--his sinning against Hermione
+was also a limit to something else. Had he not sinned against Maddalena,
+sinned when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that he delighted to
+be with her? Was he not sinning now when he promised to buy for her the
+most beautiful things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself
+that his fault against Maddalena was more grave, more unforgivable than
+his fault against Hermione. But then a sudden anger that was like a
+storm, against his own condemnation of himself, swept through him. He had
+come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and here he was giving himself up
+to gloom, to absurd self-torture. Where was his natural careless
+temperament? To-day his soul was full of shadows, like the soul of a man
+going to meet a doom.
+
+"Where's the wine?" he called to Gaspare. "Wine, cameriere, wine!"
+
+"You must not drink wine with the pasta, signorino!" cried Gaspare. "Only
+afterwards, with the vitello."
+
+"Have you ordered vitello? Capital! But I've finished my pasta and I'm
+thirsty. Well, what do you want to buy at the auction, Gaspare, and you,
+Amedeo, and you Salvatore?"
+
+He plunged into the talk and made Salvatore show his keen desires,
+encouraging and playing with his avarice, now holding it off for a
+moment, then coaxing it as one coaxes an animal, stroking it, tempting it
+to a forward movement. The wine went round now, for the vitello was on
+the table, and the talk grew more noisy, the laughter louder. Outside,
+too, the movement and the tumult of the fair were increasing. Cries of
+men selling their wares rose up, the hard melodies of a piano-organ, and
+a strange and ecclesiastical chant sung by three voices that, repeated
+again and again, at last attracted Maurice's attention.
+
+"What's that?" he asked of Gaspare. "Are those priests chanting?"
+
+"Priests! No, signore. Those are the Romani."
+
+"Romans here! What are they doing?"
+
+"They have a cart decorated with flags, signorino, and they are selling
+lemon-water and ices. All the people say that they are Romans and that is
+how they sing in Rome."
+
+The long and lugubrious chant of the ice-venders rose up again, strident
+and melancholy as a song chanted over a corpse.
+
+"It's funny to sing like that to sell ices," Maurice said. "It sounds
+like men at a funeral."
+
+"Oh, they are very good ices, signorino. The Romans make splendid ices."
+
+Turkey followed the vitello.
+
+Maurice's guests were now completely at ease and perfectly happy. The
+consciousness that all this was going to be paid for, that they would not
+have to put their hands in their pockets for a soldo, warmed their hearts
+as the wine warmed their bodies. Amedeo's long, white face was becoming
+radiant, and even Salvatore softened towards the Inglese. A sort of
+respect, almost furtive, came to him for the wealth that could carelessly
+entertain this crowd of people, that could buy clocks, chairs, donkeys at
+pleasure, and scarcely know that soldi were gone, scarcely miss them. As
+he attacked his share of the turkey vigorously, picking up the bones with
+his fingers and tearing the flesh away with his white teeth, he tried to
+realize what such wealth must mean to the possessor of it, an effort
+continually made by the sharp-witted, very poor man. And this wealth--for
+the moment some of it was at his command! To ask to-day would be to have.
+Instinctively he knew that, and felt like one with money in the bank. If
+only it might be so to-morrow and for many days! He began to regret the
+limit, almost to forget the sound of the laughter of the Catania
+fishermen upon the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio. His pride was
+going to sleep, and his avarice was opening its eyes wider.
+
+When the meal was over they went out onto the pavement to take coffee in
+the open air. The throng was much greater than it had been when they
+entered, for people were continually arriving from the more distant
+villages, and two trains had come in from Messina and Catania. It was
+difficult to find a table. Indeed, it might have been impossible had not
+Gaspare ruthlessly dislodged a party of acquaintances who were
+comfortably established around one in a prominent position.
+
+"I must have a table for my padrone," he said. "Go along with you!"
+
+And they meekly went, smiling, and without ill-will--indeed, almost as if
+they had received a compliment.
+
+"But, Gaspare," began Maurice, "I can't--"
+
+"Here is a chair for you, signorino. Take it quickly."
+
+"At any rate, let us offer them something."
+
+"Much better spare your soldi now, signorino, and buy something at the
+auction. That clock plays the 'Tre Colori' just like a band."
+
+"Buy it. Here is some money."
+
+He thrust some notes into the boy's ready hand.
+
+"Grazie, signorino. Ecco la musica!"
+
+In the distance there rose the blare of a processional march from "Aida,"
+and round the corner of the Via di Polifemo came a throng of men and boys
+in dark uniforms, with epaulets and cocked hats with flying plumes,
+blowing with all their might into wind instruments of enormous size.
+
+"That is the musica of the citta, signore," explained Amedeo. "Afterwards
+there will be the Musica Mascagni and the Musica Leoncavallo."
+
+"Mamma mia! And will they all play together?"
+
+"No, signore. They have quarrelled. At Pasqua we had no music, and the
+archpriest was hooted by all in the Piazza."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Non lo so. I think he had forbidden the Musica Mascagni to play at Madre
+Lucia's funeral, and the Musica Mascagni went to fight with the Musica
+della citta. To-day they will all play, because it is the festa of the
+Santo Patrono, but even for him they will not play together."
+
+The bandsmen had now taken their places upon a wooden dais exactly
+opposite to the restaurant, and were indulging in a military rendering of
+"Celeste Aida," which struck most of the Sicilians at the small tables to
+a reverent silence. Maddalena's eyes had become almost round with
+pleasure, Gaspare was singing the air frankly with Amedeo, and even
+Salvatore seemed soothed and humanized, as he sipped his coffee, puffed
+at a thin cigar, and eyed the women who were slowly sauntering up and
+down to show their finery. At the windows of most of the neighboring
+houses appeared parties of dignified gazers, important personages of the
+town, who owned small balconies commanding the piazza, and who now
+stepped forth upon these coigns of vantage, and leaned upon the rails
+that they might see and be seen by the less favored ones below. Amedeo
+and Gaspare began to name these potentates. The stout man with a gray
+mustache, white trousers, and a plaid shawl over his shoulders was Signor
+Torloni, the syndic of San Felice. The tall, angry-looking gentleman,
+with bulging, black eyes and wrinkled cheeks, was Signor Carata, the
+avvocato; and the lady in black and a yellow shawl was his wife, who was
+the daughter of the syndic. Close by was Signorina Maria Sacchetti, the
+beauty of San Felice, already more than plump, but with a good
+complexion, and hair so thick that it stood out from her satisfied face
+as if it were trained over a trellis. She wore white, and long, thread
+gloves which went above her elbows. Maddalena regarded her with awe when
+Amedeo mentioned a rumor that she was going to be "promised" to Dr.
+Marinelli, who was to be seen at her side, wearing a Gibus hat and
+curling a pair of gigantic black mustaches.
+
+Maurice listened to the music and the chatter which, silenced by the
+arrival of the music, had now burst forth again, with rather indifferent
+ears. He wanted to get away somewhere and to be alone with Maddalena. The
+day was passing on. Soon night would be falling. The fair would be at an
+end. Then would come the ride back, and then----But he did not care to
+look forward into that future. He had not done so yet. He would not do so
+now. It would be better, when the time came, to rush upon it blindly.
+Preparation, forethought, would only render him unnatural. And he must
+seem natural, utterly natural, in his insincere surprise, in his
+insincere regret.
+
+"Pay for the coffee, Gaspare," he said, giving the boy some money. "Now I
+want to walk about and see everything. Where are the donkeys?"
+
+He glanced at Salvatore.
+
+"Oh, signore," said Gaspare, "they are outside the town in the
+watercourse that runs under the bridge--you know, that broke down this
+spring where the line is? They have only just finished mending it."
+
+"I remember your telling me."
+
+"And you were so glad the signora was travelling the other way."
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+He spoke hastily. Salvatore was on his feet.
+
+"What hour have we?"
+
+Maurice looked at his watch.
+
+"Half-past two already! I say, Salvatore, you mustn't forget the
+donkeys."
+
+Salvatore came close up to him.
+
+"Signore," he began, in a low voice, "what do you wish me to do?"
+
+"Bid for a good donkey."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"For the best donkey they put up for sale."
+
+Salvatore began to look passionately eager.
+
+"Si, signore. And if I get it?"
+
+"Come to me and I will give you the money to pay."
+
+"Si, signore. How high shall I go?"
+
+Gaspare was listening intently, with a hard face and sullen eyes. His
+whole body seemed to be disapproving what Maurice was doing. But he said
+nothing. Perhaps he felt that to-day it would be useless to try to govern
+the actions of his padrone.
+
+"How high? Well"--Maurice felt that, before Gaspare, he must put a limit
+to his price, though he did not care what it was--"say a hundred. Here,
+I'll give it you now."
+
+He put his hand into his pocket and drew out his portfolio.
+
+"There's the hundred."
+
+Salvatore took it eagerly, spread it over his hand, stared at it, then
+folded it with fingers that seemed for the moment almost delicate, and
+put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He meant to go presently and
+show it to the fishermen of Catania, who had laughed upon the steps of
+the church, and explain matters to them a little. They thought him a
+fool. Well, he would soon make them understand who was the fool.
+
+"Grazie, signore!"
+
+He said it through his teeth. Maurice turned to Gaspare. He felt the
+boy's stern disapproval of what he had done, and wanted, if possible, to
+make amends.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, "here is a hundred lire for you. I want you to go to
+the auction and to bid for anything you think worth having. Buy
+something for your mother and father, for the house, some nice things!"
+
+"Grazie, signore."
+
+He took the note, but without alacrity, and his face was still lowering.
+
+"And you, signore?" he asked.
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. Are you not coming with me to the auction? It will be better for
+you to be there to choose the things."
+
+For an instant Maurice felt irritated. Was he never to be allowed a
+moment alone with Maddalena?
+
+"Oh, but I'm no good at----" he began.
+
+Then he stopped. To-day he must be birbante--on his guard. Once the
+auction was in full swing--so he thought--Salvatore and Gaspare would be
+as they were when they gambled beside the sea. They would forget
+everything. It would be easy to escape. But till that moment came he must
+be cautious.
+
+"Of course I'll come," he exclaimed, heartily. "But you must do the
+bidding, Gaspare."
+
+The boy looked less sullen.
+
+"Va bene, signorino. I shall know best what the things are worth. And
+Salvatore"--he glanced viciously at the fisherman--"can go to the
+donkeys. I have seen them. They are poor donkeys this year."
+
+Salvatore returned his vicious glance and said something in dialect which
+Maurice did not understand. Gaspare's face flushed, and he was about to
+burst into an angry reply when Maurice touched his arm.
+
+"Come along, Gaspare!"
+
+As they got up, he whispered:
+
+"Remember what I said about to-day!"
+
+"Macche----"
+
+Maurice closed his fingers tightly on Gaspare's arm.
+
+"Gaspare, you must remember! Afterwards what you like, but not to-day.
+Andiamo!"
+
+They all got up. The Musica della citta was now playing a violent jig,
+undoubtedly composed by Bellini, who was considered almost as a child of
+San Felice, having been born close by at Catania.
+
+"Where are the women in the wonderful blue dresses?" Maurice asked, as
+they stepped into the road; "and the ear-rings? I haven't seen them yet."
+
+"They will come towards evening, signorino," replied Gaspare, "when it
+gets cool. They do not care to be in the sun dressed like that. It might
+spoil their things."
+
+Evidently the promenade of these proud beauties was an important
+function.
+
+"We must not miss them," Maurice said to Maddalena.
+
+She looked conscious.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"They will all be here this evening, signore," said Amedeo, "for the
+giuochi di fuoco."
+
+"The giuochi di fuoco--they will be at the end?"
+
+"Si, signore. After the giuochi di fuoco it is all finished."
+
+Maurice stifled a sigh. "It is all finished," Amedeo had said. But for
+him? For him there would be the ride home up the mountain, the arrival
+upon the terrace before the house of the priest. At what hour would he be
+there? It would be very late, perhaps nearly at dawn, in the cold, still,
+sad hour when vitality is at its lowest. And Hermione? Would she be
+sleeping? How would they meet? How would he----?
+
+"Andiamo! Andiamo!"
+
+He cried out almost angrily.
+
+"Which is the way?"
+
+"All the auctions are held outside the town, signore," said Amedeo.
+"Follow me."
+
+Proudly he took the lead, glad to be useful and important after the
+benefits that had been bestowed upon him, and hoping secretly that
+perhaps the rich Inglese would give him something to spend, too, since
+money was so plentiful for donkeys and clocks.
+
+"They are in the fiume, near the sea and the railway line."
+
+The railway line! When he heard that Maurice had a moment's absurd
+sensation of reluctance, a desire to hold back, such as comes to a man
+who is unexpectedly asked to confront some danger. It seemed to him that
+if he went to the watercourse he might be seen by Hermione and Artois as
+they passed by on their way to Marechiaro. But of course they were coming
+from Messina! What a fool he was to-day! His recklessness seemed to have
+deserted him just when he wanted it most. To-day he was not himself. He
+was a coward. What it was that made him a coward he did not tell himself.
+
+"Then we can all go together," he said. "Salvatore and all."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Salvatore's voice was close at his ear, and he knew by the sound of it
+that the fisherman was smiling.
+
+"We can all keep together, signore; then we shall be more gay."
+
+They threaded their way through the throng. The violent jig of Bellini
+died away gradually, till it was faint in the distance. At the end of the
+narrow street Maurice saw the large bulk of Etna. On this clear afternoon
+it looked quite close, almost as if, when they got out of the street,
+they would be at its very foot, and would have to begin to climb. Maurice
+remembered his wild longing to carry Maddalena off upon the sea, or to
+some eyrie in the mountains, to be alone with her in some savage place.
+Why not give all these people the slip now--somehow--when the fun of the
+fair was at its height, mount the donkeys and ride straight for the huge
+mountain? There were caverns there and desolate lava wastes; there were
+almost impenetrable beech forests. Sebastiano had told him tales of
+them, those mighty forests that climbed up to green lawns looking down
+upon the Lipari Isles. He thought of their silence and their shadows,
+their beds made of the drifted leaves of the autumn. There, would be no
+disturbance, no clashing of wills and of interests, but calm and silence
+and the time to love. He glanced at Maddalena. He could hardly help
+imagining that she knew what he was thinking of. Salvatore had dropped
+behind for a moment. Maurice did not know it, but the fisherman had
+caught sight of his comrades of Catania drinking in a roadside wine-shop,
+and had stopped to show them the note for a hundred francs, and to make
+them understand the position of affairs between him and the forestiere.
+Gaspare was talking eagerly to Amedeo about the things that were likely
+to be put up for sale at the auction.
+
+"Maddalena," Maurice said to the girl, in a low voice, "can you guess
+what I am thinking about?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"You see the mountain!"
+
+He pointed to the end of the little street.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"I am thinking that I should like to go there now with you."
+
+"Ma, signorino--the fiera!"
+
+Her voice sounded plaintive with surprise and she glanced at her
+pea-green skirt.
+
+"And this, signorino!"--she touched it carefully with her slim fingers.
+"How could I go in this?"
+
+"When the fair is over, then, and you are in your every-day gown,
+Maddalena, I should like to carry you off to Etna."
+
+"They say there are briganti there."
+
+"Brigands--would you be afraid of them with me?"
+
+"I don't know, signore. But what should we do there on Etna far away from
+the sea and from Marechiaro?"
+
+"We should"--he whispered in her ear, seizing this chance almost angrily,
+almost defiantly, with the thought of Salvatore in his mind--"we should
+love each other, Maddalena. It is quiet in the beech forests on Etna. No
+one would come to disturb us, and----"
+
+A chuckle close to his ear made him start. Salvatore's hand was on his
+arm, and Salvatore's face, looking wily and triumphant, was close to his.
+
+"Gaspare was wrong, there are splendid donkeys here. I have been talking
+to some friends who have seen them."
+
+There was a tramp of heavy boots on the stones behind them. The fishermen
+from Catania were coming to see the fun. Salvatore was in glory. To get
+all and give nothing was, in his opinion, to accomplish the legitimate
+aim of a man's life. And his friends, those who had dared to sneer and to
+whisper, and to imagine that he was selling his daughter for money, now
+knew the truth and were here to witness his ingenuity. Intoxicated by his
+triumph, he began to show off his power over the Inglese for the benefit
+of the tramplers behind. He talked to Maurice with a loud familiarity,
+kept laying his hand on Maurice's arm as they walked, and even called
+him, with a half-jocose intonation, "compare." Maurice sickened at his
+impertinence, but was obliged to endure it with patience, and this act of
+patience brought to the birth within him a sudden, fierce longing for
+revenge, a longing to pay Salvatore out for his grossness, his greed, his
+sly and leering affectation of playing the slave when he was really
+indicating to his compatriots that he considered himself the master.
+Again Maurice heard the call of the Sicilian blood within him, but this
+time it did not call him to the tarantella or to love. It called him to
+strike a blow. But this blow could only be struck through Maddalena,
+could only be struck if he were traitor to Hermione. For a moment he saw
+everything red. Again Salvatore called him "compare." Suddenly Maurice
+could not bear it.
+
+"Don't say that!" he said. "Don't call me that!"
+
+He had almost hissed the words out. Salvatore started, and for an
+instant, as they walked side by side, the two men looked at each other
+with eyes that told the truth. Then Salvatore, without asking for any
+explanation of Maurice's sudden outburst, said:
+
+"Va bene, signore, va bene! I thought for to-day we were all compares.
+Scusi, scusi."
+
+There was a bitterness of irony in his voice. As he finished he swept off
+his soft hat and then replaced it more over his left ear than ever.
+Maurice knew at once that he had done the unforgivable thing, that he had
+stabbed a Sicilian's amour propre in the presence of witnesses of his own
+blood. The fishermen from Catania had heard. He knew it from Salvatore's
+manner, and an odd sensation came to him that Salvatore had passed
+sentence upon him. In silence, and mechanically, he walked on to the end
+of the street. He felt like one who, having done something swiftly,
+thoughtlessly, is suddenly confronted with the irreparable, abruptly sees
+the future spread out before him bathed in a flash of crude light, the
+future transformed in a second by that act of his as a landscape is
+transformed by an earthquake or a calm sea by a hurricane.
+
+And when the watercourse came in sight, with its crowd, its voices, and
+its multitude of beasts, he looked at it dully for a moment, hardly
+realizing it.
+
+In Sicily the animal fairs are often held in the great watercourses that
+stretch down from the foot of the mountains to the sea, and that resemble
+huge highroads in the making, roads upon which the stones have been
+dumped ready for the steam-roller. In winter there is sometimes a torrent
+of water rushing through them, but in summer they are dry, and look like
+wounds gashed in the thickly growing lemon and orange groves. The
+trampling feet of beasts can do no harm to the stones, and these
+watercourses in the summer season are of no use to anybody. They are,
+therefore, often utilized at fair time. Cattle, donkeys, mules are driven
+down to them in squadrons. Painted Sicilian carts are ranged upon their
+banks, with sets of harness, and the auctioneers, whose business it is to
+sell miscellaneous articles, household furniture, stuffs, clocks,
+ornaments, frequently descend into them, and mount a heap of stones to
+gain command of their gaping audience of contadini and the shrewder
+buyers from the towns.
+
+The watercourse of San Felice was traversed at its mouth by the railway
+line from Catania to Messina, which crossed it on a long bridge supported
+by stone pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had said,
+had recently collapsed and was now nearly built up again. It was already
+in use, but the trains were obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in
+order not to shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed at each
+end to signal to the driver whether he was to stop or whether he might
+venture to go on. Beyond the watercourse, upon the side opposite to the
+town of San Felice, was a series of dense lemon groves, gained by a
+sloping bank of bare, crumbling earth, on the top of which, close to the
+line and exactly where it came to the bridge, was a group of four old
+olive-trees with gnarled, twisted trunks. These trees cast a patch of
+pleasant shade, from which all the bustle of the fair was visible, but at
+a distance, and as Maurice and his party came out of the village on the
+opposite bank, he whispered to Maddalena:
+
+"Maddalena!"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"Let's get away presently, you and I; let's go and sit under those trees.
+I want to talk to you quietly."
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+Her voice was lower even than his own.
+
+"Ecco, signore! Ecco!"
+
+Salvatore was pointing to a crowd of donkeys.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+"What is it, Gaspare?"
+
+"That is the man who is going to sell the clock!"
+
+The boy's face was intent. His eyes were shining, and his glum manner had
+vanished, under the influence of a keen excitement. Maurice realized that
+very soon he would be free. Once his friends were in the crowd of buyers
+and sellers everything but the chance of a bargain would be forgotten.
+His own blood quickened but for a different reason.
+
+"What beautiful carts!" he said. "We have no such carts in England!"
+
+"If you would like to buy a cart, signore----" began Salvatore.
+
+But Gaspare interrupted with violence.
+
+"Macche! What is the use of a cart to the signorino? He is going away to
+England. How can he take a cart with him in the train?"
+
+"He can leave the cart with me," said Salvatore, with open impudence. "I
+can take care of it for the signore as well as the donkey."
+
+"Macche!" cried Gaspare, furiously.
+
+Maurice took him by the arm.
+
+"Help me down the bank! Come on!"
+
+He began to run, pulling Gaspare with him. When they got to the bottom,
+he said:
+
+"It's all right, Gaspare. I'm not going to be such a fool as to buy a
+cart. Now, then, which way are we going?"
+
+"Signore, do you want to buy a very good donkey, a very strong donkey,
+strong enough to carry three Germans to the top of Etna? Come and see my
+donkey. He is very cheap. I make a special price because the signore is
+simpatico. All the English are simpatici. Come this way, signore! Gaspare
+knows me. Gaspare knows that I am not birbante."
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Look at this clock! It plays the 'Tre Colori.' It
+is worth twenty-five lire, but I will make a special price for you
+because you love Sicily and are like a Siciliano. Gaspare will tell
+you----"
+
+But Gaspare elbowed away his acquaintances roughly.
+
+"Let my padrone alone. He is not here to buy. He is only here to see the
+fair. Come on, signorino! Do not answer them. Do not take any notice. You
+must not buy anything or you will be cheated. Let me make the prices."
+
+"Yes, you make the prices. Per Bacco, how hot it is!"
+
+Maurice pulled his hat down over his eyes.
+
+"Maddalena, you'll get a sunstroke!" he said.
+
+"Oh no, signore. I am accustomed to the sun."
+
+"But to-day it's terrific!"
+
+Indeed, the masses of stones in the watercourse seemed to draw and to
+concentrate the sun-rays. The air was alive with minute and dancing
+specks of light, and in the distance, seen under the railway bridge, the
+sea looked hot, a fiery blue that was surely sweating in the glare of the
+afternoon. The crowd of donkeys, of cattle, of pigs--there were many pigs
+on sale--looked both dull and angry in the heat, and the swarms of
+Sicilians who moved slowly about among them, examining them critically,
+appraising their qualities and noting their defects, perspired in their
+festa clothes, which were mostly heavy and ill-adapted to summer-time. A
+small boy passed by, bearing in his arms a struggling turkey. He caught
+his foot in some stones, fell, bruised his forehead, and burst out
+crying, while the indignant and terrified bird broke away, leaving some
+feathers, and made off violently towards Etna. There was a roar of
+laughter from the people near. Some ran to catch the turkey, others
+picked up the boy. Salvatore had stopped to see this adventure, and was
+now at a little distance surrounded by the Catanesi, who were evidently
+determined to assist at his bidding for a donkey. The sight of the note
+for a hundred lire had greatly increased their respect for Salvatore, and
+with the Sicilian instinct to go, and to stay, where money is, they now
+kept close to their comrade, eying him almost with awe as one in
+possession of a fortune. Maurice saw them presently examining a group of
+donkeys. Salvatore, with an autocratic air, and the wild gestures
+peculiar to him, was evidently laying down the law as to what each animal
+was worth. The fishermen stood by, listening attentively. The fact of
+Salvatore's purchasing power gave him the right to pronounce an opinion.
+He was in glory. Maurice thanked Heaven for that. The man in glory is
+often the forgetful man. Salvatore, he thought, would not bother about
+his daughter and his banker for a little while. But how to get rid of
+Gaspare and Amedeo! It seemed to him that they would never leave his
+side.
+
+There were many wooden stands covered with goods for sale in the
+watercourse, with bales of stuff for suits and dresses, with hats and
+caps, shirts, cravats, boots and shoes, walking-sticks, shawls, household
+utensils, crockery, everything the contadino needs and loves. Gaspare,
+having money to lay out, considered it his serious duty to examine
+everything that was to be bought with slow minuteness. It did not matter
+whether the goods were suited to a masculine taste or not. He went into
+the mysteries of feminine attire with almost as much assiduity as a
+mother displays when buying a daughter's trousseau, and insisted upon
+Maurice sharing his interest and caution. All sense of humor, all boyish
+sprightliness vanished from him in this important epoch of his life. The
+suspicion, the intensity of the bargaining contadino came to the surface.
+His usually bright face was quite altered. He looked elderly, subtle, and
+almost Jewish as he slowly passed from stall to stall, testing, weighing,
+measuring, appraising.
+
+It seemed to Maurice that this progress would never end. Presently they
+reached a stand covered with women's shawls and with aprons.
+
+"Shall I buy an apron for my mother, signorino?" asked Gaspare.
+
+"Yes, certainly."
+
+Maurice did not know what else to say. The result of his consent was
+terrible. For a full half-hour they stood in the glaring sun, while
+Gaspare and Amedeo solemnly tried on aprons over their suits in the midst
+of a concourse of attentive contadini. In vain did Maurice say: "That's a
+pretty one. I should take that one." Some defect was always discoverable.
+The distant mother's taste was evidently peculiar and not to be easily
+suited, and Maurice, not being familiar with it, was unable to combat
+such assertions of Gaspare as that she objected to pink spots, or that
+she could never be expected to put on an apron before the neighbors if
+the stripes upon it were of different colors and there was no stitching
+round the hem. For the first time since he was in Sicily the heat began
+to affect him unpleasantly. His head felt as if it were compressed in an
+iron band, and the vision of Gaspare, eagerly bargaining, looking Jewish,
+and revolving slowly in aprons of different colors, shapes, and sizes,
+began to dance before his eyes. He felt desperate, and suddenly resolved
+to be frank.
+
+"Macche!" Gaspare was exclaiming, with indignant gestures of protest to
+the elderly couple who were in charge of the aprons; "it is not worth two
+soldi! It is not fit to be thrown to the pigs, and you ask me----"
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+"Two lire--Madonna! Sangue di San Pancrazio, they ask me two lire!
+Macche!" (He flung down the apron passionately upon the stall.) "Go and
+find Lipari people to buy your dirt; don't come to one from Marechiaro."
+
+He took up another apron.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+"One lira fifty? Madre mia, do you think I was born in a grotto on Etna
+and have never----"
+
+"Gaspare, listen to me!"
+
+"Scusi, signorino! I----"
+
+"I'm going over there to sit down in the shade for a minute. After that
+wine I drank at dinner I'm a bit sleepy."
+
+"Si, signore. Shall I come with you?"
+
+For once there was reluctance in his voice, and he looked down at the
+blue-and-white apron he had on with wistful eyes. It was a new joy to him
+to be bargaining in the midst of an attentive throng of his compatriots.
+
+"No, no. You stay here and spend the money. Bid for the clock when the
+auction comes on."
+
+"Oh, signore, but you must be here, too, then."
+
+"All right. Come and fetch me if you like. I shall be over there under
+the trees."
+
+He waved his hand vaguely towards the lemon groves.
+
+"Now, choose a good apron. Don't let them cheat you."
+
+"Macche!"
+
+The boy laughed loudly, and turned eagerly to the stall again.
+
+"Come, Maddalena!"
+
+Maurice drew her quickly, anxiously, out of the crowd, and they began to
+walk across the watercourse towards the farther bank and the group of
+olive-trees. Salvatore had forgotten them. So had Gaspare. Both father
+and servant were taken by the fascination of the fair. At last! But how
+late it must be! How many hours had already fled away! Maurice scarcely
+dared to look at his watch. He feared to see the time. While they walked
+he said nothing to Maddalena, but when they reached the bank he took her
+arm and helped her up it, and when they were at the top he drew a long
+breath.
+
+"Are you tired, signorino?"
+
+"Tired--yes, of all those people. Come and sit down, Maddalena, under the
+olive-trees."
+
+He took her by the hand. Her hand was warm and dry, pleasant to touch, to
+hold. As he felt it in his the desire to strike at Salvatore revived
+within him. Salvatore was laughing at him, was triumphing over him,
+triumphing in the get-all and give-nothing policy which he thought he was
+pursuing with such complete success. Would it be very difficult to turn
+that success into failure? Maurice wondered for a moment, then ceased to
+wonder. Something in the touch of Maddalena's hand told him that, if he
+chose, he could have his revenge upon Salvatore, and he was assailed by a
+double temptation. Both anger and love tempted him. If he stooped to do
+evil he could gratify two of the strongest desires in humanity, the
+desire to conquer in love and the desire to triumph in hate. Salvatore
+thought him such a fool, held him in such contempt! Something within him
+was burning to-day as a cheek burns with shame, something within him that
+was like the kernel of him, like the soul of his manhood, which the
+fisherman was sneering at. He did not say to himself strongly that he did
+not care what such men thought of him. He could not, for his nature was
+both reckless and sensitive. He did care, as if he had been a Sicilian
+half doubtful whether he dared to show his face in the piazza. And he had
+another feeling, too, which had come to him when Salvatore had answered
+his exclamation of irresistible anger at being called "compare," the
+feeling that, whether he sinned against the fisherman or not, the
+fisherman meant to do him harm. The sensation might be absurd, would have
+seemed to him probably absurd in England. Here, in Sicily, it sprang up
+and he had just to accept it, as a man accepts an instinct which guides
+him, prompts him.
+
+Salvatore had turned down his thumb that day.
+
+Maurice was not afraid of him. Physically, he was quite fearless. But
+this sensation of having been secretly condemned made him feel hard,
+cruel, ready, perhaps, to do a thing not natural to him, to sacrifice
+another who had never done him wrong. At that moment it seemed to him
+that it would be more manly to triumph over Salvatore by a double
+betrayal than to "run straight," conquer himself and let men not of his
+code think of him as they would.
+
+Not of his code! But what was his code? Was it that of England or that of
+Sicily? Which strain of blood was governing him to-day? Which strain
+would govern him finally? Artois would have had an interesting specimen
+under his observant eyes had he been at the fair of San Felice.
+
+Maddalena willingly obeyed Maurice's suggestion.
+
+"Get well into the shade," he said. "There's just enough to hold us, if
+we sit close together. You don't mind that, do you?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"Put your back against the trunk--there."
+
+He kept his hat off. Over the railway line from the hot-looking sea there
+came a little breeze that just moved his short hair and the feathers of
+gold about Maddalena's brow. In the watercourse, but at some distance,
+they saw the black crowd of men and women and beasts swarming over the
+hot stones.
+
+"How can they?" Maurice muttered, as he looked down.
+
+"Cosa?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"I was thinking out loud. I meant how can they bargain and bother hour
+after hour in all that sun!"
+
+"But, signorino, you would not have them pay too much!" she said, very
+seriously. "It is dreadful to waste soldi."
+
+"I suppose--yes, of course it is. Oh, but there are so many things worth
+more than soldi. Dio mio! Let's forget all that!"
+
+He waved his hand towards the crowd, but he saw that Maddalena was
+preoccupied. She glanced towards the watercourse rather wistfully.
+
+"What is it, Maddalena? Ah, I know! The blue dress and the ear-rings! Per
+Bacco!"
+
+"No, signore--no, signore!"
+
+She disclaimed quickly, reddening.
+
+"Yes, it is. I had forgotten. But we can't go now. Maddalena, we will buy
+them this evening. Directly it gets cool we'll go, directly we've rested
+a little. But don't think of them now. I've promised, and I always keep a
+promise. Now, don't think of that any more!"
+
+He spoke with a sort of desperation. The fair seemed to be his enemy, and
+he had thought that it would be his friend. It was like a personage with
+a stronger influence than his, an influence that could take away that
+which he wished to retain, to fix upon himself.
+
+"No, signore," Maddalena said, meekly, but still wistfully.
+
+"Do you care for a blue dress and a pair of ear-rings more than you do
+for me?" cried Maurice, with sudden roughness. "Are you like your father?
+Do you only care for me for what you can get out of me? I believe you
+do!"
+
+Maddalena looked startled, almost terrified, by his outburst. Her lips
+trembled, but she gazed at him steadily.
+
+"Non e vero."
+
+The words sounded almost stern.
+
+"I do--" he said. "I do want to be cared for a little--just for myself."
+
+[Illustration: "HE KEPT HIS HAND ON HERS AND HELD IT ON THE WARM GROUND"]
+
+At that moment he had a sensation of loneliness like that of an
+utterly unloved man. And yet at that moment a great love was travelling
+to him--a love that was complete and flawless. But he did not think of
+it. He only thought that perhaps all this time he had been deceived, that
+Maddalena, like her father, was merely pleased to see him because he had
+money and could spend it. He sickened.
+
+"Non e vero!" Maddalena repeated.
+
+Her lips still trembled. Maurice looked at her doubtfully, yet with a
+sudden tenderness. Always when she looked troubled, even for an instant,
+there came to him the swift desire to protect her, to shield her.
+
+"But why should you care for me?" he said. "It is better not. For I am
+going away, and probably you will never see me again."
+
+Tears came into Maddalena's eyes. He did not know whether they were
+summoned by his previous roughness or his present pathos. He wanted to
+know.
+
+"Probably I shall never come back to Sicily again," he said, with
+pressure.
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"It will be better not," he added. "Much better."
+
+Now he was speaking for himself.
+
+"There's something here, something that I love and that's bad for me. I'm
+quite changed here. I'm like another man."
+
+He saw a sort of childish surprise creeping into her face.
+
+"Why, signorino?" she murmured.
+
+He kept his hand on hers and held it on the warm ground.
+
+"Perhaps it is the sun," he said. "I lose my head here, and I--lose my
+heart!"
+
+She still looked rather surprised, and again her ignorance fascinated
+him. He thought that it was far more attractive than any knowledge could
+have been.
+
+"I'm horribly happy here, but I oughtn't to be happy."
+
+"Why, signorino? It is better to be happy."
+
+"Per Dio!" he exclaimed.
+
+Now a deep desire to have his revenge upon Salvatore came to him, but not
+at all because it would hurt Salvatore. The cruelty had gone out of him.
+Maddalena's eyes of a child had driven it away. He wanted his revenge
+only because it would be an intense happiness to him to have it. He
+wanted it because it would satisfy an imperious desire of tender passion,
+not because it would infuriate a man who hated him. He forgot the father
+in the daughter.
+
+"Suppose I were quite poor, Maddalena!" he said.
+
+"But you are very rich, signorino."
+
+"But suppose I were poor, like Gaspare, for instance. Suppose I were as I
+am, just the same, only a contadino, or a fisherman, as your father is.
+And suppose--suppose"--he hesitated--"suppose that I were not married!"
+
+She said nothing. She was listening with deep but still surprised
+attention.
+
+"Then I could--I could go to your father and ask him----"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"What could you ask him, signorino?"
+
+"Can't you guess?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"I might ask him to let me marry you. I should--if it were like that--I
+should ask him to let me marry you."
+
+"Davvero?"
+
+An expression of intense pleasure, and of something more--of pride--had
+come into her face. She could not divest herself imaginatively of her
+conception of him as a rich forestiere, and she saw herself placed high
+above "the other girls," turned into a lady.
+
+"Magari!" she murmured, drawing in her breath, then breathing out.
+
+"You would be happy if I did that?"
+
+"Magari!" she said again.
+
+He did not know what the word meant, but he thought it sounded like the
+most complete expression of satisfaction he had ever heard.
+
+"I wish," he said, pressing her hand--"I wish I were a Sicilian of
+Marechiaro."
+
+At this moment, while he was speaking, he heard in the distance the
+shrill whistle of an engine. It ceased. Then it rose again, piercing,
+prolonged, fierce surely with inquiry. He put his hands to his ears.
+
+"How beastly that is!" he exclaimed.
+
+He hated it, not only for itself, but for the knowledge it sharply
+recalled to his mind, the knowledge of exactly what he was doing, and of
+the facts of his life, the facts that the very near future held.
+
+"Why do they do that?" he added, with intense irritation.
+
+"Because of the bridge, signorino. They want to know if they can come
+upon the bridge. Look! There is the man waving a flag. Now they can come.
+It is the train from Palermo."
+
+"Palermo!" he said, sharply.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"But the train from Palermo comes the other way, by Messina!"
+
+"Si, signore. But there are two, one by Messina and one by Catania.
+Ecco!"
+
+From the lemon groves came the rattle of the approaching train.
+
+"But--but----"
+
+He caught at his watch, pulled it out.
+
+Five o'clock!
+
+He had taken his hand from Maddalena's, and now he made a movement as if
+to get up. But he did not get up. Instead, he pressed back against the
+olive-tree, upon whose trunk he was leaning, as if he wished to force
+himself into the gnarled wood of it. He had an instinct to hide. The
+train came on very slowly. During the two or three minutes that elapsed
+before it was in his view Maurice lived very rapidly. He felt sure that
+Hermione and Artois were in the train. Hermione had said that they would
+arrive at Cattaro at five-thirty. She had not said which way they were
+coming. Maurice had assumed that they would come from Messina because
+Hermione had gone away by that route. It was a natural error. But now? If
+they were at the carriage window! If they saw him! And surely they must
+see him. The olive-trees were close to the line and on a level with it.
+He could not get away. If he got up he would be more easily seen.
+Hermione would call out to him. If he pretended not to hear she might,
+she probably would, get out of the train at the San Felice station and
+come into the fair. She was impulsive. It was just the sort of thing she
+might do. She would do it. He was sure she would do it. He looked at the
+watercourse hard. The crowd of people was not very far off. He thought he
+detected the form of Gaspare. Yes, it was Gaspare. He and Amedeo were on
+the outskirts of the crowd near the railway bridge. As he gazed, the
+train whistled once more, and he saw Gaspare turn round and look towards
+the sea. He held his breath.
+
+"Ecco, signorino. Viene!"
+
+Maddalena touched his arm, kept her hand upon it. She was deeply
+interested in this event, the traversing by the train of the unfinished
+bridge. Maurice was thankful for that. At least she did not notice his
+violent perturbation.
+
+"Look, signorino! Look!"
+
+In despite of himself, Maurice obeyed her. He wanted not to look, but he
+could not help looking. The engine, still whistling, crept out from the
+embrace of the lemon-trees, with the dingy line of carriages behind it.
+At most of the windows there were heads of people looking out. Third
+class--he saw soldiers, contadini. Second class--no one. Now the
+first-class carriages were coming. They were close to him.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+He had seen Hermione. She was standing up, with her two hands resting on
+the door-frame and her head and shoulders outside of the carriage.
+Maurice sat absolutely still and stared at her, stared at her almost as
+if she were a stranger passing by. She was looking at the watercourse, at
+the crowd, eagerly. Her face, much browner than when she had left Sicily,
+was alight with excitement, with happiness. She was radiant. Yet he
+thought she looked old, older at least than he had remembered. Suddenly,
+as the train came very slowly upon the bridge, she drew in to speak to
+some one behind her, and he saw vaguely Artois, pale, with a long beard.
+He was seated, and he, too, was gazing out at the fair. He looked ill,
+but he, too, looked happy, much happier than he had in London. He put up
+a thin hand and stroked his beard, and Maurice saw wrinkles coming round
+his eyes as he smiled at something Hermione said to him. The train came
+to the middle of the bridge and stopped.
+
+"Ecco!" murmured Maddalena. "The man at the other end has signalled!"
+
+Maurice looked again at the watercourse. Gaspare was beyond the crowd
+now, and was staring at the train with interest, like Maddalena. Would it
+never go on? Maurice set his teeth and cursed it silently. And his soul
+said; "Go on! Go on!" again and again. "Go on! Go on!" Now Hermione was
+once more leaning out. Surely she must see Gaspare. A man waved a flag.
+The train jerked back, jangled, crept forward once more, this time a
+little faster. In a moment they would begone. Thank God! But what was
+Hermione doing? She started. She leaned further forward, staring into
+the watercourse. Maurice saw her face changing. A look of intense
+surprise, of intense inquiry, came into it. She took one hand swiftly
+from the door, put it behind her--ah, she had a pair of opera-glasses at
+her eyes now! The train went on faster. It was nearly off the bridge. But
+she was waving her hand. She was calling. She had seen Gaspare. And he?
+Maurice saw him start forward as if to run to the bridge. But the train
+was gone. The boy stopped, hesitated, then dashed away across the stones.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Maurice said nothing.
+
+"Signorino!" repeated Maddalena. "Look at Gaspare! Is he mad? Look! How
+he is running!"
+
+Gaspare reached the bank, darted up it, and disappeared into the village.
+
+"Signorino, what is the matter?"
+
+Maddalena pulled his sleeve. She was looking almost alarmed.
+
+"Matter? Nothing."
+
+Maurice got up. He could not remain still. It was all over now. The fair
+was at an end for him. Gaspare would reach the station before the train
+went on, would explain matters. Hermione would get out. Already Maurice
+seemed to see her coming down to the watercourse, walking with her
+characteristic slow vigor. It did not occur to him at first that Hermione
+might refuse to leave Artois. Something in him knew that she was coming.
+Fate had interfered now imperiously. Once he had cheated fate. That was
+when he came to the fair despite Hermione's letter. Now fate was going to
+have her revenge upon him. He looked at Maddalena. Was fate working for
+her, to protect her? Would his loss be her gain? He did not know, for he
+did not know what would have been the course of his own conduct if fate
+had not interfered. He had been trifling, letting the current take him.
+It might have taken him far, but--now Hermione was coming. It was all
+over and the sun was still up, still shining upon the sea.
+
+"Let us go into the fair. It is cooler now."
+
+He tried to speak lightly.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Maddalena shook out her skirt and began to smile. She was thinking of the
+blue dress and the ear-rings. They went down into the watercourse.
+
+"Signorino, what can have been the matter with Gaspare?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"He was looking at the train."
+
+"Was he? Perhaps he saw a friend in it. Yes, that must have been it. He
+saw a friend in the train."
+
+He stared across the watercourse towards the village, seeking two
+figures, and he was conscious now of two feelings that fought within him,
+of two desires: a desire that Hermione should not come, and a desire that
+she should come. He wanted, he even longed, to have his evening with
+Maddalena. Yet he wanted Hermione to get out of the train when Gaspare
+told her that he--Maurice--was at San Felice. If she did not get out she
+would be putting Artois before him. The pale face at the window, the eyes
+that smiled when Hermione turned familiarly round to speak, had stirred
+within him the jealousy of which he had already been conscious more than
+once. But now actual vision had made it fiercer. The woman who had leaned
+out looking at the fair belonged to him. He felt intensely that she was
+his property. Maddalena spoke to him again, two or three times. He did
+not hear her. He was seeing the wrinkles that came round the eyes of
+Artois when he smiled.
+
+"Where are we going, signorino? Are we going back to the town?"
+
+Instinctively, Maurice was following in the direction taken by Gaspare.
+He wanted to meet fate half-way, to still, by action, the tumult of
+feeling within him.
+
+"Aren't the best things to be bought there?" he replied. "By the church
+where all those booths are? I think so."
+
+Maddalena began to walk a little faster. The moment had come. Already she
+felt the blue dress rustling about her limbs, the ear-rings swinging in
+her ears.
+
+Maurice did not try to hold her back. Nor did it occur to him that it
+would be wise to meet Hermione without Maddalena. He had done no actual
+wrong, and the pale face of Artois had made him defiant. Hermione came to
+him with her friend. He would come to her with his. He did not think of
+Maddalena as a weapon exactly, but he did feel as if, without her, he
+would be at a disadvantage when he and Hermione met.
+
+They were in the first street now. People were beginning to flow back
+from the watercourse towards the centre of the fair. They walked in a
+crowd and could not see far before them. But Maurice thought he would
+know when Hermione was near him, that he would feel her approach. The
+crowd went on slowly, retarding them, but at last they were near to the
+church of Sant' Onofrio and could hear the sound of music. The
+"Intermezzo" from "Cavalleria Rusticana" was being played by the Musica
+Mascagni. Suddenly, Maurice started. He had felt a pull at his arm.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+Gaspare was by his side, streaming with perspiration and looking
+violently excited.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+He stopped, cast a swift look round. Gaspare was alone.
+
+"Signorino"--the boy was breathing hard--"the signora"--he gulped--"the
+signora has come back."
+
+The time had come for acting. Maurice feigned surprise.
+
+"The signora! What are you saying? The signora is in Africa."
+
+"No, signore! She is here!"
+
+"Here in San Felice!"
+
+"No, signore! But she was in the train. I saw her at the window. She
+waved her hand to me and called out--when the train was on the bridge. I
+ran to the station; I ran fast, but when I got there the train had just
+gone. The signora has come back, and we are not there to meet her!"
+
+His eyes were tragic. Evidently he felt that their absence was a matter
+of immense importance, was a catastrophe.
+
+"The signora here!" Maurice repeated, trying to make his voice amazed.
+"But why did she not tell us? Why did not she say that she was coming?"
+
+He looked at Gaspare, but only for an instant. He felt afraid to meet his
+great, searching eyes.
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+Maddalena stood by in silence. The bright look of anticipation had gone
+out of her face, and was replaced by a confused and slightly anxious
+expression.
+
+"I can't understand it," Maurice said, heavily. "I can't--was the signora
+alone, or did you see some one with her?"
+
+"The sick signore? I did not see him. I saw only the signora standing at
+the window, waving her hand--cosi!"
+
+He waved his hand.
+
+"Madonna!" Maurice said, mechanically.
+
+"What are we to do, signorino?"
+
+"Do! What can we do? The train has gone!"
+
+"Si, signore. But shall I fetch the donkeys?"
+
+Maurice stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking frankly piteous.
+
+"Have you got the clock yet?" he asked Gaspare.
+
+"No, signore."
+
+Gaspare began to look rather miserable, too.
+
+"It has not been put up. Perhaps they are putting it up now."
+
+"Gaspare," Maurice said, hastily, "we can't be back to meet the signora
+now. Even if we went at once we should be hours late--and the donkeys are
+tired, perhaps. They will go slowly unless they have a proper rest. It is
+a dreadful pity, but I think if the signora knew she would wish us to
+stay now till the fair is over. She would not wish to spoil your
+pleasure. Do you think she would?"
+
+"No, signore. The signora always wishes people to be happy."
+
+"Even if we went at once it would be night before we got back."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"I think we had better stay--at any rate till the auction is finished and
+we have had something to eat. Then we will go."
+
+"Va bene."
+
+The boy sounded doubtful.
+
+"La povera signora!" he said. "How disappointed she will be! She did want
+to speak to me. Her face was all red; she was so excited when she saw me,
+and her mouth was wide open like that!"
+
+He made a grimace, with earnest, heart-felt sincerity.
+
+"It cannot be helped. To-night we will explain everything and make the
+signora quite happy. Look here! Buy something for her. Buy her a present
+at the auction!"
+
+"Signorino!" Gaspare cried. "I will give her the clock that plays the
+'Tre Colori'! Then she will be happy again. Shall I?"
+
+"Si, si. And meet me in the market-place. Then we will eat something and
+we will start for home."
+
+The boy darted away towards the watercourse. His heart was light again.
+He had something to do for the signora, something that would make her
+very happy. Ah, when she heard the clock playing the "Tre Colori"! Mamma
+mia!
+
+He tore towards the watercourse in an agony lest he should be too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Night was falling over the fair. The blue dress and the ear-rings had
+been chosen and paid for. The promenade of the beauties in the famous
+inherited brocades had taken place with eclat before the church of Sant'
+Onofrio. Salvatore had acquired a donkey of strange beauty and wondrous
+strength, and Gaspare had reappeared in the piazza accompanied by Amedeo,
+both laden with purchases and shining with excitement and happiness.
+Gaspare's pockets were bulging, and he walked carefully, carrying in his
+hands a tortured-looking parcel.
+
+"Dov'e il mio padrone?" he asked, as he and Amedeo pushed through the
+dense throng. "Dov'e il mio padrone?"
+
+He spied Maurice and Maddalena sitting before the ristorante listening to
+the performance of a small Neapolitan boy with a cropped head, who was
+singing street songs in a powerful bass voice, and occasionally doing a
+few steps of a melancholy dance upon the pavement. The crowd billowed
+round them. A little way off the "Musica della citta," surrounded by a
+circle of colored lamps, was playing a selection from the "Puritani." The
+strange ecclesiastical chant of the Roman ice venders rose up against the
+music as if in protest. And these three definite and fighting
+melodies--of the Neapolitan, the band, and the ice venders--detached
+themselves from a foundation of ceaseless sound, contributed by the
+hundreds of Sicilians who swarmed about the ancient church, infested the
+narrow side streets of the village, looked down from the small balconies
+and the windows of the houses, and gathered in mobs in the wine-shops and
+the trattorie.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Look!"
+
+Gaspare had reached Maurice, and now stood by the little table at which
+his padrone and Maddalena were sitting, and placed the tortured parcel
+tenderly upon it.
+
+"Is that the clock?"
+
+Gaspare did not reply in words, but his brown fingers deftly removed the
+string and paper and undressed his treasure.
+
+"Ecco!" he exclaimed.
+
+The clock was revealed, a great circle of blue and white standing upon
+short, brass legs, and ticking loudly,
+
+               "Speranza mia, non piangere,
+                 E il marinar fedele,
+               Vedrai tornar dall' Africa
+                 Tra un anno queste vele----"
+
+bawled the little boy from Naples. Gaspare seized the clock, turned a
+handle, lifted his hand in a reverent gesture bespeaking attention; there
+was a faint whirr, and then, sure enough, the tune of the "Tre Colori"
+was tinkled blithely forth.
+
+"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare, triumphantly.
+
+"Mamma mia!" murmured Maddalena, almost exhausted with the magic of the
+fair.
+
+"It's wonderful!" said Maurice.
+
+He, too, was a little tired, but not in body.
+
+Gaspare wound the clock again, and again the tune was trilled forth,
+competing sturdily with the giant noises of the fair, a little voice that
+made itself audible by its clearness and precision.
+
+"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare. "Will not the signora be happy when she sees
+what I have brought her from the fair?"
+
+He sighed from sheer delight in his possession and the thought of his
+padrona's joy and wonder in it.
+
+"Mangiamo?" he added, descending from heavenly delights to earthly
+necessities.
+
+"Yes, it is getting late," said Maurice. "The fireworks will soon be
+beginning, I suppose."
+
+"Not till ten, signorino. I have asked. There will be dancing first.
+But--are we going to stay?"
+
+Maurice hesitated, but only for a second.
+
+"Yes," he said. "Even if we went now the signora would be in bed and
+asleep long before we got home. We will stay to the end, the very end."
+
+"Then we can say 'Good-morning' to the signora when we get home," said
+Gaspare.
+
+He was quite happy now that he had this marvellous present to take back
+with him. He felt that it would make all things right, would sweep away
+all lingering disappointment at their absence and the want of welcome.
+
+Salvatore did not appear at the meal. He had gone off to stable his new
+purchase with the other donkeys, and now, having got a further sum of
+money out of the Inglese, was drinking and playing cards with the
+fishermen of Catania. But he knew where his girl and Maurice were, and
+that Gaspare and Amedeo were with them. And he knew, too, that the
+Inglese's signora had come back. He told the news to the fishermen.
+
+"To-night, when he gets home, his 'cristiana' will be waiting for him.
+Per Dio! it is over for him now. We shall see little more of him."
+
+"And get little more from him!" said one of the fishermen, who was
+jealous of Salvatore's good-fortune.
+
+Salvatore laughed loudly. He had drunk a good deal of wine and he had had
+a great deal of money given to him.
+
+"I shall find another English fool, perhaps!" he said. "Chi lo sa?"
+
+"And his cristiana?" asked another fisherman. "What is she like?"
+
+"Like!" cried Salvatore, pouring out another glass of wine and spitting
+on the discolored floor, over which hens were running; "what is any
+cristiana like?"
+
+And he repeated the contadino's proverb:
+
+"'La mugghieri e comu la gatta: si l'accarizzi, idda ti gratta!'"
+
+"Perhaps the Inglese will get scratched to-night," said the first
+fisherman.
+
+"I don't mind," rejoined Salvatore. "Get us a fresh pack of cards,
+Fortunato. I'll pay for 'em."
+
+And he flung down a lira on the wine-stained table.
+
+Gaspare, now quite relieved in his mind, gave himself up with all his
+heart to the enjoyment of the last hours of the fair, and was unwearied
+in calling on his padrone to do the same. When the evening meal was over
+he led the party forth into the crowd that was gathered about the music;
+he took them to the shooting-tent, and made them try their luck at the
+little figures which calmly presented grotesquely painted profiles to the
+eager aim of the contadini; he made them eat ices which they bought at
+the beflagged cart of the ecclesiastical Romans, whose eternally chanting
+voices made upon Maurice a sinister impression, suggesting to his
+mind--he knew not why--the thought of death. Finally, prompted by Amedeo,
+he drew Maurice into a room where there was dancing.
+
+It was crowded with men and women, was rather dark and very hot. In a
+corner there was a grinding organ, whose handle was turned by a
+perspiring man in a long, woollen cap. Beside him, hunched up on a
+window-sill, was a shepherd boy who accompanied the organ upon a flute of
+reed. Round the walls stood a throng of gazers, and in the middle of the
+floor the dancers performed vigorously, dancing now a polka, now a waltz,
+now a mazurka, now an elaborate country dance in which sixteen or twenty
+people took part, now a tarantella, called by many of the contadini "La
+Fasola." No sooner had they entered the room than Gaspare gently but
+firmly placed his arm round his padrone's waist, took his left hand and
+began to turn him about in a slow waltz, while Amedeo followed the
+example given with Maddalena. Round and round they went among the other
+couples. The organ in the corner ground out a wheezy tune. The reed-flute
+of the shepherd boy twittered, as perhaps, long ago, on the great
+mountain that looked down in the night above the village, a similar flute
+twittered from the woods to Empedocles climbing upward for the last time
+towards the plume of smoke that floated from the volcano. And then Amedeo
+and Gaspare danced together and Maurice's arm was about the waist of
+Maddalena.
+
+It was the first time that he had danced with her, and the mutual act
+seemed to him to increase their intimacy, to carry them a step forward in
+this short and curious friendship which was now, surely, very close to
+its end. They did not speak as they danced. Maddalena's face was very
+solemn, like the face of one taking part in an important ceremonial. And
+Maurice, too, felt serious, even sad. The darkness and heat of the room,
+the melancholy with which all the tunes of a grinding organ seem
+impregnated, the complicated sounds from the fair outside, from which now
+and again the voices of the Roman ice-venders detached themselves, even
+the tapping of the heavy boots of the dancers upon the floor of
+brick--all things in this hour moved him to a certain dreariness of the
+spirit which was touched with sentimentality. This fair day was coming to
+an end. He felt as if everything were coming to an end.
+
+Every dog has his day. The old saying came to his mind. "Every dog has
+his day--and mine is over."
+
+He saw in the dimness of the room the face of Hermione at the railway
+carriage window. It was the face of one on the edge of some great
+beginning. But she did not know. Hermione did not know.
+
+The dance was over. Another was formed, a country dance. Again Maurice
+was Maddalena's partner. Then came "La Fasola," in which Amedeo proudly
+showed forth his well-known genius and Gaspare rivalled him. But Maurice
+thought it was not like the tarantella upon the terrace before the house
+of the priest. The brilliancy, the gayety of that rapture in the sun were
+not present here among farewells. A longing to be in the open air under
+the stars came to him, and when at last the grinding organ stopped he
+said to Gaspare:
+
+"I'm going outside. You'll find me there when you've finished dancing."
+
+"Va bene, signorino. In a quarter of an hour the fireworks will be
+beginning."
+
+"And then we must start off at once."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The organ struck up again and Amedeo took hold of Gaspare by the waist.
+
+"Maddalena, come out with me."
+
+She followed him. She was tired. Festivals were few in her life, and the
+many excitements of this long day had told upon her, but her fatigue was
+the fatigue of happiness. They sat down on a wooden bench set against the
+outer wall of the house. No one else was sitting there, but many people
+were passing to and fro, and they could see the lamps round the "Musica
+Leoncavallo," and hear it fighting and conquering the twitter of the
+shepherd boy's flute and the weary wheezing of the organ within the
+house. A great, looming darkness rising towards the stars dominated the
+humming village. Etna was watching over the last glories of the fair.
+
+"Have you been happy to-day, Maddalena?" Maurice asked.
+
+"Si, signore, very happy. And you?"
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"It will all be very different to-morrow," he said.
+
+He was trying to realize to-morrow, but he could not.
+
+"We need not think of to-morrow," Maddalena said.
+
+She arranged her skirt with her hands, and crossed one foot over the
+other.
+
+"Do you always live for the day?" Maurice asked her.
+
+She did not understand him.
+
+"I do not want to think of to-morrow," she said. "There will be no fair
+then."
+
+"And you would like always to be at the fair?"
+
+"Si, signore, always."
+
+There was a great conviction in her simple statement.
+
+"And you, signorino?"
+
+She was curious about him to-night.
+
+"I don't know what I should like," he said.
+
+He looked up at the great darkness of Etna, and again a longing came to
+him to climb up, far up, into those beech forests that looked towards the
+Isles of Lipari. He wanted greater freedom. Even the fair was prison.
+
+"But I think," he said, after a pause--"I think I should like to carry
+you off, Maddalena, up there, far up on Etna."
+
+He remembered his feeling when he had put his arms round her in the
+dance. It had been like putting his arms round ignorance that wanted to
+be knowledge. Who would be Maddalena's teacher? Not he. And yet he had
+almost intended to have his revenge upon Salvatore.
+
+"Shall we go now?" he said. "Shall we go off to Etna, Maddalena?"
+
+"Signorino!"
+
+She gave a little laugh.
+
+"We must go home after the fireworks."
+
+"Why should we? Why should we not take the donkeys now? Gaspare is
+dancing. Your father is playing cards. No one would notice. Shall we?
+Shall we go now and get the donkeys, Maddalena?"
+
+But she replied:
+
+"A girl can only go like that with a man when she is married."
+
+"That's not true," he said. "She can go like that with a man she loves."
+
+"But then she is wicked, and the Madonna will not hear her when she
+prays, signorino."
+
+"Wouldn't you do anything for a man you really loved? Wouldn't you forget
+everything? Wouldn't you forget even the Madonna?"
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+It seemed to him that he was answered.
+
+"Wouldn't you forget the Madonna for me?" he whispered, leaning towards
+her.
+
+There was a loud report close to them, a whizzing noise, a deep murmur
+from the crowd, and in the clear sky above Etna the first rocket burst,
+showering down a cataract of golden stars, which streamed towards the
+earth, leaving trails of fire behind them.
+
+The sound of the grinding organ and of the shepherd boy's flute ceased in
+the dancing-room, and the crowd within rushed out into the market-place.
+
+"Signorino! Signorino! Come with me! We cannot see properly here! I know
+where to go. There will be wheels of fire, and masses of flowers, and a
+picture of the Regina Margherita. Presto! Presto!"
+
+Gaspare had hold of Maurice by the arm.
+
+"E' finito!" Maurice murmured.
+
+It seemed to him that the last day of his wild youth was at an end.
+
+"E' finito!" he repeated.
+
+But there was still an hour.
+
+And who can tell what an hour will bring forth?
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Maurice and Gaspare said
+good-bye to Maddalena and her father on the road by Isola Bella.
+Salvatore had left the three donkeys at Cattaro, and had come the rest of
+the way on foot, while Maddalena rode Gaspare's beast.
+
+"The donkey you bought is for Maddalena," Maurice had said to him.
+
+And the fisherman had burst into effusive thanks. But already he had his
+eye on a possible customer in Cattaro. As soon as the Inglese had gone
+back to his own country the donkey would be resold at a good price. What
+did a fisherman want with donkeys, and how was an animal to be stabled on
+the Sirens' Isle? As soon as the Inglese was gone, Salvatore meant to put
+a fine sum of money into his pocket.
+
+"Addio, signorino!" he said, sweeping off his hat with the wild,
+half-impudent gesture that was peculiar to him. "I kiss your hand and I
+kiss the hand of your signora."
+
+He bent down his head as if he were going to translate the formal phrase
+into an action, but Maurice drew back.
+
+"Addio, Salvatore," he said.
+
+His voice was low.
+
+"Addio, Maddalena!" he added.
+
+She murmured something in reply. Salvatore looked keenly from one to the
+other.
+
+"Are you tired, Maddalena?" he asked, with a sort of rough suspicion.
+
+"Si," she answered.
+
+She followed him slowly across the railway line towards the sea, while
+Maurice and Gaspare turned their donkeys' heads towards the mountain.
+
+They rode upward in silence. Gaspare was sleepy. His head nodded loosely
+as he rode, but his hands never let go their careful hold of the clock.
+Round about him his many purchases were carefully disposed, fastened
+elaborately to the big saddle. The roses, faded now, were still above his
+ears. Maurice rode behind. He was not sleepy. He felt as if he would
+never sleep again.
+
+As they drew nearer to the house of the priest, Gaspare pulled himself
+together with an effort, half-turned on his donkey, and looked round at
+his padrone.
+
+"Signorino!"
+
+"Si."
+
+"Do you think the signora will be asleep?"
+
+"I don't know. I suppose so."
+
+The boy looked wise.
+
+"I do not think so," he said, firmly.
+
+"What--at three o'clock in the morning!"
+
+"I think the signora will be on the terrace watching for us."
+
+Maurice's lips twitched.
+
+"Chi lo sa?" he replied.
+
+He tried to speak carelessly, but where was his habitual carelessness of
+spirit, his carelessness of a boy now? He felt that he had lost it
+forever, lost it in that last hour of the fair.
+
+"Signorino!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Where were you and Maddalena when I was helping with the fireworks?"
+
+"Close by."
+
+"Did you see them all? Did you see the Regina Margherita?"
+
+"Si."
+
+"I looked round for you, but I could not see you."
+
+"There was such a crowd and it was dark."
+
+"Yes. Then you were there, where I left you?"
+
+"We may have moved a little, but we were not far off."
+
+"I cannot think why I could not find you when the fireworks were over."
+
+"It was the crowd. I thought it best to go to the stable without
+searching for you. I knew you and Salvatore would be there."
+
+The boy was silent for a moment. Then he said:
+
+"Salvatore was very angry when he saw me come into the stable without
+you."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He said I ought not to have left my padrone."
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"I told him I would not be spoken to by him. If you had not come in just
+then I think there would have been a baruffa. Salvatore is a bad man, and
+always ready with his knife. And he had been drinking."
+
+"He was quiet enough coming home."
+
+"I do not like his being so quiet."
+
+"What does it matter?"
+
+Again there was a pause. Then Gaspare said:
+
+"Now that the signora has come back we shall not go any more to the Casa
+delle Sirene, shall we?"
+
+"No, I don't suppose we shall go any more."
+
+"It is better like that, signorino. It is much better that we do not go."
+
+Maurice said nothing.
+
+"We have been there too often," added Gaspare. "I am glad the signora has
+come back. I am sorry she ever went away."
+
+"It was not our fault that she went," Maurice said, in a hard voice like
+that of a man trying to justify something, to defend himself against some
+accusation. "We did not want the signora to go."
+
+"No, signore."
+
+Gaspare's voice sounded almost apologetic. He was a little startled by
+his padrone's tone.
+
+"It was a pity she went," he continued. "The poor signora----"
+
+"Why is it such a pity?" Maurice interrupted, almost roughly, almost
+suspiciously. "Why do you say 'the poor signora'?"
+
+Gaspare stared at him with open surprise.
+
+"I only meant----"
+
+"The signora wished to go to Africa. She decided for herself. There is no
+reason to call her the poor signora."
+
+"No, signore."
+
+The boy's voice recalled Maurice to prudence.
+
+"It was very good of her to go," he said, more quietly. "Perhaps she has
+saved the life of the sick signore by going."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+Gaspare said no more, but as they rode up, drawing ever nearer to the
+bare mountain-side and the house of the priest, Maurice's heart
+reiterated the thought of the boy. Why had Hermione ever gone? What a
+madness it had all been, her going, his staying! He knew it now for a
+madness, a madness of the summer, of the hot, the burning south. In this
+terrible quiet of the mountains, without the sun, without the laughter
+and the voices and the movement of men, he understood that he had been
+mad, that there had been something in him, not all himself, which had run
+wild, despising restraint. And he had known that it was running wild, and
+he had thought to let it go just so far and no farther. He had set a
+limit of time to his wildness and its deeds. And he had set another
+limit. Surely he had. He had not ever meant to go too far. And then, just
+when he had said to himself "E' finito!" the irrevocable was at hand, the
+moment of delirium in which all things that should have been remembered
+were forgotten. What had led him? What spirit of evil? Or had he been
+led at all? Had not he rather deliberately forced his way to the tragic
+goal whither, through all these sunlit days, these starry nights, his
+feet had been tending?
+
+He looked upon himself as a man looks upon a stranger whom he has seen
+commit a crime which he could never have committed. Mentally he took
+himself into custody, he tried, he condemned himself. In this hour of
+acute reaction the cool justice of the Englishman judged the passionate
+impulse of the Sicilian, even marvelled at it, and the heart of the
+dancing Faun cried: "What am I--what am I really?" and did not find the
+answer.
+
+"Signorino?"
+
+"Yes, Gaspare."
+
+"When we get to that rock we shall see the house."
+
+"I know."
+
+How eagerly he had looked upward to the little white house on the
+mountain on that first day in Sicily, with what joy of anticipation, with
+what an exquisite sense of liberty and of peace! The drowsy wail of the
+"Pastorale" had come floating down to him over the olive-trees almost
+like a melody that stole from paradise. But now he dreaded the turn of
+the path. He dreaded to see the terrace wall, the snowy building it
+protected. And he felt as if he were drawing near to a terror, and as if
+he could not face it, did not know how to face it.
+
+"Signorino, there is no light! Look!"
+
+"The signora and Lucrezia must be asleep at this hour."
+
+"If they are, what are we to do? Shall we wake them?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+He spoke quickly, in hope of a respite.
+
+"We will wait--we will not disturb them."
+
+Gaspare looked down at the parcel he was holding with such anxious care.
+
+"I would like to play the 'Tre Colori,'" he said. "I would like the
+first thing the signora hears when she wakes to be the 'Tre Colori.'"
+
+"Hush! We must be very quiet."
+
+The noise made on the path by the tripping feet of the donkeys was almost
+intolerable to him. It must surely wake the deepest sleeper. They were
+now on the last ascent where the mountain-side was bare. Some stones
+rattled downward, causing a sharp, continuous sound. It was answered by
+another sound, which made both Gaspare and Maurice draw rein and pull up.
+
+As on that first day in Sicily Maurice had been welcomed by the
+"Pastorale," so he was welcomed by it now. What an irony that was to him!
+For an instant his lips curved in a bitter smile. But the smile died away
+as he realized things, and a strange sadness took hold of his heart. For
+it was not the ceramella that he heard in this still hour, but a piano
+played softly, monotonously, with a dreamy tenderness that made it surely
+one with the tenderness of the deep night. And he knew that Hermione had
+been watching, that she had heard him coming, that this was her welcome,
+a welcome from the depths of her pure, true heart. How much the music
+told him! How clearly it spoke to him! And how its caress flagellated his
+bare soul! Hermione had returned expectant of welcome and had found
+nothing, and instead of coming out upon the terrace, instead of showing
+surprise, vexation, jealous curiosity, of assuming the injured air that
+even a good woman can scarcely resist displaying in a moment of acute
+disappointment, she sent forth this delicate salutation to him from afar,
+the sweetest that she knew, the one she herself loved best.
+
+Tears came into his eyes as he listened. Then he shut his eyes and said
+to himself, shuddering:
+
+"Oh, you beast! You beast!"
+
+"It is the signora!" said Gaspare, turning round on his donkey. "She does
+not know we are here, and she is playing to keep herself awake."
+
+He looked down at his clock, and his eyes began to shine.
+
+"I am glad the signora is awake!" he said. "Signorino, let us get off the
+donkeys and leave them at the arch, and let us go in without any noise."
+
+"But perhaps the signora knows that we are here," Maurice said.
+
+Directly he had heard the music he had known that Hermione was aware of
+their approach.
+
+"No, no, signore. I am sure she does not, or she would have come out to
+meet us. Let us leave the donkeys!"
+
+He sprang off softly. Mechanically, Maurice followed his example.
+
+"Now, signore!"
+
+The boy took him by the hand and led him on tiptoe to the terrace, making
+him crouch down close to the open French window. The "Pastorale" was
+louder here. It never ceased, but returned again and again with the
+delicious monotony that made it memorable and wove a spell round those
+who loved it. As he listened to it, Maurice fancied he could hear the
+breathing of the player, and he felt that she was listening, too,
+listening tensely for footsteps on the terrace.
+
+Gaspare looked up at him with bright eyes. The boy's whole face was alive
+with a gay and mischievous happiness, as he turned the handle at the back
+of his clock slowly, slowly, till at last it would turn no more. Then
+there tinkled forth to join the "Pastorale" the clear, trilling melody of
+the "Tre Colori."
+
+The music in the room ceased abruptly. There was a rustling sound as the
+player moved. Then Hermione's voice, with something trembling through it
+that was half a sob, half a little burst of happy laughter, called out:
+
+"Gaspare, how dare you interrupt my concert?"
+
+"Signora! Signora!" cried Gaspare, and, springing up, he darted into the
+sitting-room.
+
+But Maurice, though he lifted himself up quickly, stood where he was with
+his hand set hard against the wall of the house. He heard Gaspare kiss
+Hermione's hand. Then he heard her say:
+
+"But, but, Gaspare----"
+
+He took his hand from the wall with an effort. His feet seemed glued to
+the ground, but at last he was in the room.
+
+"Hermione!" he said.
+
+"Maurice!"
+
+He felt her strong hands, strong and yet soft like all the woman, on his.
+
+"Cento di questi giorni!" she said. "Ah, but it is better than all the
+birthdays in the world!"
+
+He wanted to kiss her--not to please her, but for himself he wanted to
+kiss her--but he dared not. He felt that if his lips were to touch
+hers--she must know. To excuse his avoidance of the natural greeting he
+looked at Gaspare.
+
+"I know!" she whispered. "You haven't forgotten!"
+
+She was alluding to that morning on the terrace when he came up from the
+fishing. They loosed their hands. Gaspare set the clock playing again.
+
+"What a beauty!" Hermione said, glad to hide her emotion for a moment
+till she and Maurice could be alone. "What a marvel! Where did you find
+it, Gaspare--at the fair?"
+
+"Si, signora!"
+
+Solemnly he handed it, still playing brightly, to his padrona, just a
+little reluctantly, perhaps, but very gallantly.
+
+"It is for you, signora."
+
+"A present--oh, Gaspare!"
+
+Again her voice was veiled. She put out her hand and touched the boy's
+hand.
+
+"Grazie! How sweetly it plays! You thought of me!"
+
+There was a silence till the tune was finished. Then Maurice said:
+
+"Hermione, I don't know what to say. That we should be at the fair the
+day you arrived! Why--why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you write?"
+
+"You didn't know, then!"
+
+The words came very quickly, very eagerly.
+
+"Know! Didn't Lucrezia tell you that we had no idea?"
+
+"Poor Lucrezia! She's in a dreadful condition. I found her in the
+village."
+
+"No!" Maurice cried, thankful to turn the conversation from himself,
+though only for an instant. "I specially told her to stay here. I
+specially----"
+
+"Well, but, poor thing, as you weren't expecting me! But I wrote,
+Maurice, I wrote a letter telling you everything, the hour we were
+coming--"
+
+"It's Don Paolo!" exclaimed Gaspare, angrily. "He hides away the letters.
+He lets them lie sometimes in his office for months. To-morrow I will go
+and tell him what I think; I will turn out every drawer."
+
+"It is too bad!" Maurice said.
+
+"Then you never had it?"
+
+"Hermione"--he stared at the open door--"you think we should have gone to
+the fair if----"
+
+"No, no, I never thought so. I only wondered. It all seemed so strange."
+
+"It is too horrible!" Maurice said, with heavy emphasis. "And Artois--no
+rooms ready for him! What can he have thought?"
+
+"As I did, that there had been a mistake. What does it matter now? Just
+at the moment I was dreadfully--oh, dreadfully disappointed. I saw
+Gaspare at the fair. And you saw me, Gaspare?"
+
+"Si, signora. I ran all the way to the station, but the train had gone."
+
+"But I didn't see you, Maurice. Where were you?"
+
+Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but Maurice did not give him time.
+
+"I was there, too, in the fair."
+
+"But of course you weren't looking at the train?"
+
+"Of course not. And when Gaspare told me, it was too late to do anything.
+We couldn't get back in time, and the donkeys were tired, and so----"
+
+"Oh, I'm glad you didn't hurry back. What good would it have done then?"
+
+There was a touch of constraint in her voice.
+
+"You must have thought I should be in bed."
+
+"Yes, we did."
+
+"And so I ought to be now. I believe I am tremendously tired, but--but
+I'm so tremendously something else that I hardly know."
+
+The constraint had gone.
+
+"The signora is happy because she is back in my country," Gaspare
+remarked, with pride and an air of shrewdness.
+
+He nodded his head. The faded roses shook above his ears. Hermione smiled
+at him.
+
+"He knows all about it," she said. "Well, if we are ever to go to
+bed----"
+
+Gaspare looked from her to his padrone.
+
+"Buona notte, signora," he said, gravely. "Buona notte, signorino. Buon
+riposo!"
+
+"Buon riposo!" echoed Hermione. "It is blessed to hear that again. I do
+love the clock, Gaspare."
+
+The boy beamed at her and went reluctantly away to find the donkeys. At
+that moment Maurice would have given almost anything to keep him. He
+dreaded unspeakably to be alone with Hermione. But it had to be. He must
+face it. He must seem natural, happy.
+
+"Shall I put the clock down?" he asked.
+
+He went to her, took the clock, carried it to the writing-table, and put
+it down.
+
+"Gaspare was so happy to bring it to you."
+
+He turned. He felt desperate. He came to Hermione and put out his hands.
+
+"I feel so bad that we weren't here," he said.
+
+"That is it!"
+
+There was a sound of deep relief in her voice. Then she had been puzzled
+by his demeanor! He must be natural; but how? It seemed to him as if
+never in all his life could he have felt innocent, careless, brave. Now
+he was made of cowardice. He was like a dog that crawls with its belly to
+the floor. He got hold of Hermione's hands.
+
+"I feel--I feel horribly, horribly bad!"
+
+Speaking the absolute truth, his voice was absolutely sincere, and he
+deceived her utterly.
+
+"Maurice," she said, "I believe it's upset you so much that--that you are
+shy of me."
+
+She laughed happily.
+
+"Shy--of me!"
+
+He tried to laugh, too, and kissed her abruptly, awkwardly. All his
+natural grace was gone from him. But when he kissed her she did not know
+it; her lips clung to his with a tender passion, a fealty that terrified
+him.
+
+"She must know!" he thought. "She must feel the truth. My lips must tell
+it to her."
+
+And when at last they drew away from each other his eyes asked her
+furiously a question, asked it of her eyes.
+
+"What is it, Maurice?"
+
+He said nothing. She dropped her eyes and reddened slowly, till she
+looked much younger than usual, strangely like a girl.
+
+"You haven't--you haven't----"
+
+There was a sound of reserve in her voice, and yet a sound of triumph,
+too. She looked up at him again.
+
+"Do you guess that I have something to tell you?" she said, slowly.
+
+"Something to tell me?" he repeated, dully.
+
+He was so intent on himself, on his own evil-doing, that it seemed to him
+as if everything must have some connection with it.
+
+"Ah," she said, quickly; "no, I see you weren't."
+
+"What is it?" he asked, but without real interest.
+
+"I can't tell you now," she said.
+
+Gaspare went by the window leading the donkeys.
+
+"Buona notte, signora!"
+
+It was a very happy voice.
+
+"Buona notte, Gaspare. Sleep well."
+
+Maurice caught at the last words.
+
+"We must sleep," he said. "To-morrow we'll--we'll----"
+
+"Tell each other everything. Yes, to-morrow!"
+
+She put her arm through his.
+
+"Maurice, if you knew how I feel!"
+
+"Yes?" he said, trying to make his voice eager, buoyant. "Yes?"
+
+"If you knew how I've been longing to be back! And so often I've thought
+that I never should be here with you again, just in the way we were!"
+
+He cleared his throat.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It is so difficult to repeat a great, an intense happiness, I think. But
+we will, we are repeating it, aren't we?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When I got to the station to-day, and--and you weren't there, I had a
+dreadful foreboding. It was foolish. The explanation of your not being
+there was so simple. Of course I might have guessed it."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But in the first moment I felt as if you weren't there because I had
+lost you forever, because you had been taken away from me forever. It was
+such an intense feeling that it frightened me--it frightened me horribly.
+Put your arm round me, Maurice. Let me feel what an idiot I have been!"
+
+He obeyed her and put his arm round her, and he felt as if his arm must
+tell her what she had not learned from his lips. And she thought that now
+he must know the truth she had not told him.
+
+"Don't think of dreadful things," he said.
+
+"I won't any more. I don't think I could with you. To me you always mean
+the sun, light, and life, and all that is brave and beautiful!"
+
+He took his arm away from her.
+
+"Come, we must sleep, Hermione!" he said. "It's nearly dawn. I can almost
+see the smoke on Etna."
+
+He shut the French window and drew the bolt.
+
+She had gone into the bedroom and was standing by the dressing-table. She
+did not know why, but a great shyness had come upon her. It was like a
+cloud enveloping her. Never before had she felt like this with Maurice,
+not even when they were first married. She had loved him too utterly to
+be shy with him. Maurice was still in the sitting-room, fastening the
+shutters of the window. She heard the creak of wood, the clatter of the
+iron bar falling into the fastener. Now he would come.
+
+But he did not come. He was moving about in the room. She heard papers
+rustling, then the lid of the piano shut down. He was putting everything
+in order.
+
+This orderliness was so unusual in Maurice that it made a disagreeable
+impression upon her. She began to feel as if he did not want to come into
+the bedroom, as if he were trying to put off the moment of coming. She
+remembered that he had seemed shy of her. What had come to them both
+to-night? Her instinct moved her to break through this painful, this
+absurd constraint.
+
+"Maurice!" she called.
+
+"Yes."
+
+His voice sounded odd to her, almost like the voice of some other man,
+some stranger.
+
+"Aren't you coming?"
+
+"Yes. Hermione."
+
+But still he did not come. After a moment, he said:
+
+"It's awfully hot to-night!"
+
+"After Africa it seems quite cool to me."
+
+"Does it? I've been--since you've been away I've been sleeping nearly
+always out-of-doors on the terrace."
+
+Now he came to the doorway and stood there. He looked at the white room,
+at Hermione. She had on a white tea-gown. It seemed to him that
+everything here was white, everything but his soul. He felt as if he
+could not come into this room, could not sleep here to-night, as if it
+would be a desecration. When he stood in the doorway the painful shyness
+returned to her.
+
+"Have you?" she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you--would you rather sleep there to-night?"
+
+She did not mean to say it. It was the last thing she wished to say. Yet
+she said it. It seemed to her that she was forced to say it.
+
+"Well, it's much cooler there."
+
+She was silent.
+
+"I could just put one or two rugs and cushions on the seat by the wall,"
+he said. "I shall sleep like a top. I'm awfully tired!"
+
+"But--but the sun will soon be up, won't it?"
+
+"Oh--then I can come in."
+
+"All right."
+
+"I'll take the rugs from the sitting-room. I say--how's Artois?"
+
+"Much better, but he's still weak."
+
+"Poor chap!"
+
+"He'll ride up to-morrow on a donkey."
+
+"Good! I'm--I'm most awfully sorry about his rooms."
+
+"What does it matter? I've made them quite nice already. He's perfectly
+comfortable."
+
+"I'm glad. It's all--it's all been such a pity--about to-day, I mean."
+
+"Don't let's think of it! Don't let's think of it any more."
+
+A passionate sound had stolen into her voice. She moved a step towards
+him. A sudden idea had come to her, an idea that stirred within her a
+great happiness, that made a flame of joy spring up in her heart.
+
+"Maurice, you--you----"
+
+"What is it?" he asked.
+
+"You aren't vexed at my staying away so long? You aren't vexed at my
+bringing Emile back with me?"
+
+"No, of course not," he said. "But--but I wish you hadn't gone away."
+
+And then he disappeared into the sitting-room, collected the rugs and
+cushions, opened the French window, and went out upon the terrace.
+Presently he called out:
+
+"I shall sleep as I am, Hermione, without undressing. I'm awfully done.
+Good-night."
+
+"Good-night!" she called.
+
+There was a quiver in her voice. And yet that flame of happiness had not
+quite died down. She said to herself:
+
+"He doesn't want me to know. He's too proud. But he has been a little
+jealous, perhaps." She remembered how Sicilian he was.
+
+"But I'll make him forget it all," she thought, eagerly.
+"To-morrow--to-morrow it will be all right. He's missed me, he's missed
+me!"
+
+That thought was very sweet to her. It seemed to explain all things; this
+constraint of her husband, which had reacted upon her, this action of his
+in preferring to sleep outside--everything. He had always been like a
+boy. He was like a boy now. He could not conceal his feelings. He did not
+doubt her. She knew that. But he had been a little jealous about her
+friendship for Emile.
+
+She undressed. When she was ready for bed she hesitated a moment. Then
+she put a white shawl round her shoulders and stole quickly out of the
+room. She came upon the terrace. The stars were waning. The gray of the
+dawn was in the sky towards the east. Maurice, stretched upon the rugs,
+with his face turned towards the terrace wall, was lying still. She went
+to him, bent down, and kissed him.
+
+"I love you," she whispered--"oh, so much!"
+
+She did not wait, but went away at once. When she was gone he put up his
+hand to his face. On his cheek there was a tear.
+
+"God forgive me!" he said to himself. "God forgive me!"
+
+His body was shaken by a sob.
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+When the sun came up over the rim of the sea Maurice ceased from his
+pretence of sleep, raised himself on his elbow, then sat upright and
+looked over the ravine to the rocks of the Sirens' Isle. The name seemed
+to him now a fatal name, and everything connected with his sojourn in
+Sicily fatal. Surely there had been a malign spirit at work. In this
+early morning hour his brain, though unrefreshed by sleep, was almost
+unnaturally clear, feverishly busy. Something had met him when he first
+set foot in Sicily--so he thought now--had met him with a fixed and evil
+purpose. And that purpose had never been abandoned.
+
+Old superstitions, inherited perhaps from a long chain of credulous
+Sicilian ancestors, were stirring in him. He did not laugh at his idea,
+as a pure-blooded Englishman would have laughed. He pondered it. He
+cherished it.
+
+On his very first evening in Sicily the spirit had led him to the wall,
+had directed his gaze to the far-off light in the house of the sirens. He
+remembered how strangely the little light had fascinated his eyes, and
+his mind through his eyes, how he had asked what it was, how, when
+Hermione had called him to come in to sleep, he had turned upon the steps
+to gaze down on it once more. Then he had not known why he gazed. Now he
+knew. The spirit that had met him by the sea in Sicily had whispered to
+him to look, and he had obeyed because he could not do otherwise.
+
+He dwelt upon that thought, that he had obeyed because he had been
+obliged to obey. It was a palliative to his mental misery and his hatred
+of himself. The fatalism that is linked with superstition got hold upon
+him and comforted him a little. He had not been a free agent. He had had
+to do as he had done. Everything had been arranged so that he might sin.
+The night of the fishing had prepared the way for the night of the fair.
+If Hermione had stayed--but of course she had not stayed. The spirit that
+had kept him in Sicily had sent her across the sea to Africa. In the full
+flush of his hot-blooded youth, intoxicated by his first knowledge of the
+sun and of love, he had been left quite alone. Newly married, he had been
+abandoned by his wife for a good, even perhaps a noble, reason. Still, he
+had been abandoned--to himself and the keeping of that spirit. Was it any
+wonder that he had fallen? He strove to think that it was not. In the
+night he had cowered before Hermione and had been cruel with himself.
+Now, in the sunshine, he showed fight. He strove to find excuses for
+himself. If he did not find excuses he felt that he could not face the
+day, face Hermione in sunlight.
+
+And now that the spirit had led him thus far, surely its work was done,
+surely it would leave him alone. He tried to believe that.
+
+Then he thought of Maddalena.
+
+She was there, down there where the rising sun glittered on the sea. She
+surely was awake, as he was awake. She was thinking, wondering--perhaps
+weeping.
+
+He got up. He could not look at the sea any more. The name "House of the
+Sirens" suddenly seemed to him a terrible misnomer, now that he thought
+of Maddalena perhaps weeping by the sea.
+
+He had his revenge upon Salvatore, but at what a cost!
+
+Salvatore! The fisherman's face rose up before him. If he ever knew!
+Maurice remembered his sensation that already, before he had done the
+fisherman any wrong, the fisherman had condemned him. Now there was a
+reason for condemnation. He had no physical fear of Salvatore. He was not
+a man to be physically afraid of another man. But if Salvatore ever knew
+he might tell. He might tell Hermione. That thought brought with it to
+Maurice a cold as of winter. The malign spirit might still have a purpose
+in connection with him, might still be near him full of intention. He
+felt afraid of the Sicily he had loved. He longed to leave it. He thought
+of it as an isle of fear, where terrors walked in the midst of the glory
+of the sunshine, where fatality lurked beside the purple sea.
+
+"Maurice!"
+
+He started. Hermione was on the steps of the sitting-room.
+
+"You're not sleeping!" he said.
+
+He felt as if she had been there reading all his thoughts.
+
+"And you!" she answered.
+
+"The sun woke me."
+
+He lied instinctively. All his life with her would be a lie now, could
+never be anything else--unless----
+
+He looked at her hard and long in the eyes for the first time since they
+had met after her return. Suppose he were to tell her, now, at once, in
+the stillness, the wonderful innocence and clearness of the dawn! For a
+moment he felt that it would be an exquisite relief, a casting down of an
+intolerable burden. She had such a splendid nature. She loved sincerity
+as she loved God. To her it was the one great essential quality, whose
+presence or absence made or marred the beauty of a human soul. He knew
+that.
+
+"Why do you look at me like that?" she said, coming down to him with the
+look of slow strength that was always characteristic of her.
+
+He dropped his eyes.
+
+"I don't know. How do you mean?"
+
+"As if you had something to tell me."
+
+"Perhaps--perhaps I have," he answered.
+
+He was on the verge, the very verge of confession. She put her arm
+through his. When she touched him the impulse waned, but it did not die
+utterly away.
+
+"Tell it me," she said. "I love to hear everything you tell me. I don't
+think you could ever tell me anything that I should not understand."
+
+"Are you--are you sure?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"But"--he suddenly remembered some words of hers that, till then, he had
+forgotten--"but you had something to tell me."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I want to hear it."
+
+He could not speak yet. Perhaps presently he would be able to.
+
+"Let us go up to the top of the mountain," she answered. "I feel as if we
+could see the whole island from there. And up there we shall get all the
+wind of the morning."
+
+They turned towards the steep, bare slope and climbed it, while the sun
+rose higher, as if attending them. At the summit there was a heap of
+stones.
+
+"Let us sit here," Hermione said. "We can see everything from here, all
+the glories of the dawn."
+
+"Yes."
+
+He was so intensely preoccupied by the debate within him that he did not
+remember that it was here, among these stones where they were sitting,
+that he had hidden the fragments of Hermione's letter from Africa telling
+him of her return on the day of the fair.
+
+They sat down with their faces towards the sea. The air up here was
+exquisitely cool. In the pellucid clearness of dawn the coast-line looked
+enchanted, fairy-like and full of delicate mystery. And its fading, in
+the far distance, was like a calling voice. Behind them the ranges of
+mountains held a few filmy white clouds, like laces, about their rugged
+peaks. The sea was a pale blue stillness, shot with soft grays and mauves
+and pinks, and dotted here and there with black specks that were the
+boats of fishermen.
+
+Hermione sat with her hands clasped round her knees. Her face, browned by
+the African sun, was intense with feeling.
+
+"Yes," she said, at last, "I can tell you here."
+
+She looked at the sea, the coast-line, then turned her head and gazed at
+the mountains.
+
+"We looked at them together," she continued--"that last evening before I
+went away. Do you remember, Maurice?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"From the arch. It is better up here. Always, when I am very happy or
+very sad, my instinct would be to seek a mountain-top. The sight of great
+spaces seen from a height teaches one, I think."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Not to be an egoist in one's joy; not to be a craven in one's sorrow.
+You see, a great view suggests the world, the vastness of things, the
+multiplicity of life. I think that must be it. And of course it reminds
+one, too, that one will soon be going away."
+
+"Going away?"
+
+"Yes. 'The mountains will endure'--but we--!"
+
+"Oh, you mean death."
+
+"Yes. What is it makes one think most of death when--when life, new life,
+is very near?"
+
+She had been gazing at the mountains and the sea, but now she turned and
+looked into his face.
+
+"Don't you understand what I have to tell you?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head. He was still wondering whether he would dare to tell
+her of his sin. And he did not know. At one moment he thought that he
+could do it, at another that he would rather throw himself over the
+precipice of the mountain than do it.
+
+"I don't understand it at all."
+
+There was a lack of interest in his voice, but she did not notice it. She
+was full of the wonder of the morning, the wonder of being again with
+him, and the wonder of what she had to tell him.
+
+"Maurice"--she put her hand on his--"the night I was crossing the sea to
+Africa I knew. All these days I have kept this secret from you because I
+could not write it. It seemed to me too sacred. I felt I must be with you
+when I told it. That night upon the sea I was very sad. I could not
+sleep. I was on deck looking always back, towards Sicily and you. And
+just when the dawn was coming I--I knew that a child was coming, too, a
+child of mine and yours."
+
+She was silent. Her hand pressed his, and now she was again looking
+towards the sea. And it seemed to him that her face was new, that it was
+already the face of a mother.
+
+He said nothing and he did not move. He looked down at the heap of stones
+by which they were sitting, and his eyes rested on a piece of paper
+covered with writing. It was a fragment of Hermione's letter to him. As
+he saw it something sharp and cold like a weapon made of ice, seemed to
+be plunged into him. He got up, pulling hard at her hand. She obeyed his
+hand.
+
+"What is it?" she said, as they stood together. "You look----"
+
+He had become pale. He knew it.
+
+"Hermione!" he said.
+
+He was actually panting as if he had been running. He moved a few steps
+towards the edge of the summit. She followed him.
+
+"You are angry that I didn't tell you! But--I wanted to say it. I wanted
+to--to----"
+
+She lifted his hands to her lips.
+
+"Thank you for giving me a child," she said.
+
+Then tears came into his eyes and ran down over his cheeks. That he
+should be thanked by her--that scourged the genuine good in him till
+surely blood started under the strokes.
+
+"Don't thank me!" he said. "Don't do that! I won't have it!"
+
+His voice sounded angry.
+
+"I won't ever let you thank me for anything," he went on. "You must
+understand that."
+
+He was on the edge of some violent, some almost hysterical outburst. He
+thought of Gaspare casting himself down in the boat that morning when he
+had feared that his padrone was drowned. So he longed to cast himself
+down and cry. But he had the strength to check his impulse. Only, the
+checking of it seemed to turn him for a moment into something made not of
+flesh and blood but of iron. And this thing of iron was voiceless.
+
+She knew that he was feeling intensely and respected his silence. But at
+last it began almost to frighten her. The boyish look she loved had gone
+out of his face. A stern man stood beside her, a man she had never seen
+before.
+
+"Maurice," she said, at length. "What is it? I think you are suffering."
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"But--but aren't you glad? Surely you are glad?"
+
+To her the word seemed mean, poverty-stricken. She changed it.
+
+"Surely you are thankful?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, at last. "I am thinking that I don't know
+that I am worthy to be a father."
+
+He himself had fixed a limit. Now, God was putting a period to his wild
+youth. And the heart--was that changed within him?
+
+Too much was happening. The cup was being filled too full. A great
+longing came to him to get away, far away, and be alone. If it had been
+any other day he would have gone off into the mountains, by himself, have
+stayed out till night came, have walked, climbed, till he was exhausted.
+But to-day he could not do that. And soon Artois would be coming. He felt
+as if something must snap in brain or heart.
+
+And he had not slept. How he wished that he could sleep for a little
+while and forget everything. In sleep one knows nothing. He longed to be
+able to sleep.
+
+"I understand that," she said. "But you are worthy, my dear one."
+
+When she said that he knew that he could never tell her.
+
+"I must try," he muttered. "I'll try--from to-day."
+
+She did not talk to him any more. Her instinct told her not to. Almost
+directly they were walking down to the priest's house. She did not know
+which of them had moved first.
+
+When they got there they found Lucrezia up. Her eyes were red, but she
+smiled at Hermione. Then she looked at the padrone with alarm. She
+expected him to blame her for having disobeyed his orders of the day
+before. But he had forgotten all about that.
+
+"Get breakfast, Lucrezia," Hermione said. "We'll have it on the terrace.
+And presently we must have a talk. The sick signore is coming up to-day
+for collazione. We must have a very nice collazione, but something
+wholesome."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia went away to the kitchen thankfully. She had heard bad news of
+Sebastiano yesterday in the village. He was openly in love with the girl
+in the Lipari Isles. Her heart was almost breaking, but the return of the
+padrona comforted her a little. Now she had some one to whom she could
+tell her trouble, some one who would sympathize.
+
+"I'll go and take a bath, Hermione," Maurice said.
+
+And he, too, disappeared.
+
+Hermione went to talk to Gaspare and tell him what to get in Marechiaro.
+
+When breakfast was ready Maurice came back looking less pale, but still
+unboyish. All the bright sparkle to which Hermione was accustomed had
+gone out of him. She wondered why. She had expected the change in him to
+be a passing thing, but it persisted.
+
+At breakfast it was obviously difficult for him to talk. She sought a
+reason for his strangeness. Presently she thought again of Artois. Could
+he be the reason? Or was Maurice now merely preoccupied by that great,
+new knowledge that there would soon be a third life mingled with theirs?
+She wondered exactly what he felt about that. He was really such a boy at
+heart despite his set face of to-day. Perhaps he dreaded the idea of
+responsibility. His agitation upon the mountain-top had been intense.
+Perhaps he was rendered unhappy by the thought of fatherhood. Or was it
+Emile?
+
+When breakfast was over, and he was smoking, she said to him:
+
+"Maurice, I want to ask you something."
+
+A startled look came into his eyes.
+
+"What?" he said, quickly.
+
+He threw his cigarette away and turned towards her, with a sort of
+tenseness that suggested to her a man bracing himself for some ordeal.
+
+"Only about Emile."
+
+"Oh!" he said.
+
+He took another cigarette, and his attitude at once looked easier. She
+wondered why.
+
+"You don't mind about Emile being here, do you?"
+
+Maurice was nearly answering quickly that he was delighted to welcome
+him. But a suddenly born shrewdness prevented him. To-day, like a guilty
+man, he was painfully conscious, painfully alert. He knew that Hermione
+was wondering about him, and realized that her question afforded him an
+opportunity to be deceptive and yet to seem quite natural and truthful.
+He could not be as he had been, to-day. The effort was far too difficult
+for him. Hermione's question showed him a plausible excuse for his
+peculiarity of demeanor and conduct. He seized it.
+
+"I think it was very natural for you to bring him," he answered.
+
+He lit the cigarette. His hand was trembling slightly.
+
+"But--but you had rather I hadn't brought him?"
+
+As Maurice began to act a part an old feeling returned to him, and almost
+turned his lie into truth.
+
+"You could hardly expect me to wish to have Artois with us here, could
+you, Hermione?" he said, slowly.
+
+She scarcely knew whether she were most pained or pleased. She was pained
+that anything she had done had clouded his happiness, but she was
+intensely glad to think he loved to be quite alone with her.
+
+"No, I felt that. But I felt, too, as if it would be cruel to stop short,
+unworthy in us."
+
+"In us?"
+
+"Yes. You let me go to Africa. You might have asked me, you might even
+have told me, not to go. I did not think of it at the time. Everything
+went so quickly. But I have thought of it since. And, knowing that,
+realizing it, I feel that you had your part, a great part, in Emile's
+rescue. For I do believe, Maurice, that if I had not gone he would have
+died."
+
+"Then I am glad you went."
+
+He spoke perfunctorily, almost formally. Hermione felt chilled.
+
+"It seemed to me that, having begun to do a good work, it would be finer,
+stronger, to carry it quite through, to put aside our own desires and
+think of another who had passed through a great ordeal. Was I wrong,
+Maurice? Emile is still very weak, very dependent. Ought I to have said,
+'Now I see you're not going to die, I'll leave you at once.' Wouldn't it
+have been rather selfish, even rather brutal?"
+
+His reply startled her.
+
+"Have you--have you ever thought of where we are?" he said.
+
+"Where we are!"
+
+"Of the people we are living among?"
+
+"I don't think I understand."
+
+He cleared his throat.
+
+"They're Sicilians. They don't see things as the English do," he said.
+
+There was a silence. Hermione felt a heat rush over her, over all her
+body and face. She did not speak, because, if she had, she might have
+said something vehement, even headstrong, such as she had never said,
+surely never would say, to Maurice.
+
+"Of course I understand. It's not that," he added.
+
+"No, it couldn't be that," she said. "You needn't tell me."
+
+The hot feeling stayed with her. She tried to control it.
+
+"You surely can't mind what ignorant people out here think of an utterly
+innocent action!" she said, at last, very quietly.
+
+But even as she spoke she remembered the Sicilian blood in him.
+
+"You have minded it!" she said. "You do mind now."
+
+And suddenly she felt very tender over him, as she might have felt over a
+child. In his face she could not see the boy to-day, but his words set
+the boy, the inmost nature of the boy that he still surely was, before
+her.
+
+The sense of humor in her seemed to be laughing and wiping away a tear at
+the same time.
+
+She moved her chair close to his.
+
+"Maurice," she said. "Do you know that sometimes you make me feel
+horribly old and motherly?"
+
+"Do I?" he said.
+
+"You do to-day, and yet--do you know that I have been thinking since I
+came back that you are looking older, much older than when I went away?"
+
+"Is that Artois?" he said, looking over the wall to the mountain-side
+beyond the ravine.
+
+Hermione got up, leaned upon the wall, and followed his eyes.
+
+"I think it must be. I told Gaspare to go to the hotel when he fetched
+the provisions in Marechiaro and tell Emile it would be best to come up
+in the cool. Yes, it is he, and Gaspare is with him! Maurice, you don't
+mind so very much?"
+
+She put her arm through his.
+
+"These people can't talk when they see how ill he looks. And if they
+do--oh, Maurice, what does it matter? Surely there's only one thing in
+the world that matters, and that is whether one can look one's own
+conscience in the face and say, 'I've nothing to be ashamed of!'"
+
+Maurice longed to get away from the touch of her arm. He remembered the
+fragment of paper he had seen among the stones on the mountain-side. He
+must go up there alone directly he had a moment of freedom. But
+now--Artois! He stared at the distant donkeys. His brain felt dry and
+shrivelled, his body both feverish and tired. How could he support this
+long day's necessities? It seemed to him that he had not the strength and
+resolution to endure them. And Artois was so brilliant! Maurice thought
+of him at that moment as a sort of monster of intellectuality, terrifying
+and repellent.
+
+"Don't you think so?" Hermione said.
+
+"I dare say," he answered. "But I dare say, I suppose--very few of us can
+do that. We can't expect to be perfect, and other people oughtn't to
+expect it of us."
+
+His voice had changed. Before, it had been almost an accusing voice and
+insincere. Now it was surely a voice that pleaded, and it was absolutely
+sincere. Hermione remembered how in London long ago the humility of
+Maurice had touched her. He had stood out from the mass of conceited men
+because of his beauty and his simple readiness to sit at the feet of
+others. And surely the simplicity, the humility, still persisted
+beautifully in him.
+
+"I don't think I should ever expect anything of you that you wouldn't
+give me," she said to him. "Anything of loyalty, of straightness, or of
+manhood. Often you seem to me a boy, and yet, I know, if a danger came to
+me, or a trouble, I could lean on you and you would never fail me. That's
+what a woman loves to feel when she has given herself to a man, that he
+knows how to take care of her, and that he cares to take care of her."
+
+Her body was touching his. He felt himself stiffen. The mental pain he
+suffered under the lash of her words affected his body, and his knowledge
+of the necessity to hide all that was in his mind caused his body to long
+for isolation, to shrink from any contact with another.
+
+"I hope," he said, trying to make his voice natural and simple----"I hope
+you'll never be in trouble or in danger, Hermione."
+
+"I don't think I could mind very much if you were there, if I could just
+touch your hand."
+
+"Here they come!" he said. "I hope Artois isn't very tired with the ride.
+We ought to have had Sebastiano here to play the 'Pastorale' for him."
+
+"Ah! Sebastiano!" said Hermione. "He's playing it for some one else in
+the Lipari Islands. Poor Lucrezia! Maurice, I love Sicily and all things
+Sicilian. You know how much! But--but I'm glad you've got some drops of
+English blood in your veins. I'm glad you aren't all Sicilian."
+
+"Come," he said. "Let us go to the arch and meet him."
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+"So this is your Garden of Paradise?" Artois said.
+
+He got off his donkey slowly at the archway, and stood for a moment,
+after shaking them both by the hand, looking at the narrow terrace,
+bathed in sunshine despite the shelter of the awning, at the columns, at
+the towering rocks which dominated the grove of oak-trees, and at the
+low, white-walled cottage.
+
+"The garden from which you came to save my life," he added.
+
+He turned to Maurice.
+
+"I am grateful and I am ashamed," he said. "I was not your friend,
+monsieur, but you have treated me with more than friendship. I thank you
+in words now, but my hope is that some day I shall be given the
+opportunity to thank you with an act."
+
+He held out his hand again to Maurice. There had been a certain formality
+in his speech, but there was a warmth in his manner that was not formal.
+As Maurice held his hand the eyes of the two men met, and each took swift
+note of the change in the other.
+
+Artois's appearance was softened by his illness. In health he looked
+authoritative, leonine, very sure of himself, piercingly observant,
+sometimes melancholy, but not anxious. His manner, never blustering or
+offensive, was usually dominating, the manner of one who had the right to
+rule in the things of the intellect. Now he seemed much gentler, less
+intellectual, more emotional. One received, at a first meeting with him,
+the sensation rather of coming into contact with a man of heart than
+with a man of brains. Maurice felt the change at once, and was surprised
+by it. Outwardly the novelist was greatly altered. His tall frame was
+shrunken and slightly bent. The face was pale and drawn, the eyes were
+sunken, the large-boned body was frightfully thin and looked uncertain
+when it moved. As Maurice gazed he realized that this man had been to the
+door of death, almost over the threshold of the door.
+
+And Artois? He saw a change in the Mercury whom he had last seen at the
+door of the London restaurant, a change that startled him.
+
+"Come into our Garden of Paradise and rest," said Hermione. "Lean on my
+arm, Emile."
+
+"May I?" Artois asked of Maurice, with a faint smile that was almost
+pathetic.
+
+"Please do. You must be tired!"
+
+Hermione and Artois walked slowly forward to the terrace, arm linked in
+arm. Maurice was about to follow them when he felt a hand catch hold of
+him, a hand that was hot and imperative.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it?"
+
+"Signorino, signorino, I must speak to you!"
+
+Startled, Maurice looked into the boy's flushed face. The great eyes
+searched him fiercely.
+
+"Put the donkeys in the stable," Maurice said. "I'll come."
+
+"Come behind the house, signorino. Ah, Madonna!"
+
+The last exclamation was breathed out with an intensity that was like the
+intensity of despair. The boy's look and manner were tragic.
+
+"Gaspare," Maurice said, "what----?"
+
+He saw Hermione turning towards him.
+
+"I'll come in a minute, Gaspare."
+
+"Madonna!" repeated the boy. "Madonna!"
+
+He held up his hands and let them drop to his sides. Then he muttered
+something--a long sentence--in dialect. His voice sounded like a
+miserable old man's.
+
+"Ah--ah!"
+
+He called to the donkeys and drove them forward to the out-house. Maurice
+followed.
+
+What had happened? Gaspare had the manner, the look, of one confronted by
+a terror from which there was no escape. His eyes had surely at the same
+time rebuked and furiously pitied his master. What did they mean?
+
+"This is our Garden of Paradise!" Hermione was saying as Maurice came up
+to her and Artois. "Do you wonder that we love it?"
+
+"I wonder that you left it." Artois replied.
+
+He was sunk in a deep straw chair, a chaise longue piled up with
+cushions, facing the great and radiant view. After he had spoken he
+sighed.
+
+"I don't think," he said, "that either of you really know that this is
+Eden. That knowledge has been reserved for the interloper, for me."
+
+Hermione sat down close to him. Maurice was standing by the wall,
+listening furtively to the noises from the out-house, where Gaspare was
+unsaddling the donkeys. Artois glanced at him, and was more sharply
+conscious of change in him. To Artois this place, after the long journey,
+which had sorely tried his feeble body, seemed an enchanted place of
+peace, a veritable Elysian Field in which the saddest, the most driven
+man must surely forget his pain and learn how to rest and to be joyful in
+repose. But he felt that his host, the man who had been living in
+paradise, who ought surely to have been learning its blessed lessons
+through sunlit days and starry nights, was restless like a man in a city,
+was anxious, was intensely ill at ease. Once, watching this man, Artois
+had thought of the messenger, poised on winged feet, radiantly ready for
+movement that would be exquisite because it would be obedient. This man
+still looked ready for flight, but for a flight how different! As Artois
+was thinking this Maurice moved.
+
+"Excuse me just for an instant!" he said. "I want to speak to Gaspare."
+
+He saw now that Gaspare was taking into the cottage the provisions that
+had been carried up by the donkey from Marechiaro.
+
+"I--I told him to do something for me in the village," he added, "and I
+want just to know--"
+
+He looked at them, almost defiantly, as if he challenged them not to
+believe what he had said. Then, without finishing his sentence, he went
+quickly into the cottage.
+
+"You have chosen your garden well," Artois said to Hermione directly they
+were alone. "No other sea has ever given to me such an impression of
+tenderness and magical space as this; no other sea has surely ever had a
+horizon-line so distant from those who look as this."
+
+He went on talking about the beauty, leading her with him. He feared lest
+she might begin to speak about her husband.
+
+Meanwhile, Maurice had reached the mountain-side behind the house and was
+waiting there for Gaspare. He heard the boy's voice in the kitchen
+speaking to Lucrezia, angrily it seemed by the sound. Then the voice
+ceased and Gaspare appeared for an instant at the kitchen door, making
+violent motions with his arms towards the mountain. He disappeared. What
+did he want? What did he mean? The gestures had been imperative. Maurice
+looked round. A little way up the mountain there was a large, closed
+building, like a barn, built of stones. It belonged to a contadino, but
+Maurice had never seen it open, or seen any one going to or coming from
+it. As he stared at it an idea occurred to him. Perhaps Gaspare meant him
+to go and wait there, behind the barn, so that Lucrezia should not see or
+hear their colloquy. He resolved to do this, and went swiftly up the
+hill-side. When he was in the shadow of the building he waited. He did
+not know what was the matter, what Gaspare wanted, but he realized that
+something had occurred which had stirred the boy to the depths. This
+something must have occurred while he was at Marechiaro. Before he had
+time mentally to make a list of possible events in Marechiaro, Maurice
+heard light feet running swiftly up the mountain, and Gaspare came round
+the corner, still with the look of tragedy, a wild, almost terrible look
+in his eyes.
+
+"Signorino," he began at once, in a low voice that was full of the
+pressure of an intense excitement. "Tell me! Where were you last night
+when we were making the fireworks go off?"
+
+Maurice felt the blood mount to his face.
+
+"Close to where you left me," he answered.
+
+"Oh, signore! Oh, signore!"
+
+It was almost a cry. The sweat was pouring down the boy's face.
+
+"Ma non e mia colpa! Non e mia colpa!" he exclaimed.
+
+"What do you mean? What has happened, Gaspare?"
+
+"I have seen Salvatore."
+
+His voice was more quiet now. He fixed his eyes almost sternly on his
+padrone, as if in the effort to read his very soul.
+
+"Well? Well, Gaspare?"
+
+Maurice was almost stammering now. He guessed--he knew what was coming.
+
+"Salvatore came up to me just before I got to the village. I heard him
+calling, 'Stop!' I stood still. We were on the path not far from the
+fountain. There was a broken branch on the ground, a branch of olive.
+Salvatore said: 'Suppose that is your padrone, that branch there!' and he
+spat on it. He spat on it, signore, he spat--and he spat."
+
+Maurice knew now.
+
+"Go on!" he said.
+
+And this time there was no uncertainty in his voice. Gaspare was
+breathing hard. His breast rose and fell.
+
+"I was going to strike him in the face, but he caught my hand, and
+then--Signorino, signorino, what have you done?"
+
+His voice rose. He began to look uncontrolled, distracted, wild, as if he
+might do some frantic thing.
+
+"Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+Maurice had him by the arms.
+
+"Why did you?" panted the boy. "Why did you?"
+
+"Then Salvatore knows?"
+
+Maurice saw that any denial was useless.
+
+"He knows! He knows!"
+
+If Maurice had not held Gaspare tightly the boy would have flung himself
+down headlong on the ground, to burst into one of those storms of weeping
+which swept upon him when he was fiercely wrought up. But Maurice would
+not let him have this relief.
+
+"Gaspare! Listen to me! What is he going to do? What is Salvatore going
+to do?"
+
+"Santa Madonna! Santa Madonna!"
+
+The boy rocked himself to and fro. He began to invoke the Madonna and the
+saints. He was beside himself, was almost like one mad.
+
+"Gaspare--in the name of God----!"
+
+"H'sh!"
+
+Suddenly the boy kept still. His face changed, hardened. His body became
+tense. With his hand still held up in a warning gesture, he crept to the
+edge of the barn and looked round it.
+
+"What is it?" Maurice whispered.
+
+Gaspare stole back.
+
+"It is only Lucrezia. She is spreading the linen. I thought----"
+
+"What is Salvatore going to do?"
+
+"Unless you go down to the sea to meet him this evening, signorino, he
+is coming up here to-night to tell everything to the signora."
+
+Maurice went white.
+
+"I shall go," he said. "I shall go down to the sea."
+
+"Madonna! Madonna!"
+
+"He won't come now? He won't come this morning?"
+
+Maurice spoke almost breathlessly, with his hands on the boy's hands
+which streamed with sweat. Gaspare shook his head.
+
+"I told him if he came up I would meet him in the path and kill him."
+
+The boy had out a knife.
+
+Maurice put his arm round Gaspare's shoulder. At that moment he really
+loved the boy.
+
+"Will he come?"
+
+"Only if you do not go."
+
+"I shall go."
+
+"I will come with you, signorino."
+
+"No. I must go alone."
+
+"I will come with you!"
+
+A dogged obstinacy hardened his whole face, made even his shining eyes
+look cold, like stones.
+
+"Gaspare, you are to stay with the signora. I may miss Salvatore going
+down. While I am gone he may come up here. The signora is not to speak
+with him. He is not to come to her."
+
+Gaspare hesitated. He was torn in two by his dual affection, his dual
+sense of the watchful fidelity he owed to his padrone and to his padrona.
+
+"Va bene," he said, at last, in a half whisper.
+
+He hung down his head like one exhausted.
+
+"How will it finish?" he murmured, as if to himself. "How will it
+finish?"
+
+"I must go," Maurice said. "I must go now. Gaspare!"
+
+"Si, signore?"
+
+"We must be careful, you and I, to-day. We must not let the signora,
+Lucrezia, any one suspect that--that we are not just as usual. Do you
+see?"
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The boy nodded. His eyes now looked tired.
+
+"And try to keep a lookout, when you can, without drawing the attention
+of the signora. Salvatore might change his mind and come up. The signora
+is not to know. She is never to know. Do you think"--he hesitated--"do
+you think Salvatore has told any one?"
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+The boy was silent. Then he lifted his hands again and said:
+
+"Signorino! Signorino!"
+
+And Maurice seemed to hear at that moment the voice of an accusing angel.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, "I was mad. We men--we are mad sometimes. But now I
+must be sane. I must do what I can to--I must do what I can--and you must
+help me."
+
+He held out his hand. Gaspare took it. The grasp of it was strong, that
+of a man. It seemed to reassure the boy.
+
+"I will always help my padrone," he said.
+
+Then they went down the mountain-side.
+
+It was perhaps very strange--Maurice thought it was--but he felt now less
+tired, less confused, more master of himself than he had before he had
+spoken with Gaspare. He even felt less miserable. Face to face with an
+immediate and very threatening danger, courage leaped up in him, a
+certain violence of resolve which cleared away clouds and braced his
+whole being. He had to fight. There was no way out. Well, then, he would
+fight. He had played the villain, perhaps, but he would not play the
+poltroon. He did not know what he was going to do, what he could do, but
+he must act, and act decisively. His wild youth responded to this call
+made upon it. There was a new light in his eyes as he went down to the
+cottage, as he came upon the terrace.
+
+Artois noticed it at once, was aware at once that in this marvellous
+peace to which Hermione had brought him there were elements which had
+nothing to do with peace.
+
+"What hast thou to do with peace? Turn thee behind me."
+
+These words from the Bible came into his mind as he looked into the eyes
+of his host, and he felt that Hermione and he were surely near to some
+drama of which they knew nothing, of which Hermione, perhaps, suspected
+nothing.
+
+Maurice acted his part. The tonic of near danger gave him strength, even
+gave him at first a certain subtlety. From the terrace he could see far
+over the mountain flanks. As one on a tower he watched for the approach
+of his enemy from the sea, but he did not neglect his two companions. For
+he was fighting already. When he seemed natural in his cordiality to his
+guest, when he spoke and laughed, when he apologized for the misfortune
+of the previous day, he was fighting. The battle with circumstances was
+joined. He must bear himself bravely in it. He must not allow himself to
+be overwhelmed.
+
+Nevertheless, there came presently a moment which brought with it a sense
+of fear.
+
+Hermione got up to go into the house.
+
+"I must see what Lucrezia is doing," she said. "Your collazione must not
+be a fiasco, Emile."
+
+"Nothing could be a fiasco here, I think," he answered.
+
+She laughed happily.
+
+"But poor Lucrezia is not in paradise," she said. "Ah, why can't every
+one be happy when one is happy one's self? I always think of that when
+I----"
+
+She did not finish her sentence in words. Her look at the two men
+concluded it. Then she turned and went into the house.
+
+"What is the matter with Lucrezia?" asked Artois.
+
+"Oh, she--she's in love with a shepherd called Sebastiano."
+
+"And he's treating her badly?"
+
+"I'm afraid so. He went to the Lipari Isles, and he doesn't come back."
+
+"A girl there keeps him captive?"
+
+"It seems so."
+
+"Faithful women must not expect to have a perfect time in Sicily," Artois
+said.
+
+As he spoke he noticed that a change came in his companion's face. It was
+fleeting, but it was marked. It made Artois think:
+
+"This man understands Sicilian faithlessness in love."
+
+It made him, too, remember sharply some words of his own said long ago in
+London:
+
+"I love the South, but I distrust what I love, and I see the South in
+him."
+
+There was a silence between the two men. Heat was growing in the long
+summer day, heat that lapped them in the influence of the South. Africa
+had been hotter, but this seemed the breast of the South, full of glory
+and of languor, and of that strange and subtle influence which inclines
+the heart of man to passion and the body of man to yield to its desires.
+It was glorious, this wonderful magic of the South, but was it wholesome
+for Northern men? Was it not full of danger? As he looked at the great,
+shining waste of the sea, purple and gold, dark and intense and jewelled,
+at the outline of Etna, at the barbaric ruin of the Saracenic castle on
+the cliff opposite, like a cry from the dead ages echoing out of the
+quivering blue, at the man before him leaning against the blinding white
+wall above the steep bank of the ravine, Artois said to himself that the
+South was dangerous to young, full-blooded men, was dangerous, to such a
+man as Delarey. And he asked himself the question, "What has this man
+been doing here in this glorious loneliness of the South, while his wife
+has been saving my life in Africa?" And a sense of reproach, almost of
+alarm, smote him. For he had called Hermione away. In the terrible
+solitude that comes near to the soul with the footfalls of death he had
+not been strong enough to be silent. He had cried out, and his friend had
+heard and had answered. And Delarey had been left alone with the sun.
+
+"I'm afraid you must feel as if I were your enemy," he said.
+
+And as he spoke he was thinking, "Have I been this man's enemy?"
+
+"Oh no. Why?"
+
+"I deprived you of your wife. You've been all alone here."
+
+"I made friends of the Sicilians."
+
+Maurice spoke lightly, but through his mind ran the thought, "What an
+enemy this man has been to me, without knowing it!"
+
+"They are easy to get on with," said Artois. "When I was in Sicily I
+learned to love them."
+
+"Oh, love!" said Maurice, hastily.
+
+He checked himself.
+
+"That's rather a strong word, but I like them. They're a delightful
+race."
+
+"Have you found out their faults?"
+
+Both men were trying to hide themselves in their words.
+
+"What are their faults, do you think?" Maurice said.
+
+He looked over the wall and saw, far off on the path by the ravine, a
+black speck moving.
+
+"Treachery when they do not trust; sensuality, violence, if they think
+themselves wronged."
+
+"Are--are those faults? I understand them. They seem almost to belong to
+the sun."
+
+Artois had not been looking at Maurice. The sound of Maurice's voice now
+made him aware that the speaker had turned away from him. He glanced up
+and saw his companion staring over the wall across the ravine. What was
+he gazing at? Artois wondered.
+
+"Yes, the sun is perhaps partly responsible for them. Then you have
+become such a sun-worshipper that----"
+
+"No, no, I don't say that," Maurice interrupted.
+
+He looked round and met Artois's observant eyes. He had dreaded having
+those eyes fixed upon him.
+
+"But I think--I think things done in such a place, such an island as
+this, shouldn't be judged too severely, shouldn't be judged, I mean,
+quite as we might judge them, say, in England."
+
+He looked embarrassed as he ended, and shifted his gaze from his
+companion.
+
+"I agree with you," Artois said.
+
+Maurice looked at him again, almost eagerly. An odd feeling came to him
+that this man, who unwittingly had done him a deadly harm, would be able
+to understand what perhaps no woman could ever understand, the tyranny of
+the senses in a man, their fierce tyranny in the sunlit lands. Had he
+been so wicked? Would Artois think so? And the punishment that was
+perhaps coming--did he deserve that it should be terrible? He wondered,
+almost like a boy. But Hermione was not with them. When she was there he
+did not wonder. He felt that he deserved lashes unnumbered.
+
+And Artois--he began to feel almost clairvoyant. The new softness that
+had come to him with the pain of the body, that had been developed by the
+blessed rest from pain that was convalescence, had not stricken his
+faculty of seeing clear in others, but it had changed, at any rate for a
+time, the sentiments that followed upon the exercise of that faculty.
+Scorn and contempt were less near to him than they had been. Pity was
+nearer. He felt now almost sure that Delarey had fallen into some
+trouble while Hermione was in Africa, that he was oppressed at this
+moment by some great uneasiness or even fear, that he was secretly
+cursing some imprudence, and that his last words were a sort of
+surreptitious plea for forgiveness, thrown out to the Powers of the air,
+to the Spirits of the void, to whatever shadowy presences are about the
+guilty man ready to condemn his sin. He felt, too, that he owed much to
+Delarey. In a sense it might be said that he owed to him his life. For
+Delarey had allowed Hermione to come to Africa, and if Hermione had not
+come the end for him, Artois, might well have been death.
+
+"I should like to say something to you, monsieur," he said. "It is rather
+difficult to say, because I do not wish it to seem formal, when the
+feeling that prompts it is not formal."
+
+Maurice was again looking over the wall, watching with intensity the
+black speck that was slowly approaching on the little path.
+
+"What is it, monsieur?" he asked, quickly.
+
+"I owe you a debt--indeed I do. You must not deny it. Through your
+magnanimous action in permitting your wife to leave you, you, perhaps
+indirectly, saved my life. For, without her aid, I do not think I could
+have recovered. Of her nobility and devotion I will not, because I cannot
+adequately, speak. But I wish to say to you that if ever I can do you a
+service of any kind I will do it."
+
+As he finished Maurice, who was looking at him now, saw a veil over his
+big eyes. Could it--could it possibly be a veil of tears!
+
+"Thank you," he answered.
+
+He tried to speak warmly, cordially. But his heart said to him: "You can
+do nothing for me now. It is all too late!"
+
+Yet the words and the emotion of Artois were some slight relief to him.
+He was able to feel that in this man he had no secret enemy, but, if
+need be, a friend.
+
+"You have a nice fellow as servant," Artois said, to change the
+conversation.
+
+"Gaspare--yes. He's loyal. I intend to ask Hermione to let me take him to
+England with us."
+
+He paused, then added, with an anxious curiosity:
+
+"Did you talk to him much as you came up?"
+
+He wondered whether the novelist had noticed Gaspare's agitation or
+whether the boy had been subtle enough to conceal it.
+
+"Not very much. The path is narrow, and I rode in front. He sang most of
+the time, those melancholy songs of Sicily that came surely long ago
+across the sea from Africa."
+
+"They nearly always sing on the mountains when they are with the
+donkeys."
+
+"Dirges of the sun. There is a sadness of the sun as well as a joy."
+
+"Yes."
+
+As Maurice answered, he thought, "How well I know that now!" And as he
+looked at the black figure drawing nearer in the sunshine it seemed to
+him that there was a terror in that gold which he had often worshipped.
+If that figure should be Salvatore! He strained his eyes. At one moment
+he fancied that he recognized the wild, free, rather strutting walk of
+the fisherman. At another he believed that his fear had played him a
+trick, that the movements of the figure were those of an old man, some
+plodding contadino of the hills. Artois wondered increasingly what he was
+looking at. A silence fell between them. Artois lay back in the chaise
+longue and gazed up at the blue, then at the section of distant sea which
+was visible above the rim of the wall though the intervening mountain
+land was hidden. It was a paradise up here. And to have it with the great
+love of a woman, what an experience that must be for any man! It seemed
+to him strange that such an experience had been the gift of the gods to
+their messenger, their Mercury. What had it meant to him? What did it
+mean to him now? Something had changed him. Was it that? In the man by
+the wall Artois did not see any longer the bright youth he remembered.
+Yet the youth was still there, the supple grace, the beauty, bronzed now
+by the long heats of the sun. It was the expression that had changed. In
+cities one sees anxious-looking men everywhere. In London Delarey had
+stood out from the crowd not only because of his beauty of the South, but
+because of his light-hearted expression, the spirit of youth in his eyes.
+And now here, in this reality that seemed almost like a dream in its
+perfection, in this reality of the South, there was a look of strain in
+his eyes and in his whole body. The man had contradicted his surroundings
+in London--now he contradicted his surroundings here.
+
+While Artois was thinking this Maurice's expression suddenly changed, his
+attitude became easier. He turned round from the wall, and Artois saw
+that the keen anxiety had gone out of his eyes. Gaspare was below with
+his gun pretending to look for birds, and had made a sign that the
+approaching figure was not that of Salvatore. Maurice's momentary sense
+of relief was so great that it threw him off his guard.
+
+"What can have been happening beyond the wall?" Artois thought.
+
+He felt as if a drama had been played out there and the denouement had
+been happy.
+
+Hermione came back at this moment.
+
+"Poor Lucrezia!" she said. "She's plucky, but Sebastiano is making her
+suffer horribly."
+
+"Here!" said Artois, almost involuntarily.
+
+"It does seem almost impossible, I know."
+
+She sat down again near him and smiled at her husband.
+
+"You are coming back to health, Emile. And Maurice and I--well, we are in
+our garden. It seems wrong, terribly wrong, that any one should suffer
+here. But Lucrezia loves like a Sicilian. What violence there is in these
+people!"
+
+"England must not judge them."
+
+He looked at Maurice.
+
+"What's that?" asked Hermione. "Something you two were talking about when
+I was in the kitchen?"
+
+Maurice looked uneasy.
+
+"I was only saying that I think the sun--the South has an influence," he
+said, "and that----"
+
+"An influence!" exclaimed Hermione. "Of course it has! Emile, you would
+have seen that influence at work if you had been with us on our first day
+in Sicily. Your tarantella, Maurice!"
+
+She smiled again happily, but her husband did not answer her smile.
+
+"What was that?" said Artois. "You never told me in Africa."
+
+"The boys danced a tarantella here on the terrace to welcome us, and it
+drove Maurice so mad that he sprang up and danced too. And the strange
+thing was that he danced as well as any of them. His blood called him,
+and he obeyed the call."
+
+She looked at Artois to remind him of his words.
+
+"It's good when the blood calls one to the tarantella, isn't it?" she
+asked him. "I think it's the most wildly innocent expression of extreme
+joy in the world. And yet"--her expressive face changed, and into her
+prominent brown eyes there stole a half-whimsical, half-earnest look--"at
+the end--Maurice, do you know that I was almost frightened that day at
+the end?"
+
+"Frightened! Why?" he said.
+
+He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a straw chair.
+
+[Illustration: "'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN--IN MY SICILIAN,' SHE
+SAID, TENDERLY"]
+
+"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the other and laying his
+brown hands on the arms of the chair.
+
+"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in the tarantella. Wasn't
+it absurd?"
+
+He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.
+
+"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced so well that I seemed to
+see before me a pure-blooded Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"But I soon learned to delight in--in my Sicilian," she said, tenderly.
+
+She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely natural, that it
+did not occur to her that though she was with her husband and her most
+intimate friend the two men were really strangers to each other.
+
+"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are back in London," Maurice
+said. There was a cold sound of determination in his voice.
+
+"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have gained here," Hermione
+protested, half laughingly, half tenderly.
+
+"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I don't think a
+Sicilian would be much good in England. We--we don't want romance there.
+We want cool-headed, practical men who can work, and who've no nonsense
+about them."
+
+"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche! And from you! Why, what
+has happened to you while I've been away?"
+
+"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing. What should happen to me
+here?"
+
+"Do you--are you beginning to long for England and English ways?"
+
+"I think it's time I began to do something," he said, resolutely. "I
+think I've had a long enough holiday."
+
+He was trying to put the past behind him. He was trying to rush into the
+new life, the life in which there would be no more wildness, no more
+yielding to the hot impulses that were surely showered down out of the
+sun. Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already. It was fading
+away, sinking into its purple sea, sinking out of his sight with his wild
+heart of youth, while he, cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady
+life befitting an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties, of
+husband and father, with a money-making ambition and a stake in his
+country.
+
+"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.
+
+But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice. Till now Maurice
+had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms, had even run before them,
+lighter-footed than she in the race towards the sunshine. It was
+difficult to accommodate herself to this abrupt change.
+
+"But don't let us think of going to-day," she added. "Remember--I have
+only just come back."
+
+"And I!" said Artois. "Be merciful to an invalid, Monsieur Delarey!"
+
+He spoke lightly, but he felt fully conscious now that his suspicion was
+well founded. Maurice was uneasy, unhappy. He wanted to get away from
+this peace that held no peace for him. He wanted to put something behind
+him. To a man like Artois, Maurice was a boy. He might try to be subtle,
+he might even be subtle--for him. But to this acute and trained observer
+of the human comedy he could not for long be deceptive.
+
+During his severe illness the mind of Artois had often been clouded, had
+been dispossessed of its throne by the clamor of the body's pain. And
+afterwards, when the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had been
+lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was delicious. But now it
+began to go again to its business. It began to work with the old rapidity
+that had for a time been lost. And as this power came back and was felt
+thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious man, he took alarm.
+What affected or threatened Delarey must affect, threaten Hermione.
+Whether he were one with her or not she was one with him. The feeling of
+Artois towards the woman who had shown him such noble, such unusual
+friendship was exquisitely delicate and intensely strong. Unmingled with
+any bodily passion, it was, or so it seemed to him, the more delicate and
+strong on that account. He was a man who had an instinctive hatred of
+heroics. His taste revolted from them as it revolted from violence in
+literature. They seemed to him a coarseness, a crudity of the soul, and
+almost inevitably linked with secret falseness. But he was conscious that
+to protect from sorrow or shame the woman who had protected him in his
+dark hour he would be willing to make any sacrifice. There would be no
+limit to what he would be ready to do now, in this moment, for Hermione.
+He knew that, and he took the alarm. Till now he had been feeling
+curiosity about the change in Delarey. Now he felt the touch of fear.
+
+Something had happened to change Maurice while Hermione had been in
+Africa. He had heard, perhaps, the call of the blood. All that he had
+said, and all that he had felt, on the night when he had met Maurice for
+the first time in London, came back to Artois. He had prophesied, vaguely
+perhaps. Had his prophecy already been fulfilled? In this great and
+shining peace of nature Maurice was not at peace. And now all sense of
+peace deserted Artois. Again, and fiercely now, he felt the danger of the
+South, and he added to his light words some words that were not light.
+
+"But I am really no longer an invalid," he said. "And I must be getting
+northward very soon. I need the bracing air, the Spartan touch of the
+cold that the Sybarite in me dreads. Perhaps we all need them."
+
+"If you go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed, "you will make me
+feel as if it were degraded to wish to live anywhere except at Clapham
+Junction or the North Pole. Let us be happy as we are, where we are,
+to-day and--yes, call me weak if you like--and to-morrow!"
+
+Maurice made no answer to this challenge, but Artois covered his silence,
+and kept the talk going on safe topics till Gaspare came to the terrace
+to lay the cloth for collazione.
+
+It was past noon now, and the heat was brimming up like a flood over the
+land. Flies buzzed about the terrace, buzzed against the white walls and
+ceilings of the cottage, winding their tiny, sultry horns ceaselessly,
+musicians of the sun. The red geraniums in the stone pots beneath the
+broken columns drooped their dry heads. The lizards darted and stopped,
+darted and stopped upon the wall and the white seats where the tiles were
+burning to the touch. There was no moving figure on the baked mountains,
+no moving vessel on the shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips
+of Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down and slain the
+fires of the earth.
+
+Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth, arranging the pots
+of flowers, the glasses, forks, and knives upon it. In his face there was
+little vivacity. But now and then his great eyes searched the hot world
+that lay beneath them, and Artois thought he saw in them the
+watchfulness, the strained anxiety that had been in Maurice's eyes.
+
+"Some one must be coming," he thought. "Or they must be expecting some
+one to come, these two."
+
+"Do you ever have visitors here?" he asked, carelessly.
+
+"Visitors! Emile, why are we here? Do you anticipate a knock and 'If you
+please, ma'am, Mrs. and the Misses Watson'? Good Heavens--visitors on
+Monte Amato!"
+
+He smiled, but he persisted.
+
+"Never a contadino, or a shepherd, or"--he looked down at the sea--"or a
+fisherman with his basket of sarde?"
+
+Maurice moved in his chair, and Gaspare, hearing a word he knew, looked
+hard at the speaker.
+
+"Oh, we sometimes have the people of the hills to see us," said Hermione.
+"But we don't call them 'visitors.' As to fishermen--here they are!"
+
+She pointed to her husband and Gaspare.
+
+"But they eat all the fish they catch, and we never see the fin of even
+one at the cottage."
+
+Collazione was ready now. Hermione helped Artois up from his chaise
+longue, and they went to the table under the awning.
+
+"You must sit facing the view, Emile," Hermione said.
+
+"What a dining-room!" Artois exclaimed.
+
+Now he could see over the wall. His gaze wandered over the
+mountain-sides, travelled down to the land that lay along the edge of the
+sea.
+
+"Have you been fishing much since I've been away, Maurice?" Hermione
+asked, as they began to eat.
+
+"Oh yes. I went several times. What wine do you like, Monsieur Artois?"
+
+He tried to change the conversation, but Hermione, quite innocently,
+returned to the subject.
+
+"They fish at night, you know, Emile, all along that coast by Isola Bella
+and on to the point there that looks like an island, where the House of
+the Sirens is."
+
+A tortured look went across Maurice's face. He had begun to eat, but now
+he stopped for a moment like a man suddenly paralyzed.
+
+"The House of the Sirens!" said Artois. "Then there are sirens here? I
+could well believe it. Have you seen them, Monsieur Maurice, at night,
+when you have been fishing?"
+
+He had been gazing at the coast, but now he turned towards his host.
+Maurice began hastily to eat again.
+
+"I'm afraid not. But we didn't look out for them. We were prosaic and
+thought of nothing but the fish."
+
+"And is there really a house down there?" said Artois.
+
+"Yes," said Hermione. "It used to be a ruin, but now it's built up and
+occupied. Gaspare"--she spoke to him as he was taking a dish from the
+table--"who is it lives in the Casa delle Sirene now? You told me, but
+I've forgotten."
+
+A heavy, obstinate look came into the boy's face, transforming it. The
+question startled him, and he had not understood a word of the
+conversation which had led up to it. What had they been talking about? He
+glanced furtively at his master. Maurice did not look at him.
+
+"Salvatore and Maddalena, signora," he answered, after a pause.
+
+Then he took the dish and went into the house.
+
+"What's the matter with Gaspare?" said Hermione. "I never saw him look
+like that before--quite ugly. Doesn't he like these people?"
+
+"Oh yes," replied Maurice. "Why--why, they're quite friends of ours. We
+saw them at the fair only yesterday."
+
+"Well, then, why should Gaspare look like that?"
+
+"Oh," said Artois, who saw the discomfort of his host, "perhaps there is
+some family feud that you know nothing of. When I was in Sicily I found
+the people singularly subtle. They can gossip terribly, but they can keep
+a secret when they choose. If I had won the real friendship of a
+Sicilian, I would rather trust him with my secret than a man of any other
+race. They are not only loyal--that is not enough--but they are also very
+intelligent."
+
+"Yes, they are both--the good ones," said Hermione. "I would trust
+Gaspare through thick and thin. If they were only as stanch in love as
+they can be in friendship!"
+
+Gaspare came out again with another course. The ugly expression had gone
+from his face, but he still looked unusually grave.
+
+"Ah, when the senses are roused they are changed beings," Artois said.
+"They hate and resent governance from outside, but their blood governs
+them."
+
+"Our blood governs us when the time comes--do you remember?"
+
+Hermione had said the words before she remembered the circumstances in
+which they had been spoken and of whom they were said. Directly she had
+uttered them she remembered.
+
+"What was that?" Maurice asked, before Artois could reply.
+
+He had seen a suddenly conscious look in Hermione's face, and instantly
+he was aware of a feeling of jealousy within him.
+
+"What was that?" he repeated, looking quickly from one to the other.
+
+"Something I remember saying to your wife," Artois answered. "We were
+talking about human nature--a small subject, monsieur, isn't it?--and I
+think I expressed the view of a fatalist. At any rate, I did say
+that--that our blood governs us when the time comes."
+
+"The time?" Maurice asked.
+
+His feeling of jealousy died away, and was replaced by a keen personal
+interest unmingled with suspicions of another.
+
+"Well, I confess it sometimes seems to me as if, when a certain hour
+strikes, a certain deed must be committed by a certain man or woman. It
+is perhaps their hour of madness. They may repent it to the day of their
+death. But can they in that hour avoid that deed? Sometimes, when I
+witness the tragic scenes that occur abruptly, unexpectedly, in the
+comedy of life, I am moved to wonder."
+
+"Then you should be very forgiving, Emile," Hermione said.
+
+"And you?" he asked. "Are you, or would you be, forgiving?"
+
+Maurice leaned forward on the table and looked at his wife with
+intensity.
+
+"I hope so, but I don't think it would be for that--I mean because I
+thought the deed might not have been avoided. I think I should forgive
+because I pitied so, because I know how desperately unhappy I should be
+myself if I were to do a hateful thing, a thing that was exceptional,
+that was not natural to my nature as I had generally known it. When one
+really does love cleanliness, to have thrown one's self down deliberately
+in the mud, to see, to feel, that one is soiled from head to foot--that
+must be terrible. I think I should forgive because I pitied so. What do
+you say, Maurice?"
+
+It was like a return to their talk in London at Caminiti's restaurant,
+when Hermione and Artois discussed topics that interested them, and
+Maurice listened until Hermione appealed to him for his opinion. But now
+he was more deeply interested than his companions.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about pitying and forgiving, but I
+expect you're right, Hermione."
+
+"How?"
+
+"In what you say about--about the person who's done the wrong thing
+feeling awful afterwards. And I think Monsieur Artois is right,
+too--about the hour of madness. I'm sure he is right. Sometimes an hour
+comes and one seems to forget everything in it. One seems not to be
+really one's self in it, but somebody else, and--and--"
+
+Suddenly he seemed to become aware that, whereas Hermione and Artois had
+been considering a subject impersonally, he was introducing the personal
+element into the conversation. He stopped short, looked quickly from
+Hermione to Artois, and said:
+
+"What I mean is that I imagine it's so, and that I've known fellows--in
+London, you know--who've done such odd things that I can only explain it
+like that. They must have--well, they must have gone practically mad for
+the moment. You--you see what I mean, Hermione?"
+
+The question was uneasy.
+
+"Yes, but I think we can control ourselves. If we couldn't, remorse would
+lose half its meaning. I could never feel remorse because I had been
+mad--horror, perhaps, but not remorse. It seems to me that remorse is our
+sorrow for our own weakness, the heart's cry of 'I need not have done the
+hateful thing, and I did it, I chose to do it!' But I could pity, I could
+pity, and forgive because of my pity."
+
+Gaspare came out with coffee.
+
+"And then, Emile, you must have a siesta," said Hermione. "This is a
+tiring day for you. Maurice and I will leave you quite alone in the
+sitting-room."
+
+"I don't think I could sleep," said Artois.
+
+He was feeling oddly excited, and attributed the sensation to his weak
+state of health. For so long he had been shut up, isolated from the
+world, that even this coming out was an event. He was accustomed to
+examine his feelings calmly, critically, to track them to their sources.
+He tried to do so now.
+
+"I must beware of my own extra sensitiveness," he said to himself. "I'm
+still weak. I am not normal. I may see things distorted. I may
+exaggerate, turn the small into the great. At least half of what I think
+and feel to-day may come from my peculiar state."
+
+Thus he tried to raise up barriers against his feeling that Delarey had
+got into some terrible trouble during the absence of Hermione, that he
+was now stricken with remorse, and that he was also in active dread of
+something, perhaps of some Nemesis.
+
+"All this may be imagination," Artois thought, as he sipped his coffee.
+But he said again:
+
+"I don't think I could sleep. I feel abnormally alive to-day. Do you
+know the sensation, as if one were too quick, as if all the nerves were
+standing at attention?"
+
+"Then our peace here does not soothe you?" Hermione said.
+
+"If I must be truthful--no," he answered.
+
+He met Maurice's restless glance.
+
+"I think I've had enough coffee," he added. "Coffee stimulates the nerves
+too much at certain times."
+
+Maurice finished his and asked for another cup.
+
+"He isn't afraid of being overstimulated," said Hermione. "But, Emile,
+you ought to sleep. You'll be dead tired this evening when you ride
+down."
+
+"This evening," Hermione had said. Maurice wondered suddenly how late
+Artois was going to stay at the cottage.
+
+"Oh no, it will be cool," Artois said.
+
+"Yes," Maurice said. "Towards five we get a little wind from the sea
+nearly always, even sooner sometimes. I--I usually go down to bathe about
+that time."
+
+"I must begin to bathe, too," Hermione said.
+
+"What--to-day!" Maurice said, quickly.
+
+"Oh no. Emile is here to-day."
+
+Then Artois did not mean to go till late. But he--Maurice--must go down
+to the sea before nightfall.
+
+"Unless I bathe," he said, trying to speak naturally--"unless I bathe I
+feel the heat too much at night. A dip in the sea does wonders for me."
+
+"And in such a sea!" said Artois. "You must have your dip to-day. I shall
+go directly that little wind you speak of comes. I told a boy to come up
+from the village at four to lead the donkey down."
+
+He smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"Dreadful to be such a weakling, isn't it?" he said.
+
+"Hush. Don't talk, like that. It's all going away. Strength is coming.
+You'll soon be your old self. But you've got to look forward all the
+time."
+
+Hermione spoke with a warmth, an energy that braced. She spoke to Artois,
+but Maurice, eager to grasp at any comfort, strove to take the words to
+himself. This evening the climax of his Sicilian tragedy must come. And
+then? Beyond, might there not be the calm, the happiness of a sane life?
+He must look forward, he would look forward.
+
+But when he looked, there stood Maddalena weeping.
+
+He hated himself. He loved happiness, he longed for it, but he knew he
+had lost his right to it, if any man ever has such a right. He had
+created suffering. How dared he expect, how dared he even wish, to escape
+from suffering?
+
+"Now, Emile," Hermione said, "you have really got to go in and lie down
+whether you feel sleepy or not. Don't protest. Maurice and I have hardly
+seen anything of each other yet. We want to get rid of you."
+
+She spoke laughingly, and laughingly he obeyed her. When she had settled
+him comfortably in the sitting-room she came out again to the terrace
+where her husband was standing, looking towards the sea. She had a rug
+over her arm and was holding two cushions.
+
+"I thought you and I might go down and take our siesta under the
+oak-trees, Maurice. Would you like that?"
+
+He was longing to get away, to go up to the heap of stones on the
+mountain-top and set a match to the fragments of Hermione's letter, which
+the dangerous wind might disturb, might bring out into the light of day.
+But he acquiesced at once. He would go later--if not this afternoon, then
+at night when he came back from the sea. They went down and spread the
+rug under the shadow of the oaks.
+
+"I used to read to Gaspare here," he said. "When you were away in
+Africa."
+
+"What did you read?"
+
+"The _Arabian Nights_."
+
+She stretched herself on the rug.
+
+"To lie here and read the _Arabian Nights_! And you want to go away,
+Maurice?"
+
+"I think it's time to go. If I stayed too long here I should become fit
+for nothing."
+
+"Yes, that's true, I dare say. But--Maurice, it's so strange--I have a
+feeling as if you would always be in Sicily. I know it's absurd, and yet
+I have it. I feel as if you belonged to Sicily, and Sicily did not mean
+to part from you."
+
+"That can't be. How could I stay here always?"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Unless," he said, as if some new thought had started suddenly into his
+mind--"unless I were--"
+
+He stopped. He had remembered his sensation in the sea that gray morning
+of sirocco. He had remembered how he had played at dying.
+
+"What?"
+
+She looked at him and understood.
+
+"Maurice--don't! I--I can't bear that!"
+
+"Not one of us can know," he answered.
+
+"I--I thought of that once," she said--"long ago, on the first night that
+we were here. I don't know why--but perhaps it was because I was so
+happy. I think it must have been that. I suppose, in this world, there
+must aways be dread in one's happiness, the thought it may stop soon, it
+may end. But why should it? Is God cruel? I think He wants us to be
+happy."
+
+"If he wants us--"
+
+"And that we prevent ourselves from being happy. But we won't do that,
+Maurice--you and I--will we?"
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"This world--nature--is so wonderfully beautiful, so happily beautiful.
+Surely we can learn to be happy, to keep happy in it. Look at that sky,
+that sea! Look at the plain over there by the foot of Etna, and the
+coast-line fading away, and Etna. The God who created it all must have
+meant men to be happy in such a world. It isn't my brain tells me that,
+Maurice, it's my heart, my whole heart that you have made whole. And I
+know it tells the truth."
+
+Her words were terrible to him. The sound of a step, a figure standing
+before her, a few Sicilian words--and all this world in which she gloried
+would be changed for her. But she must not know. He felt that he would be
+willing to die to keep her ignorant of the truth forever.
+
+"Now we must try to sleep," he said, to prevent her from speaking any
+more of the words that were torturing him. "We must have our siesta. I
+had very little sleep last night."
+
+"And I had none at all. But now--we're together."
+
+He arranged the cushion for her. They lay in soft shadow and could see
+the shining world. The distant gleams upon the sea spoke to her. She
+fancied them voices rising out of the dream of the waters, voices from
+the breast of nature that was the breast of God, saying that she was not
+in error, that God did mean men to be happy, that they could be happy if
+they would learn of Him.
+
+She watched those gleams until she fell asleep.
+
+
+
+XX
+
+When Hermione woke it was four o'clock. She sat up on the rug, looked
+down over the mountain flank to the sea, then turned and saw her husband.
+He was lying with his face half buried in his folded arms.
+
+"Maurice!" she said, softly.
+
+"Yes," he answered, lifting his face.
+
+"Then you weren't asleep!"
+
+"No."
+
+"Have you been asleep?"
+
+"No."
+
+She looked at her watch.
+
+"All this time! It's four. What a disgraceful siesta! But I was really
+tired after the long journey and the night."
+
+She stood up. He followed her example and threw the rug over his arm.
+
+"Emile will think we've deserted him and aren't going to give him any
+tea."
+
+"Yes."
+
+They began to walk up the track towards the terrace.
+
+"Maurice," Hermione said, presently, more thoroughly wide-awake now. "Did
+you get up while I was asleep? Did you begin to move away from me, and
+did I stop you, or was it a dream? I have a kind of vague
+recollection--or is it only imagination?--of stretching out my hand and
+saying, 'Don't leave me alone--don't leave me alone!'"
+
+"I moved a little," he answered, after a slight pause.
+
+"And you did stretch out your hand and murmur something."
+
+"It was that--'don't leave me alone.'"
+
+"Perhaps. I couldn't hear. It was such a murmur."
+
+"And you only moved a little? How stupid of me to think you were getting
+up to go away!"
+
+"When one is half asleep one has odd ideas often."
+
+He did not tell her that he had been getting up softly, hoping to steal
+away to the mountain-top and destroy the fragments of her letter, hidden
+there, while she slept.
+
+"You won't mind," he added, "if I go down to bathe this evening. I
+sha'n't sleep properly to-night unless I do."
+
+"Of course--go. But won't it be rather late after tea?"
+
+"Oh no. I've often been in at sunset."
+
+"How delicious the water must look then! Maurice!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Shall I come with you? Shall I bathe, too? It would be lovely,
+refreshing, after this heat! It would wash away all the dust of the
+train!"
+
+Her face was glowing with the anticipation of pleasure. Every little
+thing done with him was an enchantment after the weeks of separation.
+
+"Oh, I don't think you'd better, Hermione," he answered, hastily.
+"I--you--there might be people. I--I must rig you up something first, a
+tent of some kind. Gaspare and I will do it. I can't have my wife--"
+
+"All right," she said.
+
+She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
+
+"How lucky you men are! You can do anything. And there's no fuss. Ah,
+there's poor Emile, patiently waiting!"
+
+Artois was already established once more in the chaise longue. He greeted
+them with a smile that was gentle, almost tender. Those evil feelings to
+which he had been a prey in London had died away. He loved now to see
+the happiness in Hermione's face. His illness had swept out his
+selfishness, and in it he had proved her affection. He did not think that
+he could ever be jealous of her again.
+
+"Sleeping all this time?" he said.
+
+"I was. I'm ashamed of myself. My hair is full of mountain-side, but you
+must forgive me, Emile. Ah, there's Lucrezia! Is tea ready, Lucrezia?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Then ask Gaspare to bring it."
+
+"Gaspare--he isn't here, signora. But I'll bring it."
+
+She went away.
+
+"Where's Gaspare, I wonder?" said Hermione. "Have you seen him, Emile?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Perhaps he's sleeping, too. He sleeps generally among the hens."
+
+She looked round the corner into the out-house.
+
+"No, he isn't there. Have you sent him anywhere, Maurice?"
+
+"I? No. Where should I--"
+
+"I only thought you looked as if you knew where he was."
+
+"No. But he may have gone out after birds and forgotten the time. Here's
+tea!"
+
+These few words had renewed in Maurice the fever of impatience to get
+away and meet his enemy. This waiting, this acting of a part, this
+suspense, were almost unbearable. All the time that Hermione slept he had
+been thinking, turning over again and again in his mind the coming scene,
+trying to imagine how it would be, how violent or how deadly, trying to
+decide exactly what line of conduct he should pursue. What would
+Salvatore demand? What would he say or do? And where would they meet? If
+Salvatore waited for his coming they would meet at the House of the
+Sirens. And Maddalena? She would be there. His heart sickened. He was
+ready to face a man--but not Maddalena. He thought of Gaspare's story of
+the fallen olive-branch upon which Salvatore had spat. It was strange to
+be here in this calm place with these two happy people, wife and friend,
+and to wonder what was waiting for him down there by the sea.
+
+How lonely our souls are!--something like that he thought. Circumstances
+were turning him away from his thoughtless youth. He had imagined it
+sinking down out of his sight into the purple sea, with the magic island
+in which it had danced the tarantella and heard the voice of the siren.
+But was it not leaving him, vanishing from him while still his feet trod
+the island and his eyes saw her legendary mountains?
+
+Gaspare, he knew, was on the watch. That was why he was absent from his
+duties. But the hour was at hand when he would be relieved. The evening
+was coming. Maurice was glad. He was ready to face even violence, but he
+felt that he could not for much longer endure suspense and play the quiet
+host and husband.
+
+Tea was over and Gaspare had not returned. The clock he had bought at the
+fair struck five.
+
+"I ought to be going," Artois said.
+
+There was reluctance in his voice. Hermione noticed it and knew what he
+was feeling.
+
+"You must come up again very soon," she said.
+
+"Yes, monsieur, come to-morrow, won't you?" Maurice seconded her.
+
+The thought of what was going to happen before to-morrow made it seem to
+him a very long way off.
+
+Hermione looked pleased.
+
+"I must not be a bore," Artois answered. "I must not remind you and
+myself of limpets. There are rocks in your garden which might suggest the
+comparison. I think to-morrow I ought to stay quietly in Marechiaro."
+
+"No, no," said Maurice. "Do come to-morrow."
+
+"Thank you very much. I can't pretend that I do not wish to come. And,
+now that donkey-boy--has he climbed up, I wonder?"
+
+"I'll go and see," said Maurice.
+
+He was feverishly impatient to get rid of Artois. He hurried to the arch.
+A long way off, near the path that led up from the ravine, he saw a
+figure with a gun. He was not sure, but he was almost sure that it was
+Gaspare. It must be he. The gun made him look, indeed, a sentinel. If
+Salvatore came the boy would stop him, stop him, if need be, at the cost
+of his own life. Maurice felt sure of that, and realized the danger of
+setting such faithfulness and violence to be sentinel. He stood for a
+moment looking at the figure. Yes, he knew it now for Gaspare. The boy
+had forgotten tea-time, had forgotten everything, in his desire to carry
+out his padrone's instructions. The signora was not to know. She was
+never to know. And Salvatore might come. Very well, then, he was there in
+the sun--ready.
+
+"We'll never part from Gaspare," Maurice thought, as he looked and
+understood.
+
+He saw no other figure. The donkey-boy had perhaps forgotten his mission
+or had started late. Maurice chafed bitterly at the delay. But he could
+not well leave his guest on this first day of his coming to Monte Amato,
+more especially after the events of the preceding day. To do so would
+seem discourteous. He returned to the terrace ill at ease, but strove to
+disguise his restlessness. It was nearly six o'clock when the boy at last
+appeared. Artois at once bade Hermione and Maurice good-bye and mounted
+his donkey.
+
+"You will come to-morrow, then?" Maurice said to him at parting.
+
+"I haven't the courage to refuse," Artois replied. "Good-bye."
+
+He had already shaken Maurice's hand, but now he extended his hand again.
+
+"It is good of you to make me so welcome," he said.
+
+He paused, holding Maurice's hand in his. Both Hermione and Maurice
+thought he was going to say something more, but he glanced at her,
+dropped his host's hand, lifted his soft hat, and signed to the boy to
+lead the donkey away.
+
+Hermione and Maurice followed to the arch, and from there watched him
+riding slowly down till he was out of sight. Maurice looked for Gaspare,
+but did not see him. He must have moved into the shadow of the ravine.
+
+"Dear old Emile!" Hermione said. "He's been happy to-day. You've made him
+very happy, Maurice. Bless you for it!"
+
+Maurice said nothing. Now the moment had arrived when he could go he felt
+a strange reluctance to say good-bye to Hermione, even for a short time.
+So much might--must--happen before he saw her again that evening.
+
+"And you?" she said, at last, as he was silent. "Are you really going
+down to bathe? Isn't it too late?"
+
+"Oh no. I must have a dip. It will do me all the good in the world." He
+tried to speak buoyantly, but the words seemed to himself to come heavily
+from his tongue.
+
+"Will you take Tito?"
+
+"I--no, I think I'll walk. I shall get down quicker, and I like going
+into the sea when I'm hot. I'll just fetch my bathing things."
+
+They walked back together to the house. Maurice wondered what had
+suddenly come to him. He felt horribly sad now--yet he wished to get the
+scene that awaited him over. He was longing to have it over. He went into
+the house, got his bathing-dress and towels, and came out again onto the
+terrace.
+
+"I shall be a little late back, I suppose," he said.
+
+"Yes. It's six o'clock now. Shall we dine at half-past eight--or better
+say nine? That will give you plenty of time to come up quietly."
+
+"Yes. Let's say nine."
+
+Still he did not move to go.
+
+"Have you been happy to-day, Hermione?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, very--since this morning."
+
+"Since?"
+
+"Yes. This morning I--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"I was a little puzzled," she said, after a minute, with her usual
+frankness. "Tell me, Maurice--you weren't made unhappy by--by what I told
+you?"
+
+"About--about the child?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He did not answer with words, but he put his arms about her and kissed
+her, as he had not kissed her since she went away to Africa. She shut her
+eyes. Presently she felt the pressure of his arms relax.
+
+"I'm perfectly happy now," she said. "Perfectly happy."
+
+He moved away a step or two. His face was flushed, and she thought that
+he looked younger, that the boyish expression she loved had come back to
+him.
+
+"Good-bye, Hermione," he said.
+
+Still he did not go. She thought that he had something more to say but
+did not know how to say it. She felt so certain of this that she said:
+
+"What is it, Maurice?"
+
+"We shall come back to Sicily, I suppose, sha'n't we, some time or
+other?"
+
+"Surely. Many times, I hope."
+
+"Suppose--one can never tell what will happen--suppose one of us were to
+die here?"
+
+"Yes," she said, soberly.
+
+"Don't you think it would be good to lie there where we lay this
+afternoon, under the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea? I think it
+would. Good-bye, Hermione."
+
+He swung the bathing-dress and the towels up over his shoulder and went
+away through the arch. She followed and watched him springing down the
+mountain-side. Just before he reached the ravine he turned and waved his
+hand to her. His movements, that last gesture, were brimful of energy and
+of life. He acted better then than he had that day upon the terrace. But
+the sense of progress, the feeling that he was going to meet fate in the
+person of Salvatore, quickened the blood within him. At last the suspense
+would be over. At last he would be obliged to play not the actor but the
+man. He longed to be down by the sea. The youth in him rose up at the
+thought of action, and his last farewell to Hermione, looking down to him
+from the arch, was bold and almost careless.
+
+Scarcely had he got into the ravine before he met Gaspare. He stopped.
+The boy's face was aflame with expression as he stood, holding his gun,
+in front of his padrone.
+
+"Gaspare!" Maurice said to him.
+
+He held out his hand and grasped the boy's hot hand.
+
+"I sha'n't forget your faithful service," he said. "Thank you, Gaspare."
+
+He wanted to say more, to find other and far different words. But he
+could not.
+
+"Let me come with you, signorino."
+
+The boy's voice was intensely, almost savagely, earnest.
+
+"No. You must stay with the signora."
+
+"I want to come with you."
+
+His great eyes were fastened on his padrone's face.
+
+"I have always been with you."
+
+"But you were with the signora first. You were her servant. You must stay
+with her now. Remember one thing, Gaspare--the signora is never to know."
+
+The boy nodded. His eyes still held Maurice. They glittered as if with
+leaping fires. That deep and passionate spirit of Sicilian loyalty, which
+is almost savage in its intensity and heedless of danger, which is ready
+to go to hell with, or for, a friend or a master who is beloved and
+believed in, was awake in Gaspare, illuminated him at this moment. The
+peasant boy looked noble.
+
+"Mayn't I come with you, signorino?"
+
+"Gaspare," Maurice said, "I must leave some one with the padrona.
+Salvatore might come still. I may miss him going down. Whom can I trust
+to stop Salvatore, if he comes, but you? You see?"
+
+"Va bene, signorino."
+
+The boy seemed convinced, but he suffered and did not try to conceal it.
+
+"Now I must go," Maurice said.
+
+He shook Gaspare's hand.
+
+"Have you got the revolver, signorino?" said the boy.
+
+"No. I am not going to fight with Salvatore."
+
+"How do you know what Salvatore will do?"
+
+Maurice looked down upon the stones that lay on the narrow path.
+
+"My revolver can have nothing to do with Maddalena's father," he said.
+
+He sighed.
+
+"That's how it is, Gaspare. Addio!"
+
+"Addio, signorino."
+
+Maurice went on down the path into the shadow of the trees. Presently he
+turned. Gaspare stood quite still, looking after him.
+
+"Signorino!" he called. "May I not come? I want to come with you."
+
+Maurice waved his hand towards the mountain-side.
+
+"Go to the signora," he called back. "And look out for me to-night.
+Addio, Gaspare!"
+
+The boy's "Addio!" came to him sadly through the gathering shadows of the
+evening.
+
+Presently Hermione, who was sitting alone on the terrace with a book in
+her lap which she was not reading, saw Gaspare walking listlessly through
+the archway holding his gun. He came slowly towards her, lifted his hat,
+and was going on without a word, but she stopped him.
+
+"Why, Gaspare," she said, lightly, "you forgot us to-day. How was that?"
+
+"Signora?"
+
+Again she saw the curious, almost ugly, look of obstinacy, which she had
+already noticed, come into his face.
+
+"You didn't remember about tea-time!"
+
+"Signora," he answered, "I am sorry."
+
+He looked at her fixedly while he spoke.
+
+"I am sorry," he said again.
+
+"Never mind," Hermione said, unable to blame him on this first day of her
+return. "I dare say you have got out of regular habits while I've been
+away. What have you been doing all the time?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Niente."
+
+Again she wondered what was the matter with the boy to-day. Where were
+his life and gayety? Where was his sense of fun? He used to be always
+joking, singing. But now he was serious, almost heavy in demeanor.
+
+"Gaspare," she said, jokingly, "I think you've all become very solemn
+without me. I am the old person of the party, but I begin to believe that
+it is I who keep you lively. I mustn't go away again."
+
+"No, signora," he answered, earnestly; "you must never go away from us
+again. You should never have gone away from us."
+
+The deep solemnity of his great eyes startled her. He put on his hat and
+went away round the angle of the cottage.
+
+"What can be the matter with him?" she thought.
+
+She remained sitting there on the terrace, wondering. Now she thought
+over things quietly, it struck her as strange the fact that she had left
+behind her in the priest's house three light-hearted people, and had
+come back to find Lucrezia drowned in sorrow, Gaspare solemn, even
+mysterious in his manner, and her husband--but here her thoughts paused,
+not labelling Maurice. At first he had puzzled her the most. But she
+thought she had found reasons for the change--a passing one, she felt
+sure--in him. He had secretly resented her absence, and, though utterly
+free from any ignoble suspicion of her, he had felt boyishly jealous of
+her friendship with Emile. That was very natural. For this was their
+honeymoon. She considered it their honeymoon prolonged, delightfully
+prolonged, beyond any fashionable limit. Lucrezia's depression was easily
+comprehensible. The change in her husband she accounted for; but now here
+was Gaspare looking dismal!
+
+"I must cheer them all up," she thought to herself. "This beautiful time
+mustn't end dismally."
+
+And then she thought of the inevitable departure. Was Maurice looking
+forward to it, desiring it? He had spoken that day as if he wished to be
+off. In London she had been able to imagine him in the South, in the
+highway of the sun. But now that she was here in Sicily she could not
+imagine him in London.
+
+"He is not in his right place there," she thought.
+
+Yet they must go, and soon. She knew that they were going, and yet she
+could not feel that they were going. What she had said under the
+oak-trees was true. In the spring her tender imagination had played
+softly with the idea of Sicily's joy in the possession of her son, of
+Maurice. Would Sicily part from him without an effort to retain him?
+Would Sicily let him go? She smiled to herself at her fancies. But if
+Sicily kept him, how would she keep him? The smile left her lips and her
+eyes as she thought of Maurice's suggestion. That would be too horrible.
+God would not allow that. And yet what tragedies He allowed to come into
+the lives of others. She faced certain facts, as she sat there, facts
+permitted, or deliberately brought about by the Divine Will. The scourge
+of war--that sowed sorrows over a land as the sower in the field scatters
+seeds. She, like others, had sat at home and read of battles in which
+thousands of men had been killed, and she had grieved--or had she really
+grieved, grieved with her heart? She began to wonder, thinking of
+Maurice's veiled allusion to the possibility of his death. He was the
+spirit of youth to her. And all the boys slain in battle! Had not each
+one of them represented the spirit of youth to some one, to some
+woman--mother, sister, wife, lover?
+
+What were those women's feelings towards God?
+
+She wondered. She wondered exceedingly. And presently a terrible thought
+came into her mind. It was this. How can one forgive God if He snatches
+away the spirit of youth that one loves?
+
+Under the shadow of the oak-trees she had lain that day and looked out
+upon the shining world--upon the waters, upon the plains, upon the
+mountains, upon the calling coast-line and the deep passion of the blue.
+And she had felt the infinite love of God. When she had thought of God,
+she had thought of Him as the great Provider of happiness, as One who
+desired, with a heart too large and generous for the mere accurate
+conception of man, the joy of man.
+
+But Maurice was beside her then.
+
+Those whose lives had been ruined by great tragedies, when they looked
+out upon the shining world what must they think, feel?
+
+She strove to imagine. Their conception of God must surely be very
+different from hers.
+
+Once she had been almost unable to believe that God could choose her to
+be the recipient of a supreme happiness. But we accustom ourselves with a
+wonderful readiness to a happy fate. She had come back--she had been
+allowed to return to the Garden of Paradise. And this fact had given to
+her a confidence in life which was almost audacious. So now, even while
+she imagined the sorrows of others, half strove to imagine what her own
+sorrows might be, her inner feeling was still one of confidence. She
+looked out on the shining world, and in her heart was the shining world.
+She looked out on the glory of the blue, and in her heart was the glory
+of the blue. The world shone for her because she had Maurice. She knew
+that. But there was light in it. There would always be light whatever
+happened to any human creature. There would always be the sun, the great
+symbol of joy. It rose even upon the battle-field where the heaps of the
+dead were lying.
+
+She could not realize sorrow to-day. She must see the sunlight even in
+the deliberate visions conjured up by her imagination.
+
+Gaspare did not reappear. For a long time she was alone. She watched the
+changing of the light, the softening of the great landscape as the
+evening approached. Sometimes she thought of Maurice's last words about
+being laid to rest some day in the shadows of the oak-trees, in sight of
+Etna and the sea. When the years had gone, perhaps they would lie
+together in Sicily, wrapped in the final siesta of the body. Perhaps the
+unborn child, of whose beginning she was mystically conscious, would lay
+them to rest there.
+
+"Buon riposo." She loved the Sicilian good-night. Better than any text
+she would love to have those simple words written above her
+sleeping-place and his. "Buon riposo!"--she murmured the words to herself
+as she looked at the quiet of the hills, at the quiet of the sea. The
+glory of the world was inspiring, but the peace of the world was almost
+more uplifting, she thought. Far off, in the plain, she discerned tiny
+trails of smoke from Sicilian houses among the orange-trees beside the
+sea. The gold was fading. The color of the waters was growing paler,
+gentler, the color of the sky less passionate. The last point of the
+coast-line was only a shadow now, scarcely that. Somewhere was the
+sunset, its wonder unseen by her, but realized because of this growing
+tenderness, that was like a benediction falling upon her from a distant
+love, intent to shield her and her little home from sorrow and from
+danger. Nature was whispering her "Buon riposo!" Her hushed voice spoke
+withdrawn among the mountains, withdrawn upon the spaces of the sea. The
+heat of the golden day was blessed, but after it how blessed was the cool
+of the dim night!
+
+Again she thought that the God who had placed man in the magnificent
+scheme of the world must have intended and wished him to be always happy
+there. Nature seemed to be telling her this, and her heart was convinced
+by Nature, though the story of the Old Testament had sometimes left her
+smiling or left her wondering. Men had written a Bible. God had written a
+Bible, too. And here she read its pages and was made strong by it.
+
+"Signora!"
+
+Hermione started and turned her head.
+
+"Lucrezia! What is it?"
+
+"What time is it, signora?"
+
+Hermione looked at her watch.
+
+"Nearly eight o'clock. An hour still before supper."
+
+"I've got everything ready."
+
+"To-night we've only cold things, haven't we? You made us a very nice
+collazione. The French signore praised your cooking, and he's very
+particular, as French people generally are. So you ought to be proud of
+yourself."
+
+Lucrezia smiled, but only for an instant. Then she stood with an anxious
+face, twisting her apron.
+
+"Signora!"
+
+"Yes? What is it?"
+
+"Would you mind--may I--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"Why, Lucrezia, are you afraid of me? I've certainly been away too long!"
+
+"No, no, signora, but--" Tears hung in her eyes. "Will you let me go away
+if I promise to be back by nine?"
+
+"But you can't go to Marechiaro in--"
+
+"No, signora. I only want to go to the mountain over there under Castel
+Vecchio. I want to go to the Madonna."
+
+Hermione took one of the girl's hands.
+
+"To the Madonna della Rocca?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"I understand."
+
+"I have a candle to burn to the Madonna. If I go now I can be back before
+nine."
+
+She stood gazing pathetically, like a big child, at her padrona.
+
+"Lucrezia," Hermione said, moved to a great pity by her own great
+happiness, "would you mind if I came, too? I think I should like to say a
+prayer for you to-night. I am not a Catholic, but my prayer cannot hurt
+you."
+
+Lucrezia suddenly forgot distinctions, threw her arms round Hermione, and
+began to sob.
+
+"Hush, you must be brave!"
+
+She smoothed the girl's dark hair gently.
+
+"Have you got your candle?"
+
+"Si."
+
+She showed it.
+
+"Let us go quickly, then. Where's Gaspare?"
+
+"Close to the house, signora, on the mountain. One cannot speak with him
+to-day."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Non lo so. But he is terrible to-day!"
+
+So Lucrezia had noticed Gaspare's strangeness, too, even in the midst of
+her sorrow!
+
+"Gaspare!" Hermione called.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+She called louder.
+
+"Si, signora!"
+
+The voice came from somewhere behind the house.
+
+"I am going for a walk with Lucrezia. We shall be back at nine. Tell the
+padrone if he comes."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+The two women set out without seeing Gaspare. They walked in silence down
+the mountain-path. Lucrezia held her candle carefully, like one in a
+procession. She was not sobbing now. There were no tears in her eyes. The
+companionship and the sympathy of her padrona had given her some courage,
+some hope, had taken away from her the desolate feeling, the sensation of
+abandonment which had been torturing her. And then she had an almost
+blind faith in the Madonna della Rocca. And the padrona was going to
+pray, too. She was not a Catholic, but she was a lady and she was good.
+The Madonna della Rocca must surely be influenced by her petition.
+
+So Lucrezia plucked up a little courage. The activity of the walk helped
+her. She knew the solace of movement. And perhaps, without being
+conscious of it, she was influenced by the soft beauty of the evening, by
+the peace of the hills. But as they crossed the ravine they heard the
+tinkle of bells, and a procession of goats tripped by them, following a
+boy who was twittering upon a flute. He was playing the tune of the
+tarantella, that tune which Hermione associated with careless joy in the
+sun. He passed down into the shadows of the trees, and gradually the airy
+rapture of his fluting and the tinkle of the goat-bells died away towards
+Marechiaro. Then Hermione saw tears rolling down over Lucrezia's brown
+cheeks.
+
+"He can't play it like Sebastiano, signora!" she said.
+
+The little tune had brought back all her sorrow.
+
+"Perhaps we shall soon hear Sebastiano play it again," said Hermione.
+
+They began to climb upward on the far side of the ravine towards the
+fierce silhouette of the Saracenic castle on the height. Beneath the
+great crag on which it was perched was the shrine of the Madonna della
+Rocca. Night was coming now, and the little lamp before the shrine shone
+gently, throwing a ray of light upon the stones of the path. When they
+reached it, Lucrezia crossed herself, and they stood together for a
+moment looking at the faded painting of the Madonna, almost effaced
+against its rocky background. Within the glass that sheltered it stood
+vases of artificial flowers, and on the ledge outside the glass were two
+or three bunches of real flowers, placed there by peasants returning to
+their homes in Castel Vecchio from their labors in the vineyards and the
+orchards. There were also two branches with clustering, red-gold oranges
+lying among the flowers. It was a strange, wild place. The precipice of
+rock, which the castello dominated, leaned slightly forward above the
+head of the Madonna, as if it meditated overwhelming her. But she smiled
+gently, as if she had no fear of it, bending down her pale eyes to the
+child who lay upon her girlish knees. Among the bowlders, the wild cactus
+showed its spiked leaves, and in the daytime the long black snakes sunned
+themselves upon the stones.
+
+To Hermione this lonely and faded Madonna, smiling calmly beneath the
+savagely frowning rock upon which dead men had built long years ago a
+barbarous fastness, was touching in her solitude. There was something
+appealing in her frailness, in her thin, anaemic calm. How long had she
+been here? How long would she remain? She was fading away, as things fade
+in the night. Yet she had probably endured for years, would still be here
+for years to come, would be here to receive the wild flowers of peasant
+children, the prayers of peasant lovers, the adoration of the poor, who,
+having very little here, put their faith in far-off worlds, where they
+will have harvests surely without reaping in the heat of the sun, where
+they will have good wine without laboring in the vineyards, where they
+will be able to rest without the thought coming to them, "If to-day I
+rest, to-morrow I shall starve."
+
+As Hermione looked at the painting lit by the little lamp, at the gifts
+of the flowers and the fruit, she began to feel as if indeed a woman
+dwelt there, in that niche of the crag, as if a heart were there, a soul
+to pity, an ear to listen.
+
+Lucrezia knelt down quietly, lit her candle, turned it upside down till
+the hot wax dripped onto the rock and made a foundation for it, then
+stuck it upright, crossed herself silently, and began to pray. Her lips
+moved quickly. The candle-flame flickered for a moment, then burned
+steadily, sending its thin fire up towards the evening star. After a
+moment Hermione knelt down beside her.
+
+She had never before prayed at a shrine. It was curious to be kneeling
+under this savage wall of rock above which the evening star showed itself
+in the clear heaven of night. She looked at the star and at the Madonna,
+then at the little bunches of flowers, and at Lucrezia's candle. These
+gifts of the poor moved her heart. Poverty giving is beautiful. She
+thought that, and was almost ashamed of the comfort of her life. She
+wished she had brought a candle, too. Then she bent her head and began to
+pray that Sebastiano might remember Lucrezia and return to her. To make
+her prayer more earnest, she tried to realize Lucrezia's sorrow by
+putting herself in Lucrezia's place, and Maurice in Sebastiano's. It was
+such a natural effort as people make every day, every hour. If Maurice
+had forgotten her in absence, had given his love to another, had not
+cared to return to her! If she were alone now in Sicily while he was
+somewhere else, happy with some one else!
+
+Suddenly the wildness of this place where she knelt became terrible to
+her. She felt the horror of solitude, of approaching darkness. The
+outlines of the rocks and of the ruined castle looked threatening,
+alarming. The pale light of the lamp before the shrine and of Lucrezia's
+votive candle drew to them not only the fluttering night-moths, but the
+spirits of desolation and of hollow grief that dwell among the waste
+places and among the hills. Night seemed no more beneficent, but dreary
+as a spectre that came to rob the world of all that made it beautiful.
+The loneliness of deserted women encompassed her. Was there any other
+loneliness comparable to it?
+
+She felt sure that there was not, and she found herself praying not only
+for Lucrezia, but for all women who were sad because they loved, for all
+women who were deserted by those whom they loved, or who had lost those
+whom they loved.
+
+At first she believed that she was addressing her prayer to the Madonna
+della Rocca, the Blessed Virgin of the Rocks, whose pale image was before
+her. But presently she knew that her words, the words of her lips and the
+more passionate words of her heart, were going out to a Being before whom
+the sun burned as a lamp and the moon as a votive taper. She was thinking
+of women, she was praying for women, but she was no longer praying to a
+woman. It seemed to her as if she was so ardent a suitor that she pushed
+past the Holy Mother of God into the presence of God Himself. He had
+created women. He had created the love of women. To Him she would, she
+must, appeal.
+
+Often she had prayed before, but never as now, never with such passion,
+with such a sensation of personally pleading. The effort of her heart was
+like the effort of womanhood. It seemed to her--and she had no feeling
+that this was blasphemous--as if God knew, understood, everything of the
+world He had created except perhaps this--the inmost agony some women
+suffer, as if she, perhaps, could make Him understand this by her prayer.
+And she strove to recount this agony, to make it clear to God.
+
+Was it a presumptuous effort? She did not feel that it was. And now she
+felt selfless. She was no more thinking of herself, was no longer obliged
+to concentrate her thoughts and her imagination upon herself and the one
+she loved best. She had passed beyond that, as she had passed beyond the
+Madonna della Rocca. She was the voice and the heart not of a woman, but
+of woman praying in the night to the God who had made woman and the
+night.
+
+From behind a rock Gaspare watched the two praying women. He had not
+forgotten his padrone's words, and when Hermione and Lucrezia set off
+from the cottage he had followed them, faithful to his trust. Intent upon
+their errand, they had not seen him. His step was light among the stones,
+and he had kept at a distance. Now he stood still, gazing at them as they
+prayed.
+
+Gaspare did not believe in priests. Very few Sicilians do. An uncle of
+his was a priest's son, and he had other reasons, quite sufficient to his
+mind, for being incredulous of the sanctity of those who celebrated the
+mass to which he seldom went. But he believed in God, and he believed
+superstitiously in the efficacy of the Madonna and in the powers of the
+saints. Once his little brother had fallen dangerously ill on the festa
+of San Giorgio, the santo patrono of Castel Vecchio. He had gone to the
+festa, and had given all his money, five lire, to the saint to heal his
+brother. Next day the child was well. In misfortune he would probably
+utter a prayer, or burn a candle, himself. That Lucrezia might think that
+she had reason to pray he understood, though he doubted whether the
+Madonna and all the saints could do much for the reclamation of his
+friend Sebastiano. But why should the padrona kneel there out-of-doors
+sending up such earnest petitions? She was not a Catholic. He had never
+seen her pray before. He looked on with wonder, presently with
+discomfort, almost with anger. To-night he was what he would himself have
+called "nervoso," and anything that irritated his already strung-up
+nerves roused his temper. He was in anxiety about his padrone, and he
+wanted to be back at the priest's house, he wanted to see his padrone
+again at the earliest possible moment. The sight of his padrona
+committing an unusual action alarmed him. Was she, then, afraid as he was
+afraid? Did she know, suspect anything? His experience of women was that
+whenever they were in trouble they went for comfort and advice to the
+Madonna and the saints.
+
+He grew more and more uneasy. Presently he drew softly a little nearer.
+It was getting late. Night had fallen. He must know the result of the
+padrone's interview with Salvatore, and he could not leave the padrona.
+Well, then--! He crept nearer and nearer till at last he was close to the
+shrine and could see the Madonna smiling. Then he crossed himself and
+said, softly:
+
+"Signora!"
+
+Hermione did not hear him. She was wrapped in the passion of her prayer.
+
+"Signora!"
+
+He bent forward and touched her on the shoulder. She started, turned her
+head, and rose to her feet.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+She looked startled. This abrupt recall to the world confused her for a
+moment.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it? The padrone?"
+
+He took off his cap.
+
+"Signora, do you know how late it is?"
+
+"Has the padrone come back?"
+
+Lucrezia was on her feet, too. The tears were in her eyes.
+
+"Scusi, signora!" said Gaspare.
+
+Hermione began to look more natural.
+
+"Has the padrone come back and sent you for us?"
+
+"He did not send me, signora. It was getting dark. I thought it best to
+come. But I expect he is back. I expect he is waiting for us now."
+
+"You came to guard me?"
+
+She smiled. She liked his watchfulness.
+
+"What's the time?"
+
+She looked at her watch.
+
+"Why, it is nine already! We must hurry. Come, Lucrezia!"
+
+They went quickly down the path.
+
+They did not talk as they went. Gaspare led the way. It was obvious that
+he was in great haste. Sometimes he forgot that the padrona was not so
+light-footed as he was, and sprang on so swiftly that she called to him
+to wait. When at last they came in sight of the arch Hermione and
+Lucrezia were panting.
+
+"The padrone will--forgive us--when--he--sees how we have--hurried," said
+Hermione, laughing at her own fatigue. "Go on, Gaspare!"
+
+She stood for a moment leaning against the arch.
+
+"And you go quickly, Lucrezia, and get the supper. The padrone--will
+be--hungry after his bath."
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+Lucrezia went off to the back of the house. Then Hermione drew a long
+breath, recovered herself, and walked to the terrace.
+
+Gaspare met her with flaming eyes.
+
+"The padrone is not here, signora. The padrone has not come back!"
+
+He stood and stared at her.
+
+It was not yet very dark. They stood in a sort of soft obscurity in which
+all objects could be seen, not with sharp clearness, but distinctly.
+
+"Are you sure, Gaspare?"
+
+"Si, signora! The padrone has not come back. He is not here."
+
+The boy's voice sounded angry, Hermione thought. It startled her. And the
+way he looked at her startled her too.
+
+"You have looked in the house? Maurice!" she called. "Maurice!"
+
+"I say the padrone is not here, signora!"
+
+Never before had Gaspare spoken to Hermione like this, in a tone almost
+that she ought to have resented. She did not resent it, but it filled her
+with a creeping uneasiness.
+
+"What time is it? Nearly half-past nine. He ought to be here by now."
+
+The boy nodded, keeping his flaming eyes on her.
+
+"I said nine to give him lots of time to get cool, and change his
+clothes, and--it's very odd."
+
+"I will go down to the sea, signora. A rivederci."
+
+He swung round to go, but Hermione caught his arm.
+
+"No; don't go. Wait a moment, Gaspare. Don't leave me like this!"
+
+She detained him.
+
+"Why, what's the matter? What--what are you afraid of?"
+
+Instantly there came into his face the ugly, obstinate look she had
+already noticed, and wondered at, that day.
+
+"What are you afraid of, Gaspare?" she repeated.
+
+Her voice vibrated with a strength of feeling that as yet she herself
+scarcely understood.
+
+"Niente!" the boy replied, doggedly.
+
+"Well, but then"--she laughed--"why shouldn't the padrone be a few
+minutes late? It would be absurd to go down. You might miss him on the
+way."
+
+Gaspare said nothing. He stood there with his arms hanging and the ugly
+look still on his face.
+
+"Mightn't you? Mightn't you, Gaspare, if he came up by Marechiaro?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+They stood there in silence for a minute. Hermione broke it.
+
+"He--you know how splendidly the padrone swims," she said. "Don't you,
+Gaspare?"
+
+The boy said nothing.
+
+"Gaspare, why don't you answer when I speak to you?"
+
+"Because I've got nothing to say, signora."
+
+His tone was almost rude. At that moment he nearly hated Hermione for
+holding him by the arm. If she had been a man he would have struck her
+off and gone.
+
+"Gaspare!" she said, but not angrily.
+
+Her instinct told her that he was obliged to be utterly natural just then
+under the spell of some violent feeling. She knew he loved his padrone.
+The feeling must be one of anxiety. But it was absurd to be so anxious.
+It was ridiculous, hysterical. She said to herself that it was Gaspare's
+excitement that was affecting her. She was catching his mood.
+
+"My dear Gaspare," she said, "we must just wait. The padrone will be here
+in a minute. Perhaps he has come up by Marechiaro. Very likely he has
+looked in at the hotel to see how the sick signore is after his day up
+here. That is it, I feel sure."
+
+She looked at him for agreement and met his stern and flaming eyes,
+utterly unmoved by what she had said, utterly unconvinced. At this moment
+she could not deny that this untrained, untutored nature had power over
+hers. She let go his arm and sat down by the wall.
+
+"Let us wait out here for a minute," she said.
+
+"Va bene, signora."
+
+He stood there quite still, but she felt as if in this unnatural
+stillness there was violent movement, and she looked away from him. It
+was fully night now. She gazed down at the ravine. By that way Maurice
+would come, unless he really had gone to Marechiaro to see Artois. She
+had suggested to Gaspare that this might be the reason of Maurice's
+delay, but she knew that she did not think it was. Yet what other reason
+could there be? He swam splendidly. She said that to herself. She kept on
+saying it. Why?
+
+Slowly the minutes crept by. The silence around them was intense, yet she
+felt no calm, no peace in it. Like the stillness of Gaspare it seemed to
+be violent. It began to frighten her. She began to wish for movement, for
+sound. Presently a light shone in the cottage.
+
+"Signora! Signora!"
+
+Lucrezia's voice was calling.
+
+"What is it?" she said.
+
+"Supper is quite ready, signora."
+
+"The signore has not come back yet. He is a little late."
+
+Lucrezia came to the top of the steps.
+
+"Where can the signore be, signora?" she said. "It only takes--"
+
+Her voice died suddenly away. Hermione looked quickly at Gaspare, and saw
+that he was gazing ferociously at Lucrezia as if to bid her be silent.
+
+"Gaspare!" Hermione said, suddenly getting up.
+
+"Signora?"
+
+"I--it's odd the signore's not coming."
+
+The boy answered nothing.
+
+"Perhaps--perhaps there really has been an--an accident."
+
+She tried to speak lightly.
+
+"I don't think he would keep me waiting like this if--"
+
+"I will go down to the sea," the boy said. "Signora, let me go down to
+the sea!"
+
+There was a fury of pleading in his voice. Hermione hesitated, but only
+for a moment. Then she answered:
+
+"Yes, you shall go. Stop, Gaspare!"
+
+He had moved towards the arch.
+
+"I'm coming with you."
+
+"You, signora?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You cannot come! You are not to come!"
+
+He was actually commanding her--his padrona.
+
+"You are not to come, signora!" he repeated, violently.
+
+"But I am coming," she said.
+
+They stood facing each other. It was like a battle, Gaspare's manner, his
+words, the tone in which they were spoken--all made her understand that
+there was some sinister terror in his soul. She did not ask what it was.
+She did not dare to ask. But she said again:
+
+"I am coming with you, Gaspare."
+
+He stared at her and knew that from that decision there was no appeal. If
+he went she would accompany him.
+
+"Let us wait here, signora," he said. "The padrone will be coming
+presently. We had better wait here."
+
+But now she was as determined on activity as before she had been--or
+seemed--anxious for patience.
+
+"I am going," she answered. "If you like to let me go alone you can."
+
+She spoke very quietly, but there was a thrill in her voice. The boy saw
+it was useless just then to pit his will against hers. He dropped his
+head, and the ugly look came back to his face, but he made no reply.
+
+"We shall be back very soon, Lucrezia. We are going a little way down to
+meet the padrone. Come, Gaspare!"
+
+She spoke to him gently, kindly, almost pleadingly. He made an odd sound.
+It was not a word, nor was it a sob. She had never heard anything like it
+before. It seemed to her to be like a smothered outcry of a heart torn by
+some acute emotion.
+
+"Gaspare!" she said. "We shall meet him. We shall meet him in the
+ravine!"
+
+Then they set out. As she was going, Hermione cast a look down towards
+the sea. Always at this hour, when night had come, a light shone there,
+the light in the siren's house. To-night that little spark was not
+kindled. She saw only the darkness. She stopped.
+
+"Why," she said, "there's no light!"
+
+"Signora?"
+
+She pointed over the wall.
+
+"There's no light!" she repeated.
+
+This little fact--she did not know why--frightened her.
+
+"Signora, I am going!"
+
+"Gaspare!" she said. "Give me your hand to help me down the path. It's so
+dark. Isn't it?"
+
+She put out her hand. The boy's hand was cold.
+
+They set out towards the sea.
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+They did not talk as they went down the steep mountain-side, but when
+they reached the entrance of the ravine Gaspare stopped abruptly and took
+his cold hand away from his padrona's hand.
+
+"Signora," he said, almost in a whisper. "Let me go alone!"
+
+They were under the shade of the trees here and it was much darker than
+upon the mountain-side. Hermione could not see the boy's face plainly.
+She came close up to him.
+
+"Why do you want to go alone?" she asked.
+
+Without knowing it, she, too, spoke in an under-voice.
+
+"What is it you are afraid of?" she added.
+
+"I am not afraid."
+
+"Yes," she said, "you are. Your hand is quite cold."
+
+"Let me go alone, signora."
+
+"No, Gaspare. There is nothing to be afraid of, I believe. But if--if
+there should have been an accident, I ought to be there. The padrone is
+my husband, remember."
+
+She went on and he followed her.
+
+Hermione had spoken firmly, even almost cheerfully, to comfort the boy,
+whose uneasiness was surely greater than the occasion called for. So many
+little things may happen to delay a man. And Maurice might really have
+made the detour to Marechiaro on his way home. If he had, then they would
+miss him by taking this path through the ravine. Hermione knew that, but
+she did not hesitate to take it. She could not remain inactive to-night.
+Patience was out of her reach. It was only by making a strong effort that
+she had succeeded in waiting that short time on the terrace. Now she
+could wait no longer. She was driven. Although she had not yet sincerely
+acknowledged it to herself, fear was gradually taking possession of her,
+a fear such as she had never yet known or even imagined.
+
+She had never yet known or imagined such a fear. That she felt. But she
+had another feeling, contradictory, surely. It began to seem to her as if
+this fear, which was now coming upon her, had been near her for a long
+time, ever since the night when she knew that she was going to Africa.
+Had she not even expressed it to Maurice?
+
+Those beautiful days and nights of perfect happiness--can they ever come
+again? Had she not thought that many times? Was it not the voice of this
+fear which had whispered those words, and others like them, to her mind?
+And had there not been omens? Had there not been omens?
+
+She heard Gaspare's feet behind her in the ravine, and it seemed to her
+that she could tell by the sound of them upon the many little loose
+stones that he was wild with impatience, that he was secretly cursing her
+for obliging him to go so slowly. Had he been alone he would have sped
+down with a rapidity almost like that of travelling light. She was
+strong, active. She was going fast. Instinctively she went fast. But she
+was a woman, not a boy.
+
+"I can't help it, Gaspare!"
+
+She was saying that mentally, saying it again and again, as she hurried
+onward.
+
+Had there not been omens?
+
+That last letter of hers, whose loss had prevented Maurice from meeting
+her on her return, from welcoming her! When she had reached the station
+of Cattaro, and had not seen him upon the platform, she had felt "I have
+lost him." Afterwards, directly almost, she had laughed at the feeling as
+absurd. But she had had it. And then, when at last he had come, she had
+been moved to suggest that he might like to sleep outside upon the
+terrace. And he had agreed to the suggestion. They had not resumed their
+old, sweet relation of husband and wife.
+
+Had there not been omens?
+
+And only an hour ago, scarcely that, not that, she had knelt before the
+Madonna della Rocca and she had prayed, she had prayed passionately for
+deserted women, for women who loved and who had lost those whom they
+loved.
+
+The fear was upon her fully now, and she fully knew that it was. Why had
+she prayed for lonely, deserted women? What had moved her to such a
+prayer?
+
+"Was I praying for myself?"
+
+At that thought a physical weakness came to her, and she felt as if she
+could not go on. By the side of the path, growing among pointed rocks,
+there was a gnarled olive-tree, whose branches projected towards her.
+Before she knew what she was doing she had caught hold of one and stood
+still. So suddenly she had stopped that Gaspare, unprepared, came up
+against her in the dark.
+
+"Signora! What is the matter?"
+
+His voice was surely angry. For a moment she thought of telling him to go
+on alone, quickly.
+
+"What is it, signora?"
+
+"Nothing--only--I've walked so fast. Wait one minute!"
+
+She felt the agony of his impatience, and it seemed to her that she was
+treating him very cruelly to-night.
+
+"You know, Gaspare," she said, "it's not easy for women--this rough
+walking, I mean. We've got our skirts."
+
+She laughed. How unnatural, how horrible her laugh sounded in the
+darkness! He did not say any more. She knew he was wondering why she had
+laughed like that. After a moment she let go the branch. But her legs
+were trembling, and she stumbled when she began to walk on.
+
+"Signora, you are tired already. You had better let me go alone."
+
+For the first time she told him a lie.
+
+"I should be afraid to wait here all by myself in the night," she said.
+"I couldn't do that."
+
+"Who would come?"
+
+"I should be frightened."
+
+She thought she saw him look at her incredulously in the dark, but was
+not sure.
+
+"Be kind to me to-night, Gaspare!" she said.
+
+She felt a sudden passionate need of gentleness, of support, a woman's
+need of sympathy.
+
+"Won't you?" she added.
+
+"Signora!" he said.
+
+His voice sounded shocked, she thought; but in a moment, when they came
+to an awkward bit of the path, he put his hand under her arm, and very
+carefully, almost tenderly, helped her over it. Tears rushed into her
+eyes. For such a small thing she was crying! She turned her head so that
+Gaspare should not see, and tried to control her emotion. That terrible
+question kept on returning to her heart.
+
+"Was I praying for myself when I prayed at the shrine of the Madonna
+della Rocca?"
+
+Hermione was gifted, or cursed, with imagination, and as she never made
+use of her imaginative faculty in any of the arts, it was, perhaps, too
+much at the service of her own life. In happiness it was a beautiful
+handmaid, helping her to greater joy, but in unhappy, or in only anxious
+moments, it was, as it usually is, a cursed thing. It stood at her elbow,
+then, like a demon full of suggestions that were terrible. With an
+inventiveness that was diabolic it brought vividly before her scenes to
+shake the stoutest courage. It painted the future black. It showed her
+the world as a void. And in that void she was as something falling,
+falling, yet reaching nothing.
+
+Now it was with her in the ravine, and as she asked questions, terrible
+questions, it gave her terrible answers. And it reminded her of other
+omens--it told her these facts were really omens--which till now she had
+not thought of.
+
+Why had both she and Maurice been led to think and to speak of death
+to-day?
+
+Upon the mountain-top the thought of death had come to her when she
+looked at the glory of the dawn. She had said to Maurice, "'The mountains
+will endure'--but we!" Of course it was a truism, such a thing as she
+might say at any time when she was confronted by the profound stability
+of nature. Thousands of people had said much the same thing on thousands
+of occasions. Yet now the demon at her elbow whispered to her that the
+remark had had a peculiar significance. She had even said, "What is it
+makes one think most of death when--when life, new life, is very near?"
+
+Existence is made up of loss and gain. New beings rush into life day by
+day and hour by hour. Birth is about us, but death is about us too. And
+when we are given something, how often is something also taken from us!
+Was that to be her fate?
+
+And Maurice--he had been led to speak of death, afterwards, just as he
+was going away to the sea. She recalled his words, or the demon whispered
+them over to her:
+
+"'One can never tell what will happen--suppose one of us were to die
+here? Don't you think it would be good to lie there where we lay this
+afternoon, under the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea? I think it
+would."
+
+They were his very last words, his who was so full of life, who scarcely
+ever seemed to realize the possibility of death. All through the day
+death had surely been in the air about them. She remembered her dream, or
+quasi-dream. In it she had spoken. She had muttered an appeal, "Don't
+leave me alone!" and at another time she had tried to realize Maurice in
+England and had failed. She had felt as if Sicily would never let him go.
+And when she had spoken her thought he had hinted that Sicily could only
+keep him by holding him in arms of earth, holding him in those arms that
+keep the body of man forever.
+
+Perhaps it was ordained that her Sicilian should never leave the island
+that he loved. In all their Sicilian days how seldom had she thought of
+their future life together in England! Always she had seen herself with
+Maurice in the south. He had seemed to belong to the south, and she had
+brought him to the south. And now--would the south let him go? The
+thought of the sirens of legend flitted through her mind. They called men
+to destruction. She imagined them sitting among the rocks near the Casa
+della Sirene, calling--calling to her Sicilian.
+
+Long ago, when she first knew him well and loved his beauty, she had
+sometimes thought of him as a being of legend. She had let her fancy play
+about him tenderly, happily. He had been Mercury, Endymion, a dancing
+faun, Cupid vanishing from Psyche as the dawn came. And now she let a
+cruel fancy have its will for a moment. She imagined the sirens calling
+among the rocks, and Maurice listening to their summons, and going to his
+destruction. The darkness of the ravine helped the demon who hurried with
+her down the narrow path, whispering in her ears. But though she yielded
+for a time to the nightmare spell, common-sense had not utterly deserted
+her, and presently it made its voice heard. She began to say to herself
+that in giving way to such fantastic fears she was being unworthy of
+herself, almost contemptible. In former times she had never been a
+foolish woman or weak. She had, on the contrary, been strong and
+sensible, although unconventional and enthusiastic. Many people had
+leaned upon her, even strong people. Artois was one. And she had never
+yet failed any one.
+
+"I must not fail myself," she suddenly thought. "I must not be a fool
+because I love."
+
+She loved very much, and she had been separated from her lover very soon.
+Her eagerness to return to him had been so intense that it had made her
+afraid. Yet she had returned, been with him again. Her fear in Africa
+that they would perhaps never be together again in their Sicilian home
+had been groundless. She remembered how it had often tormented her,
+especially at night in the dark. She had passed agonizing hours, for no
+reason. Her imagination had persecuted her. Now it was trying to
+persecute her more cruelly. Suddenly she resolved not to let it have its
+way. Why was she so frightened at a delay that might be explained in a
+moment and in the simplest manner? Why was she frightened at all?
+
+Gaspare's foot struck a stone and sent it flying down the path past her.
+
+Ah! it had been Gaspare. His face, his manner, had startled her, had
+first inclined her to fear.
+
+"Gaspare!" she said.
+
+"Si, signora?"
+
+"Come up beside me. There's room now."
+
+The boy joined her.
+
+"Gaspare," she continued, "do you know that when we meet the padrone, you
+and I, we shall look like two fools?"
+
+"Meet the padrone?" he repeated, sullenly.
+
+"Yes. He'll laugh at us for rushing down like this. He'll think we've
+gone quite mad."
+
+Silence was the only response she had.
+
+"Won't he?" she asked.
+
+"Non lo so."
+
+"Oh, Gaspare!" she exclaimed. "Don't--don't be like this to-night. Do you
+know that you are frightening me?"
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"What is the matter with you? What has been the matter with you all day?"
+
+"Niente."
+
+His voice was hard, and he fell behind again.
+
+Hermione knew that he was concealing something from her. She wondered
+what it was. It must be something surely in connection with his anxiety.
+Her mind worked rapidly. Maurice--the sea--bathing--Gaspare's
+fear--Maurice and Gaspare had bathed together often while she had been in
+Africa.
+
+"Gaspare," she said. "Walk beside me--I wish it."
+
+He came up reluctantly.
+
+"You've bathed with the padrone lately?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Many times?"
+
+"Si, signora."
+
+"Have you ever noticed that he was tired in the sea, or afterwards, or
+that bathing seemed to make him ill in any way?"
+
+"Tired, signora?"
+
+"You know there's a thing, in English we call it cramp. Sometimes it
+seizes the best swimmers. It's a dreadful pain, I believe, and the limbs
+refuse to move. You've never--when he's been swimming with you, the
+padrone has never had anything of that kind, has he? It wasn't that which
+made you frightened this evening when he didn't come?"
+
+She had unwittingly given the boy the chance to save her from any worse
+suspicion. With Sicilian sharpness he seized it. Till now he had been in
+a dilemma, and it was that which had made him sullen, almost rude. His
+position was a difficult one. He had to keep his padrone's confidence.
+Yet he could not--physically he could not--stay on the mountain when he
+knew that some tragedy was probably being enacted, or had already been
+enacted by the sea. He was devoured by an anxiety which he could not
+share and ought not to show because it was caused by the knowledge which
+he was solemnly pledged to conceal. This remark of Hermione gave him a
+chance of shifting it from the shoulders of the truth to the shoulders of
+a lie. He remembered the morning of sirocco, his fear, his passion of
+tears in the boat. The memory seemed almost to make the lie he was going
+to tell the truth.
+
+"Si, signora. It was that."
+
+His voice was no longer sullen.
+
+"The padrone had an attack like that?"
+
+Again the terrible fear came back to her.
+
+"Signora, it was one morning."
+
+"Used you to bathe in the morning?"
+
+A hot flush came in Gaspare's face, but Hermione did not see it in the
+darkness.
+
+"Once we did, signora. We had been fishing."
+
+"Go on. Tell me!"
+
+Then Gaspare related the incident of his padrone's sinking in the sea.
+Only he made Maurice's travesty appear a real catastrophe. Hermione
+listened with painful attention. So Maurice had nearly died, had been
+into the jaws of death, while she had been in Africa! Her fears there had
+been less ill-founded than she had thought. A horror came upon her as she
+heard Gaspare's story.
+
+"And then, signora, I cried," he ended. "I cried."
+
+"You cried?"
+
+"I thought I never could stop crying again."
+
+How different from an English boy's reticence was this frank confession!
+and yet what English boy was ever more manly than this mountain lad?
+
+"Why--but then you saved the padrone's life! God bless you!"
+
+Hermione had stopped, and she now put her hand on Gaspare's arm.
+
+"Oh, signora, there were two of us. We had the boat."
+
+"But"--another thought came to her--"but, Gaspare, after such a thing as
+that, how could you let the padrone go down to bathe alone?"
+
+Gaspare, a moment before credited with a faithful action, was now to be
+blamed for a faithless one. For neither was he responsible, if strict
+truth were to be regarded. But he had insisted on saving his padrone from
+the sea when it was not necessary. And he knew his own faithfulness and
+was secretly proud of it, as a good woman knows and is proud of her
+honor. He had borne the praise therefore. But one thing he could not
+bear, and that was an imputation of faithlessness in his stewardship.
+
+"It was not my fault, signora!" he cried, hotly. "I wanted to go. I
+begged to go, but the padrone would not let me."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Hermione, peering in the darkness, thought she saw the ugly look come
+again into the boy's face.
+
+"Why not, signora?"
+
+"Yes, why not?"
+
+"He wished me to stay with you. He said: 'Stay with the padrona, Gaspare.
+She will be all alone.'"
+
+"Did he? Well, Gaspare, it is not your fault. But I never thought it was.
+You know that."
+
+She had heard in his voice that he was hurt.
+
+"Come! We must go on!"
+
+Her fear was now tangible. It had a definite form, and with every moment
+it grew greater in the night, towering over her, encompassing her about.
+For she had hoped to meet Maurice coming up the ravine, and, with each
+moment that went by, her hope of hearing his footstep decreased, her
+conviction that something untoward must have occurred grew more solid.
+Only once was her terror abated. When they were not far from the mouth of
+the ravine Gaspare suddenly seized her arm from behind.
+
+"Gaspare! What is it?" she said, startled.
+
+He held up one hand.
+
+"Zitta!" he whispered.
+
+Hermione listened, holding her breath. It was a silent night, windless
+and calm. The trees had no voices, the watercourse was dry, no longer
+musical with the falling stream. Even the sea was dumb, or, if it were
+not, murmured so softly that these two could not hear it where they
+stood. And now, in this dark silence, they heard a faint sound. It was
+surely a foot-fall upon stones. Yes, it was.
+
+By the fierce joy that burst up in her heart Hermione measured her
+previous fear.
+
+"It's he! It's the padrone!"
+
+She put her face close to Gaspare's and whispered the words. He nodded.
+His eyes were shining.
+
+"Andiamo!" he whispered back.
+
+With a boy's impetuosity he wished to rush on and meet the truant pilgrim
+from the sea, but Hermione held him back. She could not bear to lose that
+sweet sound, the foot-fall on the stones, coming nearer every moment.
+
+"No. Let's wait for him here! Let's give him a surprise."
+
+"Va bene!"
+
+His body was quivering with suppressed movement. But they waited. The
+step was slow, or so it seemed to Hermione as she listened again, like
+the step of a tired man. Maurice seldom walked like that, she thought. He
+was light-footed, swift. His actions were ardent as were his eyes. But it
+must be he! Of course it was he! He was languid after a long swim, and
+was walking slowly for fear of getting hot. That must be it. The walker
+drew nearer, the crunch of the stones was louder under his feet.
+
+"It isn't the padrone!"
+
+Gaspare had spoken. All the light had gone out of his eyes.
+
+"Si! Si! It is he!"
+
+Hermione contradicted him.
+
+"No, signora. It is a contadino."
+
+Her joy was failing. Although she contradicted Gaspare, she began to feel
+that he was right. This step was heavy, weary, an old man's step. It
+could not be her Mercury coming up to his home on the mountain. But still
+she waited. Presently there detached itself from the darkness a faint
+figure, bent, crowned with a long Sicilian cap.
+
+"Andiamo!"
+
+This time she did not keep Gaspare back. Without a word they went on. As
+they came to the figure it stopped. She did not even glance at it, but as
+she went by it she heard an old, croaky voice say:
+
+"Benedicite!"
+
+Never before had the Sicilian greeting sounded horrible in her ears. She
+did not reply to it. She could not. And Gaspare said nothing. They
+hastened on in silence till they reached the high-road by Isola Bella,
+the road where Maurice had met Maddalena on the morning of the fair.
+
+It was deserted. The thick white dust upon it looked ghastly at their
+feet. Now they could hear the faint and regular murmur of the oily sea by
+which the fishermen's boats were drawn up, and discern, far away on the
+right, the serpentine lights of Cattaro.
+
+"Where do you go to bathe?" Hermione asked, always speaking in a hushed
+voice. "Here, by Isola Bella?"
+
+She looked down at the rocks of the tiny island, at the dimness of the
+spreading sea. Till now she had always gloried in its beauty, but
+to-night it looked to her mysterious and cruel.
+
+"No, signora."
+
+"Where then?"
+
+"Farther on--a little. I will go."
+
+His voice was full of hesitation. He did not know what to do.
+
+"Please, signora, stay here. Sit on the bank by the line. I will go and
+be back in a moment. I can run. It is better. If you come we shall take
+much longer."
+
+"Go, Gaspare!" she said. "But--stop--where do you bathe exactly?"
+
+"Quite near, signora."
+
+"In that little bay underneath the promontory where the Casa delle Sirene
+is?"
+
+"Sometimes there and sometimes farther on by the caves. A rivederla!"
+
+The white dust flew up from the road as he disappeared.
+
+Hermione did not sit down on the bank. She had never meant to wait by
+Isola Bella, but she let him go because what he had said was true, and
+she did not wish to delay him. If anything serious had occurred every
+moment might be valuable. After a short pause she followed him. As she
+walked she looked continually at the sea. Presently the road mounted and
+she came in sight of the sheltered bay in which Maurice had heard
+Maddalena's cry when he was fishing. A stone wall skirted the road here.
+Some twenty feet below was the railway line laid on a bank which sloped
+abruptly to the curving beach. She leaned her hands upon the wall and
+looked down, thinking she might see Gaspare. But he was not there. The
+dark, still sea, protected by the two promontories, and by an islet of
+rock in the middle of the bay, made no sound here. It lay motionless as
+a pool in a forest under the stars. To the left the jutting land, with
+its turmoil of jagged rocks, was a black mystery. As she stood by the
+wall, Hermione felt horribly lonely, horribly deserted. She wished she
+had not let Gaspare go. Yet she dreaded his return. What might he have to
+tell her? Now that she was here by the sea she felt how impossible it was
+for Maurice to have been delayed upon the shore. For there was no one
+here. The fishermen were up in the village. The contadini had long since
+left their work. No one passed upon the road. There was nothing, there
+could have been nothing to keep a man here. She felt as if it were
+already midnight, the deepest hour of darkness and of silence.
+
+As she took her hands from the wall, and turned to go on up the hill to
+the point which commanded the open sea and the beginning of the Straits
+of Messina, she was terrified. Suspicion was hardening into certainty.
+Something dreadful must have happened to Maurice.
+
+Her legs had begun to tremble again. All her body felt weak and
+incapable, like the body of an old person whose life was drawing to an
+end. The hill, not very steep, faced her like a precipice, and it seemed
+to her that she would not be able to mount it. In the road the deep dust
+surely clung to her feet, refusing to let her lift them. And she felt
+sick and contemptible, no longer her own mistress either physically or
+mentally. The voices within her that strove to whisper commonplaces of
+consolation, saying that Maurice had gone to Marechiaro, or that he had
+taken another path home, not the path from Isola Bella, brought her no
+comfort. The thing within her soul that knew what she, the human being
+containing it, did not know, told her that her terror had its reason,
+that she was not suffering in this way without cause. It said, "Your
+terror is justified."
+
+[Illustration: "SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE CAVES WHERE THE
+FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN THE DAWN"]
+
+At last she was at the top of the hill, and could see vaguely the shore
+by the caves where the fishermen had slept in the dawn. To her right was
+the path which led to the wall of rock connecting the Sirens' Isle with
+the main-land. She glanced at it, but did not think of following it.
+Gaspare must have followed the descending road. He must be down there on
+that beach searching, calling his padrone's name, perhaps. She began to
+descend slowly, still physically distressed. True to her fixed idea that
+if there had been a disaster it must be connected with the sea, she
+walked always close to the wall, and looked always down to the sea.
+Within a short time, two or three minutes, she came in sight of the
+lakelike inlet, a miniature fiord which lay at the feet of the woods
+where hid the Casa delle Sirene. The water here looked black like ebony.
+She stared down at it and saw a boat lying on the shore. Then she gazed
+for a moment at the trees opposite from which always, till to-night, had
+shone the lamp which she and Maurice had seen from the terrace. All was
+dark. The thickly growing trees did not move. Secret and impenetrable
+seemed to her the hiding-place they made. She could scarcely imagine that
+any one lived among them. Yet doubtless the inhabitants of the Casa delle
+Sirene were sleeping quietly there while she wandered on the white road
+accompanied by her terror.
+
+She had stopped for a minute, and was just going to walk on, when she
+heard a sound that, though faint and distant, was sharp and imperative.
+It seemed to her to be a violent beating on wood, and it was followed by
+the calling of a voice. She waited. The sound died away. She listened,
+straining her ears. In this absolutely still night sound travelled far.
+At first she had no idea from what direction came this noise which had
+startled her. But almost immediately it was repeated, and she knew that
+it must be some one striking violently and repeatedly upon wood--probably
+a wooden door.
+
+Then again the call rang out. This time she recognized, or thought she
+recognized, Gaspare's voice raised angrily, fiercely, in a summons to
+someone. She looked across the ebon water at the ebon mass of the trees
+on its farther side, and realized swiftly that Gaspare must be there. He
+had gone to the only house between the two bathing-places to ask if its
+inhabitants had seen anything of the padrone.
+
+This seemed to her to be a very natural and intelligent action, and she
+waited eagerly and watched, hoping to see a light shine out as
+Salvatore--yes, that had been the name told to her by Gaspare--as
+Salvatore got up from sleep and came to open. He might know something,
+know at least at what hour Maurice had left the sea.
+
+Again came the knocking and the call, again--four, five times. Then there
+was a long silence. Always the darkness reigned, unbroken by the
+earth-bound star, the light she looked for. The silence began to seem to
+her interminable. At first she thought that perhaps Gaspare was having a
+colloquy with the owner of the house, was learning something of Maurice.
+But presently she began to believe that there could be no one in the
+house, and that he had realized this. If so, he would have to return
+either to the road or the beach. She could see no boat moored to the
+shore opposite. He would come by the wall of rock, then, unless he swam
+the inlet. She went back a little way to a point from which dimly she saw
+the wall, and waited there a few minutes. Surely it would be dangerous to
+traverse that wall on such a dark night! Now, to her other fear was added
+fear for Gaspare. If an accident were to happen to him! Suddenly she
+hastened back to the path which led from the high-road along the spit of
+cultivated land to the wall, turned from the road, traversed the spit,
+and went down till she stood at the edge of the wall. She looked at the
+black rock, the black sea that lay motionless far down on either side of
+it. Surely Gaspare would not venture to come this way. It seemed to her
+that to do so would mean death, or, if not that, a dangerous fall into
+the sea--and probably there were rocks below, hidden under the surface of
+the water. But Gaspare was daring. She knew that. He was as active as a
+cat and did not know the meaning of fear for his own safety. He might--
+
+Out of the darkness on the land beyond the wall, something came, the form
+of some one hurrying.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+The form stopped.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+"Signora! What are you doing here? Madonna!"
+
+"Gaspare, don't come this way! You are not to come this way."
+
+"Why are you here, signora? I told you to wait for me by Isola Bella."
+
+The startled voice was hard.
+
+"You are not to cross the wall. I won't have it."
+
+"The wall--it is nothing, signora. I have crossed it many times. It is
+nothing for a man."
+
+"In the day, perhaps, but at night--don't, Gaspare--d'you hear me?--you
+are not--"
+
+She stopped, holding her breath, for she saw him coming lightly, poised
+on bare feet, straight as an arrow, and balancing himself with his
+out-stretched arms.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+She had shrieked out. Just as he was midway Gaspare had looked down at
+the sea--the open sea on the far side of the wall. Instantly his foot
+slipped, he lost his balance and fell. She thought he had gone, but he
+caught the wall with his hands, hung for a moment suspended above the
+sea, then raised himself, as a gymnast does on a parallel bar, slowly
+till his body was above the wall. Then--Hermione did not know how--he was
+beside her.
+
+She caught hold of him with both hands. She felt furiously angry.
+
+"How dare you disobey me?" she said, panting and trembling. "How dare
+you--"
+
+But his eyes silenced her. She broke off, staring at him. All the healthy
+color had left his face. There was a leaden hue upon it.
+
+"Gaspare--are you--you aren't hurt--you--"
+
+"Let me go, signora! Let me go!"
+
+She let him go instantly.
+
+"What is it? Where are you going?"
+
+He pointed to the beach.
+
+"To the boat. There's--down there in the water--there's something in the
+water!"
+
+"Something?" she said.
+
+"Wait in the road."
+
+He rushed away from her, and she heard him saying: "Madonna! Madonna!
+Madonna!"--crying it out as he ran.
+
+Something in the water! She felt as if her heart stood still for a
+century, then at last beat again somewhere up in her throat, choking her.
+Something--could Gaspare have seen what? She moved on a step. One of her
+feet was on the wall, the other still on the firm earth. She leaned down
+and tried to look over into the sea beyond, the sea close to the wall.
+But her head swam. Had she not moved back hastily, obedient to an
+imperious instinct of self-preservation, she would have fallen. She sat
+down, there where she had been standing, and dropped her face into her
+hands close to her knees, and kept quite still. She felt as if she were
+in a train going through a tunnel. Her ears were full of a roaring
+clamor. How long she sat and heard tumult she did not know. When she
+looked up the night seemed to her to be much darker than before,
+intensely dark. Yet all the stars were there in the sky. No clouds had
+come to hide them. She tried to get up quickly, but there was surely
+something wrong with her body. It would not obey her will at first.
+Presently she lay down, turned over on her side, put both hands on the
+ground, and with an effort, awkward as that of a cripple, hoisted herself
+up and stood on her feet. Gaspare had said, "Wait in the road." She must
+find the road. That was what she must do.
+
+"Wait in the road--wait in the road." She kept on saying that to herself.
+But she could not remember for a moment where the road was. She could
+only think of rock, of water black like ebony. The road was white. She
+must look for something white. And when she found it she must wait.
+Presently, while she thought she was looking, she found that she was
+walking in the dust. It flew up into her nostrils, dry and acrid. Then
+she began to recover herself and to realize more clearly what she was
+doing.
+
+She did not know yet. She knew nothing yet. The night was dark, the sea
+was dark. Gaspare had only cast one swift glance down before his foot had
+slipped. It was impossible that he could have seen what it was that was
+there in the water. And she was always inclined to let her imagination
+run riot. God isn't cruel. She had said that under the oak-trees, and it
+was true. It must be true.
+
+"I've never done God any harm," she was saying to herself now. "I've
+never meant to. I've always tried to do the right thing. God knows that!
+God wouldn't be cruel to me."
+
+In this moment all the subtlety of her mind deserted her, all that in her
+might have been called "cleverness." She was reduced to an extraordinary
+simplicity like that of a child, or a very instinctive, uneducated
+person.
+
+"I don't think I'm bad," she thought. "And God--He isn't bad. He wouldn't
+wish to hurt me. He wouldn't wish to kill me."
+
+She was walking on mechanically while she thought this, but presently
+she remembered again that Gaspare had told her to wait in the road. She
+looked over the wall down to the narrow strip of beach that edged the
+inlet between the main-land and the Sirens' Isle. The boat which she had
+seen there was gone. Gaspare had taken it. She stood staring at the place
+where the boat had been. Then she sought a means of descending to that
+strip of beach. She would wait there. A little lower down the road some
+of the masonry of the wall had been broken away, perhaps by a winter
+flood, and at this point there was a faint track, trodden by fishermen's
+feet, leading down to the line. Hermione got over the wall at this point
+and was soon on the beach, standing almost on the spot where Maurice had
+stripped off his clothes in the night to seek the voice that had cried
+out to him in the darkness. She waited here. Gaspare would presently come
+back. His arms were strong. He could row fast. She would only have to
+wait a few minutes. In a few minutes she would know. She strained her
+eyes to catch sight of the boat rounding the promontory as it returned
+from the open sea. At first she stood, but presently, as the minutes went
+by and the boat did not come, her sense of physical weakness returned and
+she sat down on the stones with her feet almost touching the water.
+
+"Gaspare knows now," she thought. "I don't know, but Gaspare knows."
+
+That seemed to her strange, that any one should know the truth of this
+thing before she did. For what did it matter to any one but her? Maurice
+was hers--was so absolutely hers that she felt as if no one else had any
+concern in him. He was Gaspare's padrone. Gaspare loved him as a Sicilian
+may love his padrone. Others in England, too, loved him--his mother, his
+father. But what was any love compared with the love of the one woman to
+whom he belonged. His mother had her husband. Gaspare--he was a boy. He
+would love some girl presently; he would marry. No, she was right. The
+truth about that "something in the water" only concerned her. God's
+dealing with this creature of his to-night only really mattered to her.
+
+As she waited, pressing her hands on the stones and looking always at the
+point of the dark land round which the boat must come, a strange and
+terrible feeling came to her, a feeling that she knew she ought to drive
+out of her soul, but that she was powerless to expel.
+
+She felt as if at this moment God were on His trial before her--before a
+poor woman who loved.
+
+"If God has taken Maurice from me," she thought, "He is cruel,
+frightfully cruel, and I cannot love Him. If He has not taken Maurice
+from me, He is the God who is love, the God I can, I must worship!"
+
+Which God was he?
+
+The vast scheme of the world narrowed; the wide horizons vanished. There
+was nothing beyond the limit of her heart. She felt, as almost all
+believing human beings feel in such moments, that God's attention was
+entirely concentrated upon her life, that no other claimed His care,
+begged for His pity, demanded His tenderness because hers was so intense.
+
+Did God wish to lose her love? Surely not! Then He could not commit this
+frightful act which she feared. He had not committed it.
+
+A sort of relief crept through her as she thought this. Her agony of
+apprehension was suddenly lessened, was almost driven out.
+
+God wants to be loved by the beings He has created. Then He would not
+deliberately, arbitrarily destroy a love already existing in the heart of
+one of them--a love thankful to Him, enthusiastically grateful for
+happiness bestowed by Him.
+
+Beyond the darkness of the point there came out of the dimness of the
+night that brooded above the open sea a moving darkness, and Hermione
+heard the splash of oars in the calm water. She got up quickly. Now her
+body was trembling again. She stared at the boat as if she would force it
+to yield its secret to her eyes. But that was only for an instant. Then
+her ears seemed to be seeking the truth, seeking it from the sound of the
+oars in the water!
+
+There was no rhythmic regularity in the music they made, no steadiness,
+no--no--
+
+She listened passionately, instinctively bending down her head sideways.
+It seemed to her that she was listening to a drunken man rowing. Now
+there was a quick beating of the oars in the water, then silence, then a
+heavy splash as if one of the oars had escaped from an uncertain hand,
+then some uneven strokes, one oar striking the water after the other.
+
+"But Gaspare is a contadino," she said to herself, "not a fisherman.
+Gaspare is a contadino and--"
+
+"Gaspare!" she called out. "Gaspare!"
+
+The boat stopped midway in the mouth of the inlet.
+
+"Gaspare! Is it you?"
+
+She saw a dark figure standing up in the boat.
+
+"Gaspare, is it you?" she cried, more loudly.
+
+"Si."
+
+Was it Gaspare's voice? She did not recognize it. Yet the voice had
+answered "Yes." The boat still remained motionless on the water midway
+between shore and shore. She did not speak again; she was afraid to
+speak. She stood and stared at the boat and at the motionless figure
+standing up in it. Why did not he row in to land? What was he doing
+there? She stared at the boat and at the figure standing in it till she
+could see nothing. Then she shut her eyes.
+
+"Gaspare!" she called, keeping her eyes shut. "What are you doing?
+Gaspare!"
+
+There was no reply.
+
+She opened her eyes, and now she could see the boat again and the rower.
+
+"Gaspare!" she cried, with all her strength, to the black figure. "Why
+don't you row to the shore? Why don't you come to me?"
+
+"Vengo!"
+
+Loudly the word came to her, loudly and sullenly as if the boy were angry
+with her, almost hated her. It was followed by a fierce splash of oars.
+The boat shot forward, coming straight towards her. Then suddenly the
+oars ceased from moving, the dark figure of the rower fell down in a
+heap, and she heard cries, like cries of despair, and broken
+exclamations, and then a long sound of furious weeping.
+
+"Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+Her voice was strangled in her throat and died away.
+
+"And then, signora, I cried--I cried!"
+
+When had Gaspare said that to her? And why had he cried?
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+It came from her lips in a whisper almost inaudible to herself.
+
+Then she rushed forward into the dark water.
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Late that night Dr. Marini, the doctor of the commune of Marechiaro, was
+roused from sleep in his house in the Corso by a violent knocking on his
+street door. He turned over in his bed, muttered a curse, then lay still
+for a moment and listened. The knocking was renewed more violently.
+Evidently the person who stood without was determined to gain admission.
+There was no help for it. The good doctor, who was no longer young,
+dropped his weary legs to the floor, walked across to the open window,
+and thrust his head out of it. A man was standing below.
+
+"What is it? What do you want?" said the doctor, in a grumbling voice.
+"Is it another baby? Upon my word, these--"
+
+"Signor Dottore, come down, come down instantly! The signore of Monte
+Amato, the signore of the Casa del Prete has had an accident. You must
+come at once. I will go to fetch a donkey."
+
+The doctor leaned farther out of the window.
+
+"An accident! What--?"
+
+But the man, a fisherman of Marechiaro, was already gone, and the doctor
+saw only the narrow, deserted street, black with the shadows of the tall
+houses.
+
+He drew in quickly and began to dress himself with some expedition. An
+accident, and to a forestiere! There would be money in this case. He
+regretted his lost sleep less now and cursed no more, though he thought
+of the ride up into the mountains with a good deal of self-pity. It was
+no joke to be a badly paid Sicilian doctor, he thought, as he tugged at
+his trousers buttons, and fastened the white front that covered the
+breast of his flannel shirt, and adjusted the cuffs which he took out of
+a small drawer. Without lighting a candle he went down-stairs, fumbled
+about, and found his case of instruments. Then he opened the street door
+and waited, yawning on the stone pavement. In two or three minutes he
+heard the tripping tip-tap of a donkey's hoofs, and the fisherman came up
+leading a donkey apparently as disinclined for a nocturnal flitting as
+the doctor.
+
+"Ah, Giuseppe, it's you, is it?"
+
+"Si, Signor Dottore!"
+
+"What's this accident?"
+
+The fisherman looked grave and crossed himself.
+
+"Oh, signore, it is terrible! They say the poor signore is dead!"
+
+"Dead!" exclaimed the doctor, startled. "You said is was an accident.
+Dead you say now?"
+
+"Signore, he is dead beyond a doubt. I was going to the fishing when I
+heard dreadful cries in the water by the inlet--you know, by Salvatore's
+terreno!"
+
+"In the water?"
+
+"Si, signore. I went down quickly and I found Gaspare, the signore's--"
+
+"I know--I know!"
+
+"Gaspare in a boat with the padrone lying at the bottom, and the signora
+standing up to her middle in the sea."
+
+"Z't! z't!" exclaimed the doctor, "the signora in the sea! Is she mad?"
+
+"Signor Dottore, how do I know? I brought the boat to shore. Gaspare was
+like one crazed. Then we lifted the signore out upon the stones. Oh, he
+is dead, Signor Dottore; dead beyond a doubt. They had found him in the
+sea--"
+
+"They?"
+
+"Gaspare--under the rocks between Salvatore's terreno and the main-land.
+He had all his clothes on. He must have been there in the dark--"
+
+"Why should he go in the dark?"
+
+"How do I know, Signor Dottore?--and have fallen, and struck his head
+against the rocks. For there was a wound and--"
+
+"The body should not have been moved from where it lay till the Pretore
+had seen it. Gaspare should have left the body."
+
+"But perhaps the povero signore is not really dead, after all! Madonna!
+How--"
+
+"Come! come! we must not delay! One minute! I will get some lint and--"
+
+He disappeared into the house. Almost directly he came out again with a
+package under his arm and a long, black cigar lighted in his mouth.
+
+"Take these, Giuseppe! Carry them carefully. Now then!"
+
+He hoisted himself onto the donkey.
+
+"A-ah! A-ah!"
+
+They set off, the fisherman walking on naked feet beside the donkey.
+
+"Then we have to go down to the sea?"
+
+"No, Signor Dottore. There were others on the road, Antonio and--"
+
+"The rest of you going to the boats--I know. Well?"
+
+"And the signora would have him carried up to Monte Amato."
+
+"She could give directions?"
+
+"Si, signore. She ordered everything. When she came out of the sea she
+was all wet, the poor signora, but she was calm. I called the others.
+When they saw the signore they all cried out. They knew him. Some of them
+had been to the fishing with him. Oh, they were sorry! They all began to
+speak and to try to--"
+
+"Diavolo! They could only make things worse! If the breath of life was
+in the signore's body they would drive it out. Per Dio!"
+
+"But the signora stopped them. She told them to be silent and to carry
+the signore up to the Casa del Prete. Signore, she--the povera
+signora--she took his head in her hands. She held his head and she never
+cried, not a tear!"
+
+The man brushed his hand across his eyes.
+
+"Povera signora! Povera signora!" murmured the doctor.
+
+"And she comforted Gaspare, too!" Giuseppe added. "She put her arm round
+him and told him to be brave, and help her. She made him walk by her and
+put his hand under the padrone's shoulder. Madonna!"
+
+They turned away from the village into a narrow path that led into the
+hills.
+
+"And I came to fetch you, Signor Dottore. Perhaps the povero signore is
+not really dead. Perhaps you can save him, Signor Dottore!"
+
+"Chi lo sa?" replied the doctor.
+
+He had let his cigar go out and did not know it.
+
+"Chi lo sa?" he repeated, mechanically.
+
+Then they went on in silence--till they reached the shoulder of the
+mountain under Castel Vecchio. From here they could see across the ravine
+to the steep slope of Monte Amato. Upon it, high up, a light shone, and
+presently a second light detached itself from the first, moved a little
+way, and then was stationary.
+
+Giuseppe pointed.
+
+"Ecco, Signor Dottore! They have carried the poor signore up."
+
+The second light moved waveringly back towards the first.
+
+"They are carrying him into the house, Signor Dottore. Madonna! And all
+this to happen in the night!"
+
+The doctor nodded without speaking. He was watching the lights up there
+in that lonely place. He was not a man of strong imagination, and was
+accustomed to look on misery, the misery of the poor. But to-night he
+felt a certain solemnity descend upon him as he rode by these dark
+by-paths up into the bosom of the hills. Perhaps part of this feeling
+came from the fact that his mission had to do with strangers, with rich
+people from a distant country who had come to his island for pleasure,
+and who were now suddenly involved in tragedy in the midst of their
+amusement. But also he had a certain sense of personal sympathy. He had
+known Hermione on her former visit to Sicily and had liked her; and
+though this time he had seen scarcely anything of her he had seen enough
+to be aware that she was very happy with her young husband. Maurice, too,
+he had seen, full of the joy of youth and of bounding health. And now all
+that was put out, if Giuseppe's account were true. It was a pity, a sad
+pity.
+
+The donkey crossed the mouth of the ravine, and picked its way upward
+carefully amid the loose stones. In the ravine a little owl hooted twice.
+
+"Giuseppe!" said the doctor.
+
+"Signore?"
+
+"The signora has been away, hasn't she?"
+
+"Si signore. In Africa."
+
+"Nursing that sick stranger. And now directly she comes back here's this
+happening to her! Per Dio!"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Somebody must have looked on the povera signora with the evil-eye,
+Signor Dottore."
+
+Giuseppe crossed himself.
+
+"It seems so," the doctor replied, gravely.
+
+He was almost as superstitious as the contadini among whom he labored.
+
+"Ecco, Signor Dottore!"
+
+The doctor looked up. At the arch stood a figure holding a little lamp.
+Almost immediately, two more figures appeared behind it.
+
+"Il dottore! Ecco il dottore!"
+
+There was a murmur of voices in the dark. As the donkey came up the
+excited fishermen crowded round, all speaking at once.
+
+"He is dead, Signor Dottore. The povero signore is dead!"
+
+"Let the Signor Dottore come to him, Beppe! What do you know? Let the--"
+
+"Sure enough he is dead! Why, he must have been in the water a good hour.
+He is all swollen with the water and--"
+
+"It is his head, Signor Dottore! If it had not been for his coming
+against the rocks he would not have been hurt. Per Dio, he can swim like
+a fish, the povero signorino. I have seen him swim. Why, even Peppino--"
+
+"The signora wants us all to go away, Signor Dottore. She begs us to go
+and leave her alone with the povero signore!"
+
+"Gaspare is in such a state! You would not know him. And the povera
+signora, she is all dripping wet. She has been into the sea, and now she
+has carried the head of the povero signore all the way up the mountain.
+She would not let any one--"
+
+A succession of cries came out of the darkness, hysterical cries that
+ended in prolonged sobbing.
+
+"That is Lucrezia!" cried one of the fishermen. "Madonna! That is
+Lucrezia!"
+
+"Mamma mia! Mamma mia!"
+
+Their voices were loud in the night. The doctor pushed his way between
+the men and came onto the terrace in front of the steps that led into the
+sitting-room.
+
+Gaspare was standing there alone. His face was almost unrecognizable. It
+looked battered, puffy, and inflamed, as if he had been drinking and
+fighting. There were no tears in his eyes now, but long, violent sobs
+shook his body from time to time, and his blistered lips opened and shut
+mechanically with each sob. He stared dully at the doctor, but did not
+say a word, or move to get out of the way.
+
+"Gaspare!" said the doctor. "Where is the padrona?"
+
+The boy sobbed and sobbed, always in the same dry and terribly mechanical
+way.
+
+"Gaspare!" repeated the doctor, touching him. "Gaspare!"
+
+"E' morto!" the boy suddenly cried out, in a loud voice.
+
+And he flung himself down on the ground.
+
+The doctor felt a thrill of cold in his veins. He went up the steps into
+the little sitting-room. As he did so Hermione came to the door of the
+bedroom. Her dripping skirts clung about her. She looked quite calm.
+Without greeting the doctor she said, quietly:
+
+"You heard what Gaspare said?"
+
+"Si, signora, ma--"
+
+The doctor stopped, staring at her. He began to feel almost dazed. The
+fishermen had followed him and stood crowding together on the steps and
+staring into the room.
+
+"He is dead. I am sorry you came all this way."
+
+They stood there facing one another. From the kitchen came the sound of
+Lucrezia's cries. Hermione put her hands up to her ears.
+
+"Please--please--oh, there should be a little silence here now!" she
+said.
+
+For the first time there was a sound of something like despair in her
+voice.
+
+"Let me come in, signora!" stammered the doctor. "Let me come in and
+examine him."
+
+"He is dead."
+
+"Well, but let me. I must!"
+
+"Please come in," she said.
+
+The doctor turned round to the fishermen.
+
+"Go, one of you, and make that girl keep quiet," he said, angrily. "Take
+her away out of the house--directly! Do you hear? And the rest of you
+stay outside, and don't make a sound."
+
+The fishermen slunk a little way back into the darkness, while Giuseppe,
+walking on the toes of his bare feet, and glancing nervously at the
+furniture and the pictures upon the walls, crossed the room and
+disappeared into the kitchen. Then the doctor laid down his cigar on a
+table and went into the bedroom whither Hermione had preceded him.
+
+There was a lighted candle on the white chest of drawers. The window and
+the shutters of the room were closed against the glances of the
+fishermen. On one of the two beds--Hermione's--lay the body of a man
+dripping with water. The doctor took the candle in his hand, went to this
+bed and leaned down, then set down the candle at the bedhead and made a
+brief examination. He found at once that Gaspare had spoken the truth.
+This man had been dead for some time. Nevertheless, something--he
+scarcely knew what--kept the doctor there by the bed for some moments
+before he pronounced his verdict. Never before had he felt so great a
+reluctance to speak the simple words that would convey a great truth. He
+fingered his shirt-front uneasily, and stared at the body on the bed and
+at the wet sheets and pillows. Meanwhile, Hermione had sat down on a
+chair near the door that opened into what had been Maurice's
+dressing-room, and folded her hands in her lap. The doctor did not look
+towards her, but he felt her presence painfully. Lucrezia's cries had
+died away, and there was complete silence for a brief space of time.
+
+The body on the bed was swollen, but not very much, the face was sodden,
+the hair plastered to the head, and on the left temple there was a large
+wound, evidently, as the doctor had seen, caused by the forehead striking
+violently against a hard, resisting substance. It was not the sea alone
+which had killed this man. It was the sea and the rock in the sea. He
+had fallen, been stunned and then drowned. The doctor knew the place
+where he had been found. The explanation of the tragedy was very
+simple--very simple.
+
+While the doctor was thinking this, and fingering his shirt-front
+mechanically, and bracing himself to turn towards the quiet woman in the
+chair, he heard a loud, dry noise in the sitting-room, then in the
+bedroom. Gaspare had come in, and was standing at the foot of the bed,
+sobbing and staring at the doctor with hopeless eyes, that yet asked a
+last question, begged desperately for a lie.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+The woman in the chair whispered to him. He took no notice.
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+She got up and crossed over to the boy, and took one of his hands.
+
+"It's no use," she said. "Perhaps he is happy."
+
+Then the boy began to cry passionately. Tears poured out of his eyes
+while he held his padrona's hand. The doctor got up.
+
+"He is dead, signora," he said.
+
+"We knew it," Hermione replied.
+
+She looked at the doctor for a minute. Then she said:
+
+"Hush, Gaspare!"
+
+The doctor stood by the bed.
+
+"Scusi, signora," he said, "but--but will you take him into the next
+room?"
+
+He pointed to Gaspare, who shivered as he wept.
+
+"I must make a further examination."
+
+"Why? You see that he is dead."
+
+"Yes, but--there are certain formalities."
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Formalities!" she said. "He is dead."
+
+"Yes. But--but the authorities will have to be informed. I am very
+sorry. I should wish to leave everything undisturbed."
+
+"What do you mean? Gaspare! Gaspare!"
+
+"But--according to the law, our law, the body should never have been
+moved. It should have been left where it was found until--"
+
+"We could not leave him in the sea."
+
+She still spoke quite quietly, but the doctor felt as if he could not go
+on.
+
+"Since it is done--" he began.
+
+He pulled himself together with an effort.
+
+"There will have to be an inquiry, signora--the cause of death will have
+to be ascertained."
+
+"You see it. He was coming from the island. He fell and was drowned. It
+is very simple."
+
+"Yes, no doubt. Still, there must be an inquiry. Gaspare will have to
+explain--"
+
+He looked at the weeping boy, then at the woman who stood there holding
+the boy's hand in hers.
+
+"But that will be for to-morrow," he muttered, fingering his shirt-front
+and looking down. "That will be for to-morrow."
+
+As he went out he added:
+
+"Signora, do not remain in your wet clothes."
+
+"I--oh, thank you. They do not matter."
+
+She did not follow him into the next room. As he went down the steps to
+the terrace the sound of Gaspare's passionate weeping followed him into
+the night.
+
+When the doctor was on the donkey and was riding out through the arch,
+after a brief colloquy with the fishermen and with Giuseppe, whom he had
+told to remain at the cottage for the rest of the night, he suddenly
+remembered the cigar which he had left upon the table, and he pulled up.
+
+"What is it, Signor Dottore?" said one of the fishermen.
+
+"I've left something, but--never mind. It does not matter."
+
+He rode on again.
+
+"It does not matter," he repeated.
+
+He was thinking of the English signora standing beside the bed in her wet
+skirts and holding the hand of the weeping boy.
+
+It was the first time in his life that he had ever sacrificed a good
+cigar.
+
+He wondered why he did so now, but he did not care to return just then to
+the Casa del Prete.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+Hermione longed for quiet, for absolute silence.
+
+It seemed strange to her that she still longed for anything--strange and
+almost horrible, almost inhuman. But she did long for that, to be able to
+sit beside her dead husband and to be undisturbed, to hear no voice
+speaking, no human movement, to see no one. If it had been possible she
+would have closed the cottage against every one, even against Gaspare and
+Lucrezia. But it was not possible. Destiny did not choose that she should
+have this calm, this silence. It had seemed to her, when fear first came
+upon her, as if no one but herself had any real concern with Maurice, as
+if her love conferred upon her a monopoly. This monopoly had been one of
+joy. Now it should be one of sorrow. But now it did not exist. She was
+not weeping for Maurice. But others were. She had no one to go to. But
+others came to her, clung to her. She could not rid herself of the human
+burden.
+
+She might have been selfish, determined, she might have driven the
+mourners out. But--and that was strange, too--she found herself pitying
+them, trying to use her intellect to soothe them.
+
+Lucrezia was terrified, almost like one assailed suddenly by robbers,
+terrified and half incredulous. When her hysteria subsided she was at
+first unbelieving.
+
+"He cannot be really dead, signora!" she sobbed to Hermione. "The povero
+signorino. He was so gay! He was so--"
+
+She talked and talked, as Sicilians do when face to face with tragedy.
+
+She recalled Maurice's characteristics, his kindness, his love of
+climbing, fishing, bathing, his love of the sun--all his love of life.
+
+Hermione had to listen to the story with that body lying on her bed.
+
+Gaspare's grief was speechless, but needed comfort more. There was an
+element in it of fury which Hermione realized without rightly
+understanding. She supposed it was the fury of a boy from whom something
+is taken by one whom he cannot attack.
+
+For God is beyond our reach.
+
+She could not understand the conflict going on in the boy's heart and
+mind.
+
+He knew that this death was probably no natural death, but a murder.
+
+Neither Maddalena nor her father had been in the Casa delle Sirene when
+he knocked upon the door in the night. Salvatore had sent Maddalena to
+spend the night with relations in Marechiaro, on the pretext that he was
+going to sail to Messina on some business. And he had actually sailed
+before Gaspare's arrival on the island. But Gaspare knew that there had
+been a meeting, and he knew what the Sicilian is when he is wronged. The
+words "vengeance is mine!" are taken in Sicily by each wronged man into
+his own mouth, and Salvatore was notoriously savage and passionate.
+
+As the first shock of horror and despair passed away from Gaspare he was
+devoured, as by teeth, devoured by the desire to spring upon Salvatore
+and revenge the death of his padrone. But the padrone had laid a solemn
+injunction upon him. Solemn, indeed, it seemed to the boy now that the
+lips which had spoken were sealed forever. The padrona was never to know.
+If he obeyed his impulse, if he declared the vendetta against Salvatore,
+the padrona would know. The knife that spilled the murderer's blood would
+give the secret to the world--and to the padrona.
+
+Tremendous that night was the conflict in the boy's soul. He would not
+leave Hermione. He was like the dog that creeps to lie at the feet of his
+sorrowing mistress. But he was more than that. For he had his own sorrow
+and his own fury. And he had the battle with his own instincts.
+
+What was he going to do?
+
+As he began to think, really to think, and to realize things, he knew
+that after such a death the authorities of Marechiaro, the Pretore and
+the Cancelliere, would proceed to hold a careful examination into the
+causes of death. He would be questioned. That was certain. The
+opportunity would be given him to denounce Salvatore.
+
+And was he to keep silence? Was he to act for Salvatore, to save
+Salvatore from justice? He would not have minded doing that, he would
+have wished to do it, if afterwards he could have sprung upon Salvatore
+and buried his knife in the murderer of his padrone.
+
+But--the padrona? She was not to know. She was never to know. And she had
+been the first in his life. She had found him, a poor, ragged little boy
+working among the vines, and she had given him new clothes and had taken
+him into her home and into her confidence. She had trusted him. She had
+remembered him in England. She had written to him from far away, telling
+him to prepare everything for her and the padrone when they were coming.
+
+He began to sob violently again, thinking of it all, of how he had
+ordered the donkeys to fetch the luggage from the station, of how--
+
+"Hush, Gaspare!"
+
+Hermione again put her hand on his. She was sitting near the bed on which
+the body was lying between dry sheets. For she had changed them with
+Gaspare's assistance. Maurice still wore the clothes which had been on
+him in the sea. Giuseppe, the fisherman, had explained to Hermione that
+she must not interfere with the body till it had been visited by the
+authorities, and she had obeyed him. But she had changed the sheets. She
+scarcely knew why. Now the clothes had almost dried on the body, and she
+did not see any more the stains of water. One sheet was drawn up over the
+body, to the chin. The matted dark hair was visible against the pillow,
+and had made her think several times vaguely of that day after the
+fishing when she had watched Maurice taking his siesta. She had longed
+for him to wake then, for she had known that she was going to Africa,
+that they had only a few hours together before she started. It had seemed
+almost terrible to her, his sleeping through any of those hours. And now
+he was sleeping forever. She was sitting there waiting for nothing, but
+she could not realize that yet. She felt as if she must be waiting for
+something, that something must presently occur, a movement in the bed,
+a--she scarcely knew what.
+
+Presently the clock Gaspare had brought from the fair chimed, then played
+the "Tre Colori." Lucrezia had set it to play that evening when she was
+waiting for the padrone to return from the sea.
+
+When he heard the tinkling tune Gaspare lifted his head and listened till
+it was over. It recalled to him all the glories of the fair. He saw his
+padrone before him. He remembered how he had decorated Maurice with
+flowers, and he felt as if his heart would break.
+
+"The povero signorino! the povero signorino!" he cried, in a choked
+voice. "And I put roses above his ears! Si, signora, I did! I said he
+should be a real Siciliano!"
+
+He began to rock himself to and fro. His whole body shook, and his face
+had a frantic expression that suggested violence.
+
+"I put roses above his ears!" he repeated. "That day he was a real
+Siciliano!"
+
+"Gaspare--Gaspare--hush! Don't! Don't!"
+
+She held his hand and went on speaking softly.
+
+"We must be quiet in here. We must remember to be quiet. It isn't our
+fault, Gaspare. We did all we could to make him happy. We ought to be
+glad of that. You did everything you could, and he loved you for it. He
+was happy with us. I think he was. I think he was happy till the very
+end. And that is something to be glad of. Don't you think he was very
+happy here?"
+
+"Si, signora!" the boy whispered, with twitching lips.
+
+"I'm glad I came back in time," Hermione said, looking at the dark hair
+on the pillow. "It might have happened before, while I was away. I'm glad
+we had one more day together."
+
+Suddenly, as she said that, something in the mere sound of the words
+seemed to reveal more clearly to her heart what had befallen her, and for
+the first time she began to cry and to remember. She remembered all
+Maurice's tenderness for her, all his little acts of kindness. They
+seemed to pass rapidly in procession through her mind on their way to her
+heart. Not one surely was absent. How kind to her he had always been! And
+he could never be kind to her again. And she could never be kind to
+him--never again.
+
+Her tears went on falling quietly. She did not sob like Gaspare. But she
+felt that now she had begun to cry she would never be able to stop again;
+that she would go on crying till she, too, died.
+
+Gaspare looked up at her.
+
+"Signora!" he said. "Signora!"
+
+Suddenly he got up, as if to go out of the room, out of the house. The
+sight of his padrona's tears had driven him nearly mad with the desire to
+wreak vengeance upon Salvatore. For a moment his body seemed to get
+beyond his control. His eyes saw blood, and his hand darted down to his
+belt, and caught at the knife that was there, and drew it out. When
+Hermione saw the knife she thought the boy was going to kill himself
+with it. She sprang up, went swiftly to Gaspare, and put her hand on it
+over his hand.
+
+"Gaspare, what are you doing?" she said.
+
+For a moment his face was horrible in its savagery. He opened his mouth,
+still keeping his grasp on the knife, which she tried to wrest from him.
+
+"Lasci andare! Lasci andare!" he said, beginning to struggle with her.
+
+"No, Gaspare."
+
+"Allora--"
+
+He paused with his mouth open.
+
+At that moment he was on the very verge of a revelation of the truth. He
+was on the point of telling Hermione that he was sure that the padrone
+had been murdered, and that he meant to avenge the murder. Hermione
+believed that for the moment he was mad, and was determined to destroy
+himself in her presence. It was useless to pit her strength against his.
+In a physical struggle she must be overcome. Her only chance was to
+subdue him by other means.
+
+"Gaspare," she said, quickly, breathlessly, pointing to the bed. "Don't
+you think the padrone would have wished you to take care of me now? He
+trusted you. I think he would. I think he would rather you were with me
+than any one else in the whole world. You must take care of me. You must
+take care of me. You must never leave me!"
+
+The boy looked at her. His face changed, grew softer.
+
+"I've got nobody now," she added. "Nobody but you."
+
+The knife fell on the floor.
+
+In that moment Gaspare's resolve was taken. The battle within him was
+over. He must protect the padrona. The padrone would have wished it. Then
+he must let Salvatore go.
+
+He bent down and kissed Hermione's hand.
+
+"Lei non piange!" he muttered. "Forse Dio la aiutera."
+
+In the morning, early, Hermione left the body for the first time, went
+into the dressing-room, changed her clothes, then came back and said to
+Gaspare:
+
+"I am going a little way up the mountain, Gaspare. I shall not be long.
+No, don't come with me. Stay with him. Are you dreadfully tired?"
+
+"No, signora."
+
+"We shall be able to rest presently," she said.
+
+She was thinking of the time when they would take Maurice from her. She
+left Gaspare sitting near the bed, and went out onto the terrace.
+Lucrezia and Gaspare, both thoroughly tired out, were sleeping soundly.
+She was thankful for that. Soon, she knew, she would have to be with
+people, to talk, to make arrangements. But now she had a short spell of
+solitude.
+
+She went slowly up the mountain-side till she was near the top. Then she
+sat down on a rock and looked out towards the sea.
+
+The world was not awake yet, although the sun was coming. Etna was like a
+great phantom, the waters at its foot were pale in their tranquillity.
+The air was fresh, but there was no wind to rustle the leaves of the
+oak-trees, upon whose crested heads Hermione gazed down with quiet,
+tearless eyes.
+
+She had a strange feeling of being out of the world, as if she had left
+it, but still had the power to see it. She wondered if Maurice felt like
+that.
+
+He had said it would be good to lie beneath those oak-trees in sight of
+Etna and the sea. How she wished that she could lay his body there,
+alone, away from all other dead. But that was impossible, she supposed.
+She remembered the doctor's words. What were they going to do? She did
+not know anything about Italian procedure in such an event. Would they
+take him away? She had no intention of trying to resist anything, of
+offering any opposition. It would be useless, and besides he had gone
+away. Already he was far off. She did not feel, as many women do, that so
+long as they are with the body of their dead they are also with the soul.
+She would like to keep the dear body, to have it always near to her, to
+live close to the spot where it was committed to the earth. But Maurice
+was gone. Her Mercury had winged his way from her, obedient to a summons
+that she had not heard. Always she had thought of him as swift, and
+swiftly, without warning, he had left her. He had died young. Was that
+wonderful? She thought not. No; age could have nothing to say to him,
+could hold no commerce with him. He had been born to be young and never
+to be anything else. It seemed to her now strange that she had not felt
+this, foreseen that it must be so. And yet, only yesterday, she had
+imagined a far future, and their child laying them in the ground of
+Sicily, side by side, and murmuring "Buon riposo" above their mutual
+sleep.
+
+Their child! A life had been taken from her. Soon a life would be given
+to her. Was that what is called compensation? Perhaps so. Many strange
+thoughts, come she could not tell why, were passing through her mind as
+she sat upon this height in the dawn. The thought of compensation
+recalled to her the Book of Job. Everything was taken from Job; not only
+his flocks and his herds, but his sons and his daughters. And then at the
+last he was compensated. He was given new flocks and herds and new sons
+and daughters. And it was supposed to be well with Job. If it was well
+with Job, then Job had been a man without a heart.
+
+Never could she be compensated for this loss, which she was trying to
+realize, but which she would not be able to realize until the days went
+by, and the nights, the days and the nights of the ordinary life, when
+tragedy was supposed to be over and done with, and people would say, and
+no doubt sincerely believe, that she was "getting accustomed" to her
+loss.
+
+Thinking of Job led her on to think of God's dealings with His creatures.
+
+Hermione was a woman who clung to no special religion, but she had
+always, all her life, had a very strong personal consciousness of a
+directing Power in the world, had always had an innate conviction that
+this directing Power followed with deep interest the life of each
+individual in the scheme of His creation. She had always felt, she felt
+now, that God knew everything about her and her life, was aware of all
+her feelings, was constantly intent upon her.
+
+He was intent. But was He kindly or was He cruelly intent?
+
+Surely He had been dreadfully cruel to her!
+
+Only yesterday she had been wondering what bereaved women felt about God.
+Now she was one of these women.
+
+"Was Maurice dead?" she thought--"was he already dead when I was praying
+before the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"
+
+She longed to know. Yet she scarcely knew why she longed. It was like a
+strange, almost unnatural curiosity which she could not at first explain
+to herself. But presently her mind grew clearer and she connected this
+question with that other question--of God and what He really was, what He
+really felt towards His creatures, towards her.
+
+Had God allowed her to pray like that, with all her heart and soul, and
+then immediately afterwards deliberately delivered her over to the fate
+of desolate women, or had Maurice been already dead? If that were so, and
+it must surely have been so, for when she prayed it was already night,
+she had been led to pray for herself ignorantly, and God had taken away
+her joy before He had heard her prayer. If He had heard it first He
+surely could not have dealt so cruelly with her--so cruelly! No human
+being could have, she thought, even the most hard-hearted.
+
+But perhaps God was not all-powerful.
+
+She remembered that once in London she had asked a clever and good
+clergyman if, looking around upon the state of things in the world, he
+was able to believe without difficulty that the world was governed by an
+all-wise, all-powerful, and all-merciful God. And his reply to her had
+been, "I sometimes wonder whether God is all-powerful--yet." She had not
+pursued the subject, but she had not forgotten this answer; and she
+thought of it now.
+
+Was there a conflict in the regions beyond the world which was the only
+one she knew? Had an enemy done this thing, an enemy not only of hers,
+but of God's, an enemy who had power over God?
+
+That thought was almost more terrible than the thought that God had been
+cruel to her.
+
+She sat for a long time wondering, thinking, but not praying. She did not
+feel as if she could ever pray any more. The world was lighted up by the
+sun. The sea began to gleam, the coast-line to grow more distinct, the
+outlines of the mountains and of the Saracenic Castle on the height
+opposite to her more hard and more barbaric against the deepening blue.
+She saw smoke coming from the mouth of Etna, sideways, as if blown
+towards the sea. A shepherd boy piped somewhere below her. And still the
+tune was the tarantella. She listened to it--the tarantella. So short a
+time ago Maurice had danced with the boys upon the terrace! How can such
+life be so easily extinguished? How can such joy be not merely clouded
+but utterly destroyed? A moment, and from the body everything is
+expelled; light from the eyes, speech from the lips, movement from the
+limbs, joy, passion from the heart. How can such a thing be?
+
+The little shepherd boy played on and on. He was nearer now. He was
+ascending the slope of the mountain, coming up towards heaven with his
+little happy tune. She heard him presently among the oak-trees
+immediately below her, passing almost at her feet.
+
+To Hermione the thin sound of the reed-flute always had suggested Arcady.
+Even now it suggested Arcady--the Arcady of the imagination: wide soft
+airs, blue skies and seas, eternal sunshine and delicious shade, and
+happiness where is a sweet noise of waters and of birds, a sweet and deep
+breathing of kind and bounteous nature.
+
+And that little boy with the flute would die. His foot might slip now as
+he came upward, and no more could he play souls into Arcady!
+
+The tune wound away to her left, like a gay and careless living thing
+that was travelling ever upward, then once more came towards her. But now
+it was above her. She turned her head and she saw the little player
+against the blue. He was on a rock, and for a moment he stood still. On
+his head was a long woollen cap, hanging over at one side. It made
+Hermione think of the woollen cap she had seen come out of the darkness
+of the ravine as she waited with Gaspare for the padrone. Against the
+blue, standing on the gray and sunlit rock, with the flute at his lips,
+and his tiny, deep-brown fingers moving swiftly, he looked at one with
+the mountain and yet almost unearthly, almost as if the blue had given
+birth to him for a moment, and in a moment would draw him back again into
+the womb of its wonder. His goats were all around him, treading
+delicately among the rocks. As Hermione watched he turned and went away
+into the blue, and the tarantella went away into the blue with him.
+
+Her Sicilian and his tarantella, the tarantella of his joy in
+Sicily--they had gone away into the blue.
+
+She looked at it, deep, quivering, passionate, intense; thousands and
+thousands of miles of blue! And she listened as she looked; listened for
+some far-off tarantella, for some echo of a fainting tarantella, that
+might be a message to her, a message left on the sweet air of the
+enchanted island, telling her where the winged feet of her beloved one
+mounted towards the sun.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Giuseppe came to fetch Hermione from the mountain. He had a note in his
+hand and also a message to give. The authorities were already at the
+cottage; the Pretore of Marechiaro with his Cancelliere, Dr. Marini and
+the Maresciallo of the Carabinieri.
+
+"They have come already?" Hermione said. "So soon?"
+
+She took the note. It was from Artois.
+
+"There is a boy waiting, signora," said Giuseppe. "Gaspare is with the
+Signor Pretore."
+
+She opened Emile's note.
+
+     "I cannot write anything except this--do you wish me to come?--E."
+
+"Do I wish him to come?" she thought.
+
+She repeated the words mentally several times, while the fisherman stood
+by her, staring at her with sympathy. Then she went down to the cottage.
+
+Dr. Marini met her on the terrace. He looked embarrassed. He was
+expecting a terrible scene.
+
+"Signora," he said, "I am very sorry, but--but I am obliged to perform my
+duty."
+
+"Yes," she said. "Of course. What is it?"
+
+"As there is a hospital in Marechiaro--"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Yes?" she said.
+
+"The autopsy of the body must take place there. Otherwise I could have--"
+
+"You have come to take him away," she said. "I understand. Very well."
+
+But they could not take him away, these people. For he was gone; he had
+gone away into the blue.
+
+The doctor looked relieved, though surprised, at her apparent
+nonchalance.
+
+"I am very sorry, signora," he said--"very sorry."
+
+"Must I see the Pretore?" she said.
+
+"I am afraid so, signora. They will want to ask you a few questions. The
+body ought not to have been moved from the place where--"
+
+"We could not leave him in the sea," she said, as she had said in the
+night.
+
+"No, no. You will only just have to say--"
+
+"I will tell them what I know. He went down to bathe."
+
+"Yes. But the Pretore will want to know why he went to Salvatore's
+terreno."
+
+"I suppose he bathed from there. He knew the people in the Casa delle
+Sirene, I believe."
+
+She spoke indifferently. It seemed to her so utterly useless, this
+inquiry by strangers into the cause of her sorrow.
+
+"I must just write something," she added.
+
+She went up the steps into the sitting-room. Gaspare was there with three
+men--the Pretore, the Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. As she came in the
+strangers turned and saluted her with grave politeness, all looking
+earnestly at her with their dark eyes. But Gaspare did not look at her.
+He had the ugly expression on his face that Hermione had noticed the day
+before.
+
+"Will you please allow me to write a line to a friend?" Hermione said.
+"Then I shall be ready to answer your questions."
+
+"Certainly, signora," said the Pretore; "we are very sorry to disturb
+you, but it is our duty."
+
+He had gray hair and a dark mustache, and his black eyes looked as if
+they had been varnished.
+
+Hermione went to the writing-table, while the men stood in silence
+filling up the little room.
+
+"What shall I say?" she thought.
+
+She heard the boots of the Cancelliere creak as he shifted his feet upon
+the floor. The Maresciallo cleared his throat. There was a moment of
+hesitation. Then he went to the steps and spat upon the terrace.
+
+"Don't come yet," she wrote, slowly.
+
+Then she turned round.
+
+"How long will your inquiry take, do you think, signore?" she asked of
+the Pretore. "When will--when can the funeral take place?"
+
+"Signora, I trust to-morrow. I hope--I do not suppose there will be any
+reason to suspect, after what Dr. Marini has told us and we have seen,
+that the death was anything but an accident--an accident which we all
+most deeply grieve for."
+
+"It was an accident."
+
+She stood by the table with the pen in her hand.
+
+"I suppose--I suppose he must be buried in the Campo Santo?" she said.
+
+"Do you wish to convey the body to England, signora?"
+
+"Oh no. He loved Sicily. He wished to stay always here, I think,
+although--"
+
+She broke off.
+
+"I could never take him away from Sicily. But there is a place
+here--under the oak-trees. He was very fond of it."
+
+Gaspare began to sob, then controlled himself with a desperate effort,
+turned round and stood with his face to the wall.
+
+"I suppose, if I could buy a piece of land there, it could not be
+permitted--?"
+
+She looked at the Pretore.
+
+"I am very sorry, signora, such a thing could not possibly be allowed. If
+the body is buried here it must be in the Campo Santo."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+She turned to the table and wrote after "Don't come yet":
+
+     "They are taking him away now to the hospital in the village. I
+     shall come down. I think the funeral will be to-morrow. They tell
+     me he must be buried in the Campo Santo. I should have liked him to
+     lie here under the oak-trees.
+                                                   HERMIONE."
+
+When Artois read this note tears came into his eyes.
+
+No event in his life had shocked him so much as the death of Delarey.
+
+It had shocked both his intellect and his heart. And yet his intellect
+could hardly accept it as a fact. When, early that morning, one of the
+servants of the Hotel Regina Margherita had rushed into his room to tell
+him, he had refused to believe it. But then he had seen the fishermen,
+and finally Dr. Marini. And he had been obliged to believe. His natural
+impulse was to go to his friend in her trouble as she had come to him in
+his. But he checked it. His agony had been physical. Hers was of the
+affections, and how far greater than his had ever been! He could not bear
+to think of it. A great and generous indignation seized him, an
+indignation against the catastrophes of life. That this should be
+Hermione's reward for her noble unselfishness roused in him something
+that was like fury; and then there followed a more torturing fury against
+himself.
+
+He had deprived her of days and weeks of happiness. Such a short span of
+joy had been allotted to her, and he had not allowed her to have even
+that. He had called her away. He dared not trust himself to write any
+word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do so would be a hideous
+irony, and he sent the line in pencil which she had received. And then he
+walked up and down in his little sitting-room, raging against himself,
+hating himself.
+
+In his now bitterly acute consideration of his friendship with Hermione
+he realized that he had always been selfish, always the egoist claiming
+rather than the generous donor. He had taken his burdens to her, not
+weakly, for he was not a weak man, but with a desire to be eased of some
+of their weight. He had always been calling upon her for sympathy, and
+she had always been lavishly responding, scattering upon him the wealth
+of her great heart.
+
+And now he had deprived her of nearly all the golden time that had been
+stored up for her by the decree of the Gods, of God, of Fate,
+of--whatever it was that ruled, that gave and that deprived.
+
+A bitterness of shame gripped him. He felt like a criminal. He said to
+himself that the selfish man is a criminal.
+
+"She will hate me," he said to himself. "She must. She can't help it."
+
+Again the egoist was awake and speaking within him. He realized that
+immediately and felt almost a fear of this persistence of character. What
+is the use of cleverness, of clear sight into others, even of genius,
+when the self of a man declines to change, declines to be what is not
+despicable?
+
+"Mon Dieu!" he thought, passionately. "And even now I must be thinking of
+my cursed self!"
+
+He was beset by an intensity of desire to do something for Hermione. For
+once in his life his heart, the heart she believed in and he was inclined
+to doubt or to despise, drove him as it might have driven a boy, even
+such a one as Maurice. It seemed to him that unless he could do something
+to make atonement he could never be with Hermione again, could never bear
+to be with her again. But what could he do?
+
+"At least," he thought, "I may be able to spare her something to-day. I
+may be able to arrange with these people about the funeral, about all the
+practical things that are so frightful a burden to the living who have
+loved the dead, in the last moments before the dead are given to the
+custody of the earth."
+
+And then he thought of the inquiry, of the autopsy. Could he not help
+her, spare her perhaps, in connection with them?
+
+Despite his weakness of body he felt feverishly active, feverishly
+desirous to be of practical use. If he could do something he would think
+less, too; and there were thoughts which seemed furtively trying to press
+themselves forward in the chambers of his mind, but which, as yet, he
+was, also furtively, pushing back, striving to keep in the dark place
+from which they desired to emerge.
+
+Artois knew Sicily well, and he knew that such a death as this would
+demand an inquiry, might raise suspicions in the minds of the authorities
+of Marechiaro. And in his own mind?
+
+He was a mentally courageous man, but he longed now to leave Marechiaro,
+to leave Sicily at once, carrying Hermione with him. A great dread was
+not actually with him, but was very near to him.
+
+Presently something, he did not know what, drew him to the window of his
+bedroom which looked out towards the main street of the village. As he
+came to it he heard a dull murmur of voices, and saw the Sicilians
+crowding to their doors and windows, and coming out upon their balconies.
+
+The body of Maurice was being borne to the hospital which was at the far
+end of the town. As soon as he realized that, Artois closed his window.
+He could not look with the curious on that procession. He went back into
+his sitting-room, which faced the sea. But he felt the procession going
+past, and was enveloped in the black wonder of death.
+
+That he should be alive and Delarey dead! How extraordinary that was! For
+he had been close to death, so close that it would have seemed quite
+natural to him to die. Had not Hermione come to him, he thought, he
+would almost, at the crucial stage in his illness, have preferred to die.
+It would have been a far easier, far simpler act than the return to
+health and his former powers. And now he stood here alive, looking at the
+sea, and Delarey's dead body was being carried to the hospital.
+
+Was the fact that he was alive the cause of the fact that Delarey was
+dead? Abruptly one of those furtive thoughts had leaped forward out of
+its dark place and challenged him boldly, even with a horrible brutality.
+Too late now to try to force it back. It must be faced, be dealt with.
+
+Again, and much more strongly than on the previous day, Artois felt that
+in Hermione's absence the Sicilian life of the dead man had not run
+smoothly, that there had been some episode of which she knew nothing,
+that he, Artois, had been right in his suspicions at the cottage. Delarey
+had been in fear of something, had been on the watch. When he had sat by
+the wall he had been tortured by some tremendous anxiety.
+
+He had gone down to the sea to bathe. That was natural enough. And he had
+been found dead under a precipice of rock in the sea. The place was a
+dangerous one, they said. A man might easily fall from the rock in the
+night. Yes; but why should he be there?
+
+That thought now recurred again and again to the mind of Artois. Why had
+Delarey been at the place where he had met his death? The authorities of
+Marechiaro were going to inquire into that, were probably down at the sea
+now. Suppose there had been some tragic episode? Suppose they should find
+out what it was?
+
+He saw Hermione in the midst of her grief the central figure of some
+dreadful scandal, and his heart sickened.
+
+But then he told himself that perhaps he was being led by his
+imagination. He had thought that possible yesterday. To-day, after what
+had occurred, he thought it less likely. This sudden death seemed to tell
+him that his mind had been walking in the right track. Left alone in
+Sicily, Delarey might have run wild. He might have gone too far. This
+death might be a vengeance.
+
+Artois was deeply interested in all human happenings, but he was not a
+vulgarly curious man. He was not curious now, he was only afraid for
+Hermione. He longed to protect her from any further grief. If there were
+a dreadful truth to know, and if, by knowing it, he could guard her more
+efficiently, he wished to know it. But his instinct was to get her away
+from Sicily at once, directly the funeral was over and the necessary
+arrangements could be made. For himself, he would rather go in ignorance.
+He did not wish to add to the heavy burden of his remorse.
+
+There came at this moment a knock at his door.
+
+"Avanti!" he said.
+
+The waiter of the hotel came in.
+
+"Signore," he said. "The poor signora is here."
+
+"In the hotel?"
+
+"Si, signore. They have taken the body of the signore to the hospital.
+Everybody was in the street to see it pass. And now the poor signora has
+come here. She has taken the rooms above you on the little terrace."
+
+"The signora is going to stay here?"
+
+"Si, signore. They say, if the Signor Pretore allows after the inquiry is
+over, the funeral will be to-morrow."
+
+Artois looked at the man closely. He was a young fellow, handsome and
+gentler-looking than are most Sicilians. Artois wondered what the people
+of Marechiaro were saying. He knew how they must be gossiping on such an
+occasion. And then it was summer, when they have little or nothing to do,
+no forestieri to divide their attentions and to call their ever-ready
+suspicions in various directions. The minds of the whole community must
+undoubtedly be fixed upon this tragic episode and its cause.
+
+"If the Pretore allows?" Artois said. "But surely there can be no
+difficulty? The poor signore fell from the rock and was drowned."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The man stood there. Evidently he was anxious to talk.
+
+"The Signor Pretore has gone down to the place now, signore, with the
+Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. They have taken Gaspare with them."
+
+"Gaspare!"
+
+Artois thought of this boy, Maurice's companion during Hermione's
+absence.
+
+"Si, signore. Gaspare has to show them the exact place where he found the
+poor signore."
+
+"I suppose the inquiry will soon be over?"
+
+"Chi lo sa?"
+
+"Well, but what is there to do? Whom can they inquire of? It was a lonely
+place, wasn't it? No one was there."
+
+"Chi lo sa?"
+
+"If there had been any one, surely the signore would have been rescued at
+once? Did not every one here love the signore? He was like one of you,
+wasn't he, one of the Sicilians?"
+
+"Si, signore. Maddalena has been crying about the signore."
+
+"Maddalena?"
+
+"Si, signore, the daughter of Salvatore, the fisherman, who lives at the
+Casa delle Sirene."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+Artois paused; then he said:
+
+"Were she and her--Salvatore is her father, you say?"
+
+"Her father, signore."
+
+"Were they at the Casa delle Sirene yesterday?"
+
+Artois spoke quietly, almost carelessly, as if merely to say something,
+but without special intention.
+
+"Maddalena was here in the town with her relations. And they say
+Salvatore is at Messina. This morning Maddalena went home. She was
+crying. Every one saw her crying for the signore."
+
+"That is very natural if she knew him."
+
+"Oh yes, signore, she knew him. Why, they were all at the fair of San
+Felice together only the day before."
+
+"Then, of course, she would cry."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+The man put his hand on the door.
+
+"If the signora wishes to see me at any time I am here," said Artois.
+"But, of course, I shall not disturb her. But if I can do anything to
+help her--about the funeral, for instance--"
+
+"The signora is giving all the directions now. The poor signore is to be
+buried in the high part of the Campo Santo by the wall. Those who are not
+Catholics are buried there, and the poor signore was not a Catholic. What
+a pity!"
+
+"Thank you, Ferdinando."
+
+The man went out slowly, as if he were reluctant to stop the
+conversation.
+
+So the villagers were beginning to gossip already! Ferdinando had not
+said so, but Artois knew his Sicily well enough to read the silences that
+had made significant his words. Maddalena had been crying for the
+signore. Everybody had seen Maddalena crying for the signore. That was
+enough. By this time the village would be in a ferment, every woman at
+her door talking it over with her next-door neighbor, every man in the
+Piazza, or in one of the wine-shops.
+
+Maddalena--a Sicilian girl--weeping, and Delarey's body found among the
+rocks at night in a lonely place close to her cottage. Artois divined
+something of the truth and hated himself the more. The blood, the
+Sicilian blood in Delarey, had called to him in the sunshine when he was
+left alone, and he had, no doubt, obeyed the call. How far had he gone?
+How strongly had he been governed? Probably Artois would never know. Long
+ago he had prophesied, vaguely perhaps, still he had prophesied. And now
+had he not engineered perhaps the fulfilment of his own prophecy?
+
+But at all costs Hermione must be spared any knowledge of that
+fulfilment.
+
+He longed to go to her and to guard her door against the Sicilians. But
+surely in such a moment they would not speak to her of any suspicions, of
+any certainties, even if they had them. She would surely be the last
+person to hear anything, unless--he thought of the "authorities"--of the
+Pretore, the Cancelliere, the Maresciallo, and suddenly it occurred to
+him to ride down to the sea. If the inquiry had yielded any terrible
+result he might do something to protect Hermione. If not, he might be
+able to prepare her. She must not receive any coarse shock from these
+strangers in the midst of her agony.
+
+He got his hat, opened his door, and went quietly down-stairs. He did not
+wish to see Hermione before he went. Perhaps he would return with his
+mind relieved of its heaviest burden, and then at least he could meet her
+eyes without a furtive guilt in his.
+
+At the foot of the stairs he met Ferdinando.
+
+"Can you get me a donkey, Ferdinando?" he said.
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"I don't want a boy. Just get me a donkey, and I shall go for a short
+ride. You say the signora has not asked for me?"
+
+"No, signore."
+
+"If she does, explain to her that I have gone out, as I did not like to
+disturb her."
+
+Hermione might think him heartless to go out riding at such a time. He
+would risk that. He would risk anything to spare her the last, the
+nameless agony that would be hers if what he suspected were true, and she
+were to learn of it, to know that all these people round her knew it.
+
+That Hermione should be outraged, that the sacredness of her despair
+should be profaned, and the holiness of her memories utterly
+polluted--Artois felt he would give his life willingly to prevent that.
+
+When the donkey came he set off at once. He had drawn his broad-brimmed
+hat down low over his pale face, and he looked neither to right nor left,
+as he was carried down the long and narrow street, followed by the
+searching glances of the inhabitants, who, as he had surmised, were all
+out, engaged in eager conversation, and anxiously waiting for the return
+of the Pretore and his assistants, and the announcement of the result of
+the autopsy. His appearance gave them a fresh topic to discuss. They fell
+upon it like starveling dogs on a piece of offal found in the gutter.
+
+Once out of the village, Artois felt a little safer, a little easier; but
+he longed to be in the train with Hermione, carrying her far from the
+chance of that most cruel fate in life--the fate of disillusion, of the
+loss of holy belief in the truth of one beloved.
+
+When presently he reached the high-road by Isola Bella he encountered the
+fisherman, Giuseppe, who had spent the night at the Casa del Prete.
+
+"Are you going to see the place where the poor signore was found,
+signore?" asked the man.
+
+"Si," said Artois. "I was his friend. I wish to see the Pretore, to hear
+how it happened. Can I? Are they there, he and the others?"
+
+"They are in the Casa delle Sirene, signore. They are waiting to see if
+Salvatore comes back this morning from Messina."
+
+"And his daughter? Is she there?"
+
+"Si, signore. But she knows nothing. She was in the village. She can
+only cry. She is crying for the poor signore."
+
+Again that statement. It was becoming a refrain in the ears of Artois.
+
+"Gaspare is angry with her," added the fisherman. "I believe he would
+like to kill her."
+
+"It makes him sad to see her crying, perhaps," said Artois. "Gaspare
+loved the signore."
+
+He saluted the fisherman and rode on. But the man followed and kept by
+his side.
+
+"I will take you across in a boat, signore," he said.
+
+"Grazie."
+
+Artois struck the donkey and made it trot on in the dust.
+
+Giuseppe rowed him across the inlet and to the far side of the Sirens'
+Isle, from which the little path wound upward to the cottage. Here, among
+the rocks, a boat was moored.
+
+"Ecco, signore!" cried Giuseppe. "Salvatore has come back from Messina!
+Here is his boat!"
+
+Artois felt a pang of anxiety, of regret. He wished he had been there
+before the fisherman had returned. As he got out of the boat he said:
+
+"Did Salvatore know the signore well?"
+
+"Si, signore. The poor signore used to go out fishing with Salvatore.
+They say in the village that he gave Salvatore much money."
+
+"The signore was generous to every one."
+
+"Si, signore. But he did not give donkeys to every one."
+
+"Donkeys? What do you mean, Giuseppe?"
+
+"He gave Salvatore a donkey, a fine donkey. He bought it at the fair of
+San Felice."
+
+Artois said no more. Slowly, for he was still very weak, and the heat was
+becoming fierce as the morning wore on, he walked up the steep path and
+came to the plateau before the Casa delle Sirene.
+
+A group of people stood there: the Pretore, the Cancelliere, the
+Maresciallo, Gaspare, and Salvatore. They seemed to be in strong
+conversation, but directly Artois appeared there was a silence, and they
+all turned and stared at him as if in wonder. Then Gaspare came forward
+and took off his hat.
+
+The boy looked haggard with grief, and angry and obstinate, desperately
+obstinate.
+
+"Signore," he said. "You know my padrone! Tell them--"
+
+But the Pretore interrupted him with an air of importance.
+
+"It is my duty to make an inquiry," he said. "Who is this signore?"
+
+Artois explained that he was an intimate friend of the signora and had
+known her husband before his marriage.
+
+"I have come to hear if you are satisfied, as no doubt you are, Signor
+Pretore," he said, "that this terrible death was caused by an accident.
+The poor signora naturally wishes that this necessary business should be
+finished as soon as possible. It is unavoidable, I know, but it can only
+add to her unhappiness. I am sure, signore, that you will do your best to
+conclude the inquiry without delay. Forgive me for saying this. But I
+know Sicily, and know that I can always rely on the chivalry of Sicilian
+gentlemen where an unhappy lady is concerned."
+
+He spoke intentionally with a certain pomp, and held his hat in his hand
+while he was speaking.
+
+The Pretore looked pleased and flattered.
+
+"Certainly, Signor Barone," he said. "Certainly. We all grieve for the
+poor signora."
+
+"You will allow me to stay?" said Artois.
+
+"I see no objection," said the Pretore.
+
+He glanced at the Cancelliere, a small, pale man, with restless eyes and
+a pointed chin that looked like a weapon.
+
+"Niente, niente!" said the Cancelliere, obsequiously.
+
+He was reading Artois with intense sharpness. The Maresciallo, a broad,
+heavily built man, with an enormous mustache, uttered a deep "Buon
+giorno, Signor Barone," and stood calmly staring. He looked like a
+magnificent bull, with his short, strong brown neck, and low-growing hair
+that seemed to have been freshly crimped. Gaspare stood close to Artois,
+as if he felt that they were allies and must keep together. Salvatore was
+a few paces off.
+
+Artois glanced at him now with a carefully concealed curiosity. Instantly
+the fisherman said:
+
+"Povero signorino! Povero signorino! Mamma mia! and only two days ago we
+were all at the fair together! And he was so generous, Signor Barone." He
+moved a little nearer, but Artois saw him glance swiftly at Gaspare, like
+a man fearful of violence and ready to repel it. "He paid for everything.
+We could all keep our soldi in our pockets. And he gave Maddalena a
+beautiful blue dress, and he gave me a donkey. Dio mio! We have lost a
+benefactor. If the poor signorino had lived he would have given me a new
+boat. He had promised me a boat. For he would come fishing with me nearly
+every day. He was like a compare--"
+
+Salvatore stopped abruptly. His eyes were again on Gaspare.
+
+"And you say," began the Pretore, with a certain heavy pomposity, "that
+you did not see the signore at all yesterday?"
+
+"No, signore. I suppose he came down after I had started for Messina."
+
+"What did you go to Messina for?"
+
+"Signore, I went to see my nephew, Guido, who is in the hospital. He
+has--"
+
+"Non fa niente! non fa niente!" interrupted the Cancelliere.
+
+"Non fa niente! What time did you start?" said the Pretore.
+
+The Maresciallo cleared his throat with great elaboration, and spat with
+power twice.
+
+"Signor Pretore, I do not know. I did not look at the clock. But it was
+before sunset--it was well before sunset."
+
+"And the signore only came down from the Casa del Prete very late,"
+interposed Artois, quietly. "I was there and kept him. It was quite
+evening before he started."
+
+An expression of surprise went over Salvatore's face and vanished. He had
+realized that for some reason this stranger was his ally.
+
+"Had you any reason to suppose the signore was coming to fish with you
+yesterday?" asked the Pretore of Salvatore.
+
+"No, signore. I thought as the signora was back the poor signore would
+stay with her at the house."
+
+"Naturally, naturally!" said the Cancelliere.
+
+"Naturally! It seems the signore had several times passed across the
+rocks, from which he appears to have fallen, without any difficulty,"
+remarked the Pretore.
+
+"Si, signore," said Gaspare.
+
+He looked at Salvatore, seemed to make a great effort, then added:
+
+"But never when it was dark, signore. And I was always with him. He used
+to take my hand."
+
+His chest began to heave.
+
+"Corragio, Gaspare!" said Artois to him, in a low voice.
+
+His strong intuition enabled him to understand something of the conflict
+that was raging in the boy. He had seen his glances at Salvatore, and
+felt that he was longing to fly at the fisherman, that he only restrained
+himself with agony from some ferocious violence.
+
+The Pretore remained silent for a moment. It was evident that he was at
+a loss. He wished to appear acute, but the inquiry yielded nothing for
+the exercise of his talents.
+
+At last he said:
+
+"Did any one see you going to Messina? Is there any corroboration of your
+statement that you started before the signore came down here?"
+
+"Do you think I am not speaking the truth, Signor Pretore?" said
+Salvatore, proudly. "Why should I lie? The poor signore was my
+benefactor. If I had known he was coming I should have been here to
+receive him. Why, he has eaten in my house! He has slept in my house. I
+tell you we were as brothers."
+
+"Si, si," said the Cancelliere.
+
+Gaspare set his teeth, walked away to the edge of the plateau, and stood
+looking out to sea.
+
+"Then no one saw you?" persisted the Pretore.
+
+"Non lo so," said Salvatore. "I did not think of such things. I wanted to
+go to Messina, so I sent Maddalena to pass the night in the village, and
+I took the boat. What else should I do?"
+
+"Va bene! Va bene!" said the Cancelliere.
+
+The Maresciallo cleared his throat again. That, and the ceremony which
+invariably followed, were his only contributions to this official
+proceeding.
+
+The Pretore, receiving no assistance from his colleagues, seemed doubtful
+what more to do. It was evident to Artois that he was faintly suspicious,
+that he was not thoroughly satisfied about the cause of this death.
+
+"Your daughter seems very upset about all this," he said to Salvatore.
+
+"Mamma mia! And how should she not? Why, Signor Pretore, we loved the
+poor signore. We would have thrown ourselves into the sea for him. When
+we saw him coming down from the mountain to us it was as if we saw God
+coming down from heaven."
+
+"Certo! Certo!" said the Cancelliere.
+
+"I think every one who knew the signore at all grew to be very fond of
+him," said Artois, quietly. "He was greatly beloved here by every one."
+
+His manner to the Pretore was very civil, even respectful. Evidently it
+had its effect upon that personage. Every one here seemed to be assured
+that this death was merely an accident, could only have been an accident.
+He did not know what more to do.
+
+"Va bene!" he said at last, with some reluctance. "We shall see what the
+doctors say when the autopsy is concluded. Let us hope that nothing will
+be discovered. I do not wish to distress the poor signora. At the same
+time I must do my duty. That is evident."
+
+"It seems to me you have done it with admirable thoroughness," said
+Artois.
+
+"Grazie, Signor Barone, grazie!"
+
+"Grazie, grazie, Signor Barone!" added the Cancelliere.
+
+"Grazie, Signor Barone!" said the deep voice of the Maresciallo.
+
+The authorities now slowly prepared to take their departure.
+
+"You are coming with us, Signor Barone?" said the Pretore.
+
+Artois was about to say yes, when he saw pass across the aperture of the
+doorway of the cottage the figure of a girl with bent head. It
+disappeared immediately.
+
+"That must be Maddalena!" he thought.
+
+"Scusi, signore," he said, "but I have been seriously ill. The ride down
+here has tired me, and I should be glad to rest for a few minutes longer,
+if--" He looked at Salvatore.
+
+"I will fetch a chair for the signore!" said the fisherman, quickly.
+
+He did not know what this stranger wanted, but he felt instinctively that
+it was nothing that would be harmful to him.
+
+The Pretore and his companions, after polite inquiries as to the illness
+of Artois, took their leave with many salutations. Only Gaspare remained
+on the edge of the plateau staring at the sea. As Salvatore went to fetch
+the chair Artois went over to the boy.
+
+"Gaspare!" he said.
+
+"Si!" said the boy.
+
+"I want you to go up with the Pretore. Go to the signora. Tell her the
+inquiry is finished. It will relieve her to know."
+
+"You will come with me, signore?"
+
+"No."
+
+The boy turned and looked him full in the face.
+
+"Why do you stay?"
+
+For a moment Artois did not speak. He was considering rapidly what to
+say, how to treat Gaspare. He was now sure that there had been a tragedy,
+with which the people of the sirens' house were, somehow, connected. He
+was sure that Gaspare either knew or suspected what had happened, yet
+meant to conceal his knowledge despite his obvious hatred for the
+fisherman. Was the boy's reason for this strange caution, this strange
+secretiveness, akin to his--Artois's--desire? Was the boy trying to
+protect his padrona or the memory of his padrone? Artois wondered. Then
+he said:
+
+"Gaspare, I shall only stay a few minutes. We must have no gossip that
+can get to the padrona's ears. We understand each other, I think, you and
+I. We want the same thing. Men can keep silence, but girls talk. I wish
+to see Maddalena for a minute."
+
+"Ma--"
+
+Gaspare stared at him almost fiercely. But something in the face of
+Artois inspired him with confidence. Suddenly his reserve disappeared. He
+put his hand on Artois's arm.
+
+"Tell Maddalena to be silent and not to go on crying, signore," he said,
+violently. "Tell her that if she does not stop crying I will come down
+here in the night and kill her."
+
+"Go, Gaspare! The Pretore is wondering--go!"
+
+Gaspare went down over the edge of the land and disappeared towards the
+sea.
+
+"Ecco, signore!"
+
+Salvatore reappeared from the cottage carrying a chair which he set down
+under an olive-tree, the same tree by which Maddalena had stood when
+Maurice first saw her in the dawn.
+
+"Grazie."
+
+Artois sat down. He was very tired, but he scarcely knew it. The
+fisherman stood by him, looking at him with a sort of shifty expectation,
+and Artois, as he noticed the hard Arab type of the man's face, the
+glitter of the small, cunning eyes, the nervous alertness of the thin,
+sensitive hands, understood a great deal about Salvatore. He knew Arabs
+well. He had slept under their tents, had seen them in joy and in anger,
+had witnessed scenes displaying fully their innate carelessness of human
+life. This fisherman was almost as much Arab as Sicilian. The blend
+scarcely made for gentleness. If such a man were wronged, he would be
+quick and subtle in revenge. Nothing would stay him. But had Maurice
+wronged him? Artois meant to assume knowledge and to act upon his
+assumption. His instinct advised him that in doing so he would be doing
+the best thing possible for the protection of Hermione.
+
+"Can you make much money here?" he said, sharply yet carelessly.
+
+The fisherman moved as if startled.
+
+"Signore!"
+
+"They tell me Sicily's a poor land for the poor. Isn't that so?"
+
+Salvatore recovered himself.
+
+"Si, signore, si, signore, one earns nothing. It is a hard life, Per
+Dio!"
+
+He stopped and stared hard at the stranger with his hands on his hips.
+His eyes, his whole expression and attitude said, "What are you up to?"
+
+"America is the country for a sharp-witted man to make his fortune in,"
+said Artois, returning his gaze.
+
+"Si, signore. Many go from here. I know many who are working in America.
+But one must have money to pay the ticket."
+
+"Yes. This terreno belongs to you?"
+
+"Only the bit where the house stands, signore. And it is all rocks. It is
+no use to any one. And in winter the winds come over it. Why, it would
+take years of work to turn it into anything. And I am not a contadino.
+Once I had a wine-shop, but I am a man of the sea."
+
+"But you are a man with sharp wits. I should think you would do well in
+America. Others do, and why not you?"
+
+They looked at each other hard for a full minute. Then Salvatore said,
+slowly:
+
+"Signore, I will tell you the truth. It is the truth. I would swear it
+with sea-water on my lips. If I had the money I would go to America. I
+would take the first ship."
+
+"And your daughter, Maddalena? You couldn't leave her behind you?"
+
+"Signore, if I were ever to go to America you may be sure I should take
+Maddalena with me."
+
+"I think you would," Artois said, still looking at the man full in the
+eyes. "I think it would be wiser to take Maddalena with you."
+
+Salvatore looked away.
+
+"If I had the money, signore, I would buy the tickets to-morrow. Here I
+can make nothing, and it is a hard life, always on the sea. And in
+America you get good pay. A man can earn eight lire a day there, they
+tell me."
+
+"I have not seen your daughter yet," Artois said, abruptly.
+
+"No, signore, she is not well to-day. And the Signor Pretore frightened
+her. She will stay in the house to-day."
+
+"But I should like to see her for a moment."
+
+"Signore, I am very sorry, but--"
+
+Artois turned round in the chair and looked towards the house. The door,
+which had been open, was now shut.
+
+"Maddalena is praying, signore. She is praying to the Madonna for the
+soul of the dead signore."
+
+For the first time Artois noticed in the hard, bird-like face of the
+fisherman a sign of emotion, almost of softness.
+
+"We must not disturb her, signore."
+
+Artois got up and went a few steps nearer to the cottage.
+
+"Can one see the place where the signore's body was found?" he asked.
+
+"Si, signore, from the other side, among the trees."
+
+"I will come back in a moment," said Artois.
+
+He walked away from the fisherman and entered the wood, circling the
+cottage. The fisherman did not come with him. Artois's instinct had told
+him that the man would not care to come on such an errand. As Artois
+passed at the back of the cottage he noticed an open window, and paused
+near it in the long grass. From within there came the sound of a woman's
+voice, murmuring. It was frequently interrupted by sobs. After a moment
+Artois went close to the window, and said, but without showing himself:
+
+"Maddalena!"
+
+The murmuring voice stopped.
+
+"Maddalena!"
+
+There was silence.
+
+"Maddalena!" Artois said. "Are you listening?"
+
+He heard a faint movement as if the woman within came nearer to the
+casement.
+
+"If you loved the dead signore, if you care for his memory, do not talk
+of your grief for him to others. Pray for him, and be silent for him. If
+you are silent the Holy Mother will hear your prayers."
+
+As he said the last words Artois made his deep voice sound mysterious,
+mystical.
+
+Then he went away softly among the thickly growing trees.
+
+When he saw Salvatore again, still standing upon the plateau, he beckoned
+to him without coming into the open.
+
+"Bring the boat round to the inlet," he said. "I will cross from there."
+
+"Si, signore."
+
+"And as we cross we can speak a little more about America."
+
+The fisherman stared at him, with a faint smile that showed a gleam of
+sharp, white teeth.
+
+"Si, signore--a little more about America."
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+A night and a day had passed, and still Artois had not seen Hermione. The
+autopsy had been finished, and had revealed nothing to change the theory
+of Dr. Marini as to the determining cause of death. The English stranger
+had been crossing the dangerous wall of rock, probably in darkness, had
+fallen, been stunned upon the rocks in the sea beneath, and drowned
+before he recovered consciousness.
+
+Gaspare said nothing. Salvatore held his peace and began his preparations
+for America. And Maddalena, if she wept, wept now in secret; if she
+prayed, prayed in the lonely house of the sirens, near the window which
+had so often given a star to the eyes that looked down from the terrace
+of the Casa del Prete.
+
+There was gossip in Marechiaro, and the Pretore still preserved his air
+of faint suspicion. But that would probably soon vanish under the
+influence of the Cancelliere, with whom Artois had had some private
+conversation. The burial had been allowed, and very early in the morning
+of the day following that of Hermione's arrival at the hotel it took
+place from the hospital.
+
+Few people knew the hour, and most were still asleep when the coffin was
+carried down the street, followed only by Hermione, and by Gaspare in a
+black, ready-made suit that had been bought in the village of Cattaro.
+Hermione would not allow any one else to follow her dead, and as Maurice
+had been a Protestant there was no service. This shocked Gaspare, and
+added to his grief, till Hermione explained that her husband had been of
+a different religion from that of Sicily, a religion with different
+rites.
+
+"But we can pray for him, Gaspare," she said. "He loved us, and perhaps
+he will know what we are doing."
+
+The thought seemed to soothe the boy. He kneeled down by his padrona
+under the wall of the Campo Santo by which Protestants were buried, and
+whispered a petition for the repose of the soul of his padrone. Into the
+gap of earth, where now the coffin lay, he had thrown roses from his
+father's little terreno near the village. His tears fell fast, and his
+prayer was scarcely more than a broken murmur of "Povero
+signorino--povero signorino--Dio ci mandi buon riposo in Paradiso."
+Hermione could not pray although she was in the attitude of supplication;
+but when she heard the words of Gaspare she murmured them too. "Buon
+riposo!" The sweet Sicilian good-night--she said it now in the stillness
+of the lonely dawn. And her tears fell fast with those of the boy who had
+loved and served his master.
+
+When the funeral was over she walked up the mountain with Gaspare to the
+Casa del Prete, and from there, on the following day, she sent a message
+to Artois, asking him if he would come to see her.
+
+     "I don't ask you to forgive me for not seeing you before," she
+     wrote. "We understand each other and do not need explanations. I
+     wanted to see nobody. Come at any hour when you feel that you would
+     like to.
+                                                       HERMIONE."
+
+Artois rode up in the cool of the day, towards evening.
+
+He was met upon the terrace by Gaspare.
+
+"The signora is on the mountain, signore," he said. "If you go up you
+will find her, the povero signora. She is all alone upon the mountain."
+
+"I will go, Gaspare. I have told Maddalena. I think she will be silent."
+
+The boy dropped his eyes. His unreserve of the island had not endured. It
+had been a momentary impulse, and now the impulse had died away.
+
+"Va bene, signore," he muttered.
+
+He had evidently nothing more to say, yet Artois did not leave him
+immediately.
+
+"Gaspare," he said, "the signora will not stay here through the great
+heat, will she?"
+
+"Non lo so, signore."
+
+"She ought to go away. It will be better if she goes away."
+
+"Si, signore. But perhaps she will not like to leave the povero
+signorino."
+
+Tears came into the boy's eyes. He turned away and went to the wall, and
+looked over into the ravine, and thought of many things: of readings
+under the oak-trees, of the tarantella, of how he and the padrone had
+come up from the fishing singing in the sunshine. His heart was full, and
+he felt dazed. He was so accustomed to being always with his padrone that
+he did not know how he was to go on without him. He did not remember his
+former life, before the padrone came. Everything seemed to have begun for
+him on that morning when the train with the padrone and the padrona in it
+ran into the station of Cattaro. And now everything seemed to have
+finished.
+
+Artois did not say any more to him, but walked slowly up the mountain
+leaning on his stick. Close to the top, by a heap of stones that was
+something like a cairn, he saw, presently, a woman sitting. As he came
+nearer she turned her head and saw him. She did not move. The soft rays
+of the evening sun fell on her, and showed him that her square and rugged
+face was pale and grave and, he thought, empty-looking, as if something
+had deprived it of its former possession, the ardent vitality, the
+generous enthusiasm, the look of swiftness he had loved.
+
+When he came up to her he could only say: "Hermione, my friend--"
+
+The loneliness of this mountain summit was a fit setting for her
+loneliness, and these two solitudes, of nature and of this woman's soul,
+took hold of Artois and made him feel as if he were infinitely small, as
+if he could not matter to either. He loved nature, and he loved this
+woman. And of what use were he and his love to them?
+
+She stretched up her hand to him, and he bent down and took it and held
+it.
+
+"You said some day I should leave my Garden of Paradise, Emile."
+
+"Don't hurt me with my own words," he said.
+
+"Sit by me."
+
+He sat down on the warm ground close to the heap of stones.
+
+"You said I should leave the garden, but I don't think you meant like
+this. Did you?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"I think you thought we should be unhappy together. Well, we were never
+that. We were always very happy. I like to think of that. I come up here
+to think of that; of our happiness, and that we were always kind and
+tender to each other. Emile, if we hadn't been, if we had ever had even
+one quarrel, even once said cruel things to each other, I don't think I
+could bear it now. But we never did. God did watch us then, I think. God
+was with me so long as Maurice was with me. But I feel as if God had gone
+away from me with Maurice, as if they had gone together. Do you think any
+other woman has ever felt like that?"
+
+"I don't think I am worthy to know how some women feel," he said, almost
+falteringly.
+
+"I thought perhaps God would have stayed with me to help me, but I feel
+as if He hadn't. I feel as if He had only been able to love me so long as
+Maurice was with me."
+
+"That feeling will pass away."
+
+"Perhaps when my child comes," she said, very simply.
+
+Artois had not known about the coming of the child, but Hermione did not
+remember that now.
+
+"Your child!" he said.
+
+"I am glad I came back in time to tell him about the child," she said. "I
+think at first he was almost frightened. He was such a boy, you see. He
+was the very spirit of youth, wasn't he? And perhaps that--but at the end
+he seemed happy. He kissed me as if he loved not only me. Do you
+understand, Emile? He seemed to kiss me the last time--for us both. Some
+day I shall tell my baby that."
+
+She was silent for a little while. She looked out over the great view,
+now falling into a strange repose. This was the land he had loved, the
+land he had belonged to.
+
+"I should like to hear the 'Pastorale' now," she said, presently. "But
+Sebastiano--" A new thought seemed to strike her. "I wonder how some
+women can bear their sorrows," she said. "Don't you, Emile?"
+
+"What sorrows do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"Such a sorrow as poor Lucrezia has to bear. Maurice always loved me.
+Lucrezia knows that Sebastiano loves some one else. I ought to be trying
+to comfort Lucrezia. I did try. I did go to pray with her. But that was
+before. I can't pray now, because I can't feel sure of almost anything. I
+sometimes think that this happened without God's meaning it to happen."
+
+"God!" Artois said, moved by an irresistible impulse. "And the gods, the
+old pagan gods?"
+
+"Ah!" she said, understanding. "We called him Mercury. Yes, it is as if
+he had gone to them, as if they had recalled their messenger. In the
+spring, before I went to Africa, I often used to think of legends, and
+put him--my Sicilian--"
+
+She did not go on. Yet her voice had not faltered. There was no
+contortion of sorrow in her face. There was a sort of soft calmness about
+her almost akin to the calmness of the evening. It was the more
+remarkable in her because she was not usually a tranquil woman. Artois
+had never known her before in deep grief. But he had known her in joy,
+and then she had been rather enthusiastic than serene. Something of her
+eager humanity had left her now. She made upon him a strange impression,
+almost as of some one he had never previously had any intercourse with.
+And yet she was being wonderfully natural with him, as natural as if she
+were alone.
+
+"What are you going to do, my friend?" he said, after a long silence.
+
+"Nothing. I have no wish to do anything. I shall just wait--for our
+child."
+
+"But where will you wait? You cannot wait here. The heat would weaken
+you. In your condition it would be dangerous."
+
+"He spoke of going. It hurt me for a moment, I remember. I had a wish to
+stay here forever then. It seemed to me that this little bit of earth and
+rock was the happiest place in all the world. Yes, I will go, Emile, but
+I shall come back. I shall bring our child here."
+
+He did not combat this intention then, for he was too thankful to have
+gained her assent to the departure for which he longed. The further
+future must take care of itself.
+
+"I will take you to Italy, to Switzerland, wherever you wish to go."
+
+"I have no wish for any other place. But I will go somewhere in Italy.
+Wherever it is cool and silent will do. But I must be far away from
+people; and when you have taken me there, dear Emile, you must leave me
+there."
+
+"Quite alone?"
+
+"Gaspare will be with me. I shall always keep Gaspare. Maurice and he
+were like two brothers in their happiness. I know they loved each other,
+and I know Gaspare loves me."
+
+Artois only said:
+
+"I trust the boy."
+
+The word "trust" seemed to wake Hermione into a stronger life.
+
+"Ah, Emile," she said, "once you distrusted the south. I remember your
+very words. You said, 'I love the south, but I distrust what I love, and
+I see the south in him.' I want to tell you, I want you to know, how
+perfect he was always to me. He loved joy, but his joy was always
+innocent. There was always something of the child in him. He was
+unconscious of himself. He never understood his own beauty. He never
+realized that he was worthy of worship. His thought was to reverence and
+to worship others. He loved life and the sun--oh, how he loved them! I
+don't think any one can ever have loved life and the sun as he did, ever
+will love them as he did. But he was never selfish. He was just quite
+natural. He was the deathless boy. Emile, have you noticed anything about
+me--since?"
+
+"What, Hermione?"
+
+"How much older I look now. He was like my youth, and my youth has gone
+with him."
+
+"Will it not revive--when--?"
+
+"No, never. I don't wish it to. Gaspare gathered roses, all the best
+roses from his father's little bit of land, to throw into the grave. And
+I want my youth to lie there with my Sicilian under Gaspare's roses. I
+feel as if that would be a tender companionship. I gave everything to him
+when he was alive, and I don't want to keep anything back now. I would
+like the sun to be with him under Gaspare's roses. And yet I know he's
+elsewhere. I can't explain. But two days ago at dawn I heard a child
+playing the tarantella, and it seemed to me as if my Sicilian had been
+taken away by the blue, by the blue of Sicily. I shall often come back to
+the blue. I shall often sit here again. For it was here that I heard the
+beating of the heart of youth. And there's no other music like that. Is
+there, Emile?"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+Had the music been wild? He suspected that the harmony she worshipped had
+passed on into the hideous crash of discords. And whose had been the
+fault? Who creates human nature as it is? In what workshop, of what
+brain, are forged the mad impulses of the wild heart of youth, are mixed
+together subtly the divine aspirations which leap like the winged Mercury
+to the heights, and the powerful appetites which lead the body into the
+dark places of the earth? And why is the Giver of the divine the
+permitter of those tremendous passions, which are not without their
+glory, but which wreck so many human lives?
+
+Perhaps a reason may be found in the sacredness of pity. Evil and agony
+are the manure from which spring some of the whitest lilies that have
+ever bloomed beneath that enigmatic blue which roofs the terror and the
+triumph of the world. And while human beings know how to pity, human
+beings will always believe in a merciful God.
+
+A strange thought to come into such a mind as Artois's! Yet it came in
+the twilight, and with it a sense of tears such as he had never felt
+before.
+
+With the twilight had come a little wind from Etna. It made something
+near him flutter, something white, a morsel of paper among the stones by
+which he was sitting. He looked down and saw writing, and bent to pick
+the paper up.
+
+     "Emile may leave at once. But there is no good boat till the 10th.
+     We shall take that...."
+
+Hermione's writing!
+
+Artois understood at once. Maurice had had Hermione's letter. He had
+known they were coming from Africa, and he had gone to the fair despite
+that knowledge. He had gone with the girl who wept and prayed beside the
+sea.
+
+His hand closed over the paper.
+
+"What is it, Emile? What have you picked up?"
+
+"Only a little bit of paper."
+
+He spoke quietly, tore it into tiny fragments and let them go upon the
+wind.
+
+"When will you come with me, Hermione? When shall we go to Italy?"
+
+"I am saying 'a rivederci' now"--she dropped her voice--"and buon
+riposo."
+
+The white fragments blew away into the gathering night, separated from
+one another by the careful wind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days later Hermione and Artois left Sicily, and Gaspare, leaning
+out of the window of the train, looked his last on the Isle of the
+Sirens. A fisherman on the beach by the inlet, not Salvatore, recognized
+the boy and waved a friendly hand. But Gaspare did not see him.
+
+There they had fished! There they had bathed! There they had drunk the
+good red wine of Amato and called for brindisi! There they had lain on
+the warm sand of the caves! There they had raced together to Madre
+Carmela and her frying-pan! There they had shouted "O sole mio!"
+
+There--there they had been young together!
+
+The shining sea was blotted out from the boy's eyes by tears.
+
+"Povero signorino!" he whispered. "Povero signorino!"
+
+And then, as his "Paese" vanished, he added for the last time the words
+which he had whispered in the dawn by the grave of his padrone, "Dio ci
+mandi buon riposo in Paradiso."
+
+
+
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