The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Call of the Blood, by Robert Smythe Hichens

Some minor changes have been made to correct typographical errors and inconsistencies.

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.

THE CALL

OF THE

BLOOD

ROBERT HICHENS

AUTHOR OF
"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

MCMVI

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE

CALL OF THE BLOOD

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THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

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[Pg 2] 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[Pg 3] 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.

"Emile!" cried Hermione, getting up out of her chair with a sort of eager slowness. "Where is he?"

Selim stood gracefully aside, and a big man stepped into the room and took the two hands which Hermione stretched out in his.

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[Pg 4] 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."

"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.

"I lock the door of the room, or, rather, it locks itself. You haven't noticed it?"

"My complaints, my egoism, my ambitions, my views—Mon Dieu! Hermione, what a good friend you've been!"

"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."

"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.

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:

"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:

"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."[Pg 7]

"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which astonished me, the fact of a very handsome man loving me."

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?"

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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!"

"But it has. You've forgotten for the first time. Cursed be the egotism of man."

"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,[Pg 9] 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."

"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."

"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."

"No. You're an extraordinary woman who astonishes because she is going to do a very important thing that is very ordinary."

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.[Pg 10]

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."[Pg 12]

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.

"She said, 'Very well,' madame, and then she wrote this. Then she said again, 'Very well,' and then she went away."

"Delicious!" said Artois. "I can hear her speaking and see her drifting away consumed by jealousy, in the fog."

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."

"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.[Pg 13]

"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!"

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."

"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."

Mrs. Creswick, who was a short woman who looked[Pg 15] 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.

"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."

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."

"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."

"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[Pg 18] 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.

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,[Pg 19] 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 de[Pg 20]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.

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[Pg 21] 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[Pg 22] 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 ex[Pg 23]press 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[Pg 24] 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?"

"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."

"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[Pg 25] 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?"

"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."

"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?"

"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?"

"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's[Pg 26] 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?"

"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."

"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[Pg 27] 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."

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?"

"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."

"Suppose that some one, by means of a talent which[Pg 28] 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!"

"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?"

She sat for a moment considering deeply, with her luminous eyes fixed on the food in her plate, food which she did not see.

"Could a man be won so? Yes, I suppose he might be if there were a combination."

"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[Pg 29] beauty in another woman than of mental gifts. There's something so personal in beauty."

"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."

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,[Pg 30] 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?"

"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:

"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!"[Pg 31]

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.

"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."[Pg 32]

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—"

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."

"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."

"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:

[Pg 34] "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."

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."[Pg 35]

"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?"

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 want to have a talk with you. Maurice quite understands. He knows you go back to Paris to-morrow."

"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."

Two or three minutes later Hermione and he were in a hansom driving down Regent Street. The fog had[Pg 36] 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."

"Emile, I'm so happy, so—so happy! I think you must understand why now. You don't wonder any more, do you?"

"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."

"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[Pg 37] handsome, not at all intellectual, but fascinating. The Southern blood comes from her side."

"She was a lovely contadina. But what does it matter? I am not marrying Maurice's grandmother."

"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."

"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."

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[Pg 38] 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."

"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."

"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."

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[Pg 39]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?

"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!"

"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?"

"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."

He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at himself if she began to laugh.

"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery will be born."

"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."

"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has he faithfulness?"

"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."

"I think so—now. But does he know his own blood? Our blood governs us when the time comes. He is[Pg 41] modest about his intellect. I think it quick, but I doubt its being strong enough to prove a good restraining influence."

"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?"

"Emile, forgive me, but sometimes you seem to me deliberately to lie down and roll in pessimism rather as a horse—"

"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."

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.

"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—"

"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!"

"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 divina[Pg 43]tion?—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."

"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[Pg 44] 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."

"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."

"I shall spend the spring at the sacred city of Kairouan, among the pilgrims and the mosques, making some studies, taking some notes."

The trap in the roof was opened, and a beery eye, with a luscious smile in it, peered down upon them.

She gave her address to the cabman, and they drove in silence to Eaton Place.[Pg 45]

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,[Pg 46] 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:

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[Pg 47] 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,[Pg 48] 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 ex[Pg 49]amined 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.[Pg 50] 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.[Pg 51]

At the two small windows on either side of the door, which was half glass, half white-painted wood, were thin curtains of pale gray-blue and white, bought in the bazaars of Tunis. For furniture there were a folding-table of brown, polished wood, a large divan with many cushions, two deck-chairs of the telescope species, that can be made long or short at will, a writing-table, a cottage piano, and four round wicker chairs with arms. In one corner of the room stood a tall clock with a burnished copper face, and in another a cupboard containing glass and china. A door at the back, which led into the kitchen, was covered with an Oriental portière. On the writing-table, and on some dwarf bookcases already filled with books left behind by Hermione on her last visit to Sicily, stood rough jars of blue, yellow, and white pottery, filled with roses and geraniums arranged by Gaspare. To the left of the room, as Lucrezia faced it, was a door leading into the bedroom, of the master and mistress.

After a long moment of admiring contemplation, Lucrezia went into this bedroom, in which she was specially interested, as it was to be her special care. All was white here, walls, ceiling, wooden beds, tables, the toilet service, the bookcases. For there were books here, too, books which Lucrezia examined with an awful wonder, not knowing how to read. In the window-seat were white cushions. On the chest of drawers were more red roses and geraniums. It was a virginal room, into which the bright, golden sunbeams stole under the striped awning outside the low window with surely a hesitating modesty, as if afraid to find themselves intruders. The whiteness, the intense quietness of the room, through whose window could be seen a space of far-off sea, a space of mountain-flank, and, when one came near to it, and the awning was drawn up, the snowy cone of Etna, struck now to the soul of Lucrezia a sense of half-puzzled peace. Her large eyes opened[Pg 52] 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[Pg 53] 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:

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[Pg 54] 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.

"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."

"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."

"Does Gaspare know every grotto on Etna? Has Gaspare lived eight years with the briganti? And the Mafia—has Gaspare—"

"If the signora had not been assured of my protection she would never have come up here."

"What is the padrona like, Sebastiano?" she asked. "I have seen her, but I have never spoken to her."

"Ready to give soldi to every one who is in trouble. But if you once deceive her she will never look at you again."

"Better not. She is not like us. She thinks to tell a lie is a sin against the Madonna, I believe."

"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?"

"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—"

She looked into his twinkling eyes and reddened slightly, sticking out her under lip.

Sebastiano's dog had barked again on the terrace.[Pg 56] 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.

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.[Pg 57]

"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione, and you must be sure to—'"

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.

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[Pg 58] 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.

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[Pg 59] 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.

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.[Pg 60]

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.[Pg 61]

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?"

"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."

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:

"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[Pg 62]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—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?"[Pg 63]

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.

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.

"It's from Emile!" she exclaimed. "How good of him to remember! This must be his welcome."

"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?"

"He—there's something," she said, "that is too kind to me. I don't think I'll read it."

"No," he said, smiling too. "But is that it, do you think? Why should it be? Who wouldn't love this place?"

"Oh, I have met an Englishman who was angry with Etna for being the shape it is."

"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."

"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."

"A Brindisi!" said Hermione. "Gaspare's treating the boys. Questo vino—oh, how glorious to be here in Sicily!"[Pg 66]

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.

"Monte Amato, Gaspare, not Castel Perini. But that doesn't rhyme, eh? Bravo! But we must drink, too."

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.

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.

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[Pg 67] 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.[Pg 68] 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.[Pg 69] 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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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.

"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.

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[Pg 72] he kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation grew stronger in them.

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.

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[Pg 73] 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."

"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[Pg 74] 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.

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.[Pg 75]

"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."

He got off Giuseppe's knee, where he had been curled up almost like a big kitten, came and stood by Hermione, and added:

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.

"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!"

"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[Pg 76] 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."

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.

"But—but all this is, for us. It was here for the old Greeks to see, and I suppose it will be here—"

She had forgotten the warning of Artois. The dirty little beggar was staring at the angel and wanted the angel to know it.

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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.

"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.

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, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista lives there with Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora. Buon riposo, signore."

As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near Tito's stable, Maurice added:[Pg 80]

"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.[Pg 81]

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[Pg 82] 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[Pg 83] 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[Pg 84] 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[Pg 85] 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 per[Pg 86]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.

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[Pg 87] 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[Pg 88] to talk to the people. A grammar! I won't open it. Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"

"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."

"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."

"It's the tarantella over again," Hermione said. "You're a hopeless Sicilian. I give you up."

"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."

"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."

Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes shining with happiness and a box under his arm.

"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?"

They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into the heart of the gold, and singing as they went:

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.

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[Pg 91] 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 ter[Pg 92]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.

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.

Lucrezia shifted along the seat until she was nearly opposite to where Hermione was sitting.

"I suppose he will be marrying soon, won't he? The men all marry young round about Marechiaro."

"His father, Chinetti Urbano, wishes him to marry at once. It is better for a man."

"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, già!"

"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 got up and came slowly to the seat by the ravine. Hermione took her hand.

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[Pg 94] 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.

The ceramella droned on, moving slowly with its player on the hidden path beneath the olive-trees.

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[Pg 95] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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[Pg 97] 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.

"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.[Pg 98]

Sebastiano took his arm from Lucrezia's waist as Hermione came down to the terrace, and said:

Sebastiano laughed boldly, but Lucrezia, blushing red, disappeared into the kitchen.

Sebastiano went over to the terrace wall, looked into the ravine, turned round, and came back.

"The girls in Marechiaro can take care of themselves, signora. You don't know them as I do."

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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

"Who knows, signora? But I told Lucrezia to-day, and when she cried I told her something else. We are 'promised.'"

"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."

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—"

"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.

He touched his eyes with his sinewy hands and made his face look drowsy. Maurice laughed.

"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?"

"I know," said Gaspare, joyously. "It's the fish[Pg 101]ing. Nito has sent. I told him to. Is it Nito, Sebastiano?"

"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?"

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?"

"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."

"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[Pg 102] 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 Caffè 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—"

"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.

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's alive!" exclaimed Maurice. "By Jove, he's alive, that boy! Glorious, glorious life! Oh, there's something here that—"[Pg 103]

"The sun, the sea, the music, the people, the liberty—it goes to my head, it intoxicates me."

"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?"

"No, no. Only the little fish, the babies that Carmela rejects from the frittura."

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:

"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."[Pg 104]

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[Pg 105] 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!" he ejaculated. "Why, don't we all know who likes wading, and can always tell the best places for the fish?"[Pg 106]

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."

He deftly doubled himself up and writhed, while the lips of the others twitched with suppressed amusement.

"Haven't I, signorino?" cried Gaspare, undoubling himself, pointing to his middleman, and staring hard at Maurice.

"I've been eating Zampaglione, and I am full. If I go into the sea to-night I shall die."

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.

"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[Pg 107] 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.

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—"

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:

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:

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[Pg 108] 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[Pg 109] 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.

"No, no, signore, non basta! I can fish all night. Once the wine has warmed me, I can—"

"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.

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:

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[Pg 111] 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.

He broke away, laughing, from Gaspare, and was swiftly in the sea. The Sicilians looked at him with admiration.

"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?"

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[Pg 112]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.

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:

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[Pg 113] 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.

The action of the rough towel upon his body brought[Pg 114] a glow of warmth to Delarey, and the sense of mystery began to depart from his mind.

"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."

"But you've got a man's voice, Gaspare!" he said, putting down the glass and beginning to get into his clothes.

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 Caffè 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 caffè 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.[Pg 115]

On the height, Delarey paused for a moment, as if to look at the wide view, dim and ethereal, under the dying moon.

"Si, signore. And there is the caffè. 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.

"Si, signore. That is where you can see the light in the window from our terrace."

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[Pg 116] 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.[Pg 117]

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 Caffè 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[Pg 118] 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[Pg 119] siren there. Should he go now? He hesitated for a moment, leaning against the wall of the house.

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.

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.

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[Pg 120] 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.

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:

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:

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:

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[Pg 122] 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.

She uttered the words softly, then fell into silence again, staring at him with her lustrous eyes, that were like black jewels.

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[Pg 123] 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.

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.

He heard her merry laugh and felt her trying to pull[Pg 124] 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.

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[Pg 125] 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.

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.

He took hold of his arm with one hand, and made the motion of shaking himself.[Pg 126]

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:

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[Pg 127] while they uttered prayers, as if they could murmur love words and kiss the lips of men.

Delarey stirred on the great, white bed. A hand grasped him firmly, shook him ruthlessly.

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.

She shook him again gently. He stretched himself, yawned, and began to smile. She smiled back at him.

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 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[Pg 128] 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.

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[Pg 129] heard far above him the musical cry of the siren of the night. He answered it with a loud, exultant call.

When he reached the Caffè 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.

"The frittura, Gasparino, the frittura! And then the tarantella, and then 'O sole mio'!"

Gaspare joined in lustily, and Carmela in the doorway of the Caffè Berardi waved a frying-pan at them in time to the music.

"Per Dio, Gaspare!" exclaimed Maurice, as they raced[Pg 130] 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!"

Neck and neck they reached the caffè as Nito poured the shining fish into Madre Carmela's frying-pan.[Pg 131]

VIII

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.

"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 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."

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."

"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."[Pg 133]

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."

"If they have caught any fish, I know your frying-pan will be wanted," she said.

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[Pg 134] night would be an event. Did he know that? She wondered.

"Did you enjoy it?" she asked, thinking what a boy he looked in his eager, physical happiness.

"I never enjoyed any night so much before, out there under the moon. Why don't we always sleep out-of-doors?"

"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:

"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."

"Oh, by Jove!" Delarey said, as they went into the[Pg 135] cottage, putting his hand into his jacket-pocket, "I've got something for you, Hermione."

"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.

"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.

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[Pg 136] 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[Pg 137] 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."

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.

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.

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.

"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!"

"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."

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!"[Pg 140]

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 was standing beside Hermione. Now she turned to go into the house. As she did so she said:

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."[Pg 141]

"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 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[Pg 142] 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.

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[Pg 143] 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[Pg 144] 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.

If only he would wake! There was something terrible to her in the contrast between his condition and hers at this moment.

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[Pg 145] the hills and the shadows of the olive-trees lengthening upon the ground.

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.

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.

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.

He wondered a little why she did not come to him, but only answered him from a distance.

Now that Maurice was awake at last, Hermione's grief at the lost afternoon became much more acute, but she[Pg 146] 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.

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?"

"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."

"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."

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 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."

"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."

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:

"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."

In a moment a languid figure appeared round the corner. Maurice explained matters. Instantly Gaspare became a thing of quicksilver. He darted to help[Pg 149] Hermione. Every nerve seemed quivering to be useful.

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—"

"It brings a lump into my throat," she said, after a little pause. "It's too beautiful and too still to-night."

They ate their dinner in silence for some time. Presently Maurice began to crumble his bread.

"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[Pg 150] 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—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."

"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."

"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.

"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.

"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."[Pg 152]

"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.

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 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?"[Pg 153]

"If he were to die it would be a great sorrow, a great loss to me. I pray that he may live. And yet—"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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[Pg 154] 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.[Pg 155]

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[Pg 156] 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.

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.

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:[Pg 158]

"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."

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."

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.

He lay down on the warm ground, set his back against[Pg 159] 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."

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.

"If I had a wife I should be like the Mago Africano when he was shut up in the box."

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!"

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,[Pg 161] 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.

"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?"

"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."

"It's something like this. Life is simple and splen[Pg 162]did if you let it alone. But if you worry it—well, then, like a dog, it bites you."

"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."

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.

"Yes, meester sir, eef you pleesi," said Gaspare, with conscious pride. "We go way."

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[Pg 163] 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 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.

Castel Vecchio was the nearest village, perched on the hill-top opposite, twenty minutes' walk from the cottage.

"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—"

"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."

"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-col[Pg 165]ored 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[Pg 166] 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[Pg 167] village the people were gossiping at one another's doors, were lounging together in the piazza, were playing cards in the caffès, were singing and striking the guitars under the pepper-trees bathed in the rays of the moon. And he—what was there for him in this night that woke up desires for joy, for the sweetness of the life that sings in the passionate aisles of the south?

He stood still by the wall. Two or three lights twinkled on the height where Castel Vecchio perched clinging to its rock above the sea. Sebastiano was there setting his lips to the ceramella, and shooting bold glances of tyrannical love at Lucrezia out of his audacious eyes. The peasants, dressed in their gala clothes, were forming in a circle for the country dance. The master of the ceremonies was shouting out his commands in bastard French: "Tournez!" "À votre place!" "Prenez la donne!" "Dansez toutes!" Eyes were sparkling, cheeks were flushing, lips were parting as gay activity created warmth in bodies and hearts. Then would come the tarantella, with Gaspare spinning like a top and tripping like a Folly in a veritable madness of movement. And as the night wore on the dance would become wilder, the laughter louder, the fire of jokes more fierce. Healths would be drunk with clinking glasses, brindisi shouted, tricks played. Cards would be got out. There would be a group intent on "Scopa," another calling "Mi staio!" "Carta da vente!" throwing down the soldi and picking them up greedily in "Sette e mezzo." Stories would be told, bets given and taken. The smoke would curl up from the long, black cigars the Sicilians love. Dark-browed men and women, wild-haired boys, and girls in gay shawls, with great rings swinging from their ears, would give themselves up as only southerners can to the joy of the passing moment, forgetting poverty, hardship, and toil, grinding taxation, all the cares and the sorrows that encompass the peasant's life, forgetting the flight of the hours, forgetting everything in the passion of the[Pg 168] 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:

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[Pg 169] 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[Pg 170] 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.

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.

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.

"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."

"Zitta, Lucrezia! The padrone is asleep. We must steal in softly and not waken him."

"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.

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.

"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?[Pg 173]

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.

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[Pg 174] 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 Caffè 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,[Pg 175] 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 caffè 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,[Pg 176] 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:

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[Pg 177] 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.

His voice died away, and was answered by a silence that seemed like a startled thing holding its breath.

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.

He came up to them. Maddalena's oval face had flushed, and she dropped the full lids over her black eyes as she said:

Then they stood there for a moment in silence. Maurice was the first to speak again.

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,[Pg 178] almost gruffly, with a sort of sullen violence. "I am sorry."

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."

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,[Pg 179] 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.

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.

The boy answered the smile, and suddenly the tension between them was broken, and they were at their ease again.

He looked at the boy hard, with a deliberately quizzing kindness, that was gay but asked forgiveness, too, and surely promised amendment.

They said nothing more till they were at the wall of rock. Then Gaspare seemed struck by hesitation.

"Silenzio!" cried Maurice, bending down and pulling off his boots and stockings.

It was an order. Maurice obeyed it, feeling that in these matters Gaspare had the right to command.

He sat down on the grass, put his hand on his knees, and looked back at the rock and at the precipices.

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.

He had caught sight of her among the olive-trees watching them, with her two hands held flat against her breast.

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:

"It is not for a servant to forgive his padrone, signorino," said the boy, but rather proudly.

"It was like this, Gaspare. When you and Lucrezia had gone I felt so dull all alone, and I thought, 'ev[Pg 181]ery one is singing and dancing and laughing except me.'"

"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.

Gaspare laughed; not rudely, but as a boy laughs who is sure he knows the world from the outer shell to inner kernel.

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."

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."[Pg 182]

"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?"

"He cannot walk with her here. He cannot even walk with her down the street of Marechiaro alone. It would be a shame."

"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.

"She is a silly girl. She is flattered to see a stranger. She does not think. Girls never think."

Maurice's face flushed. An angry word rose to his lips, but he checked it and laughed, remembering that he[Pg 183] had to deal with a boy, and that Gaspare was devoted to 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[Pg 184] 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.

Maurice lifted his head lazily from the hands that served it as a pillow, and called out, sleepily:

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, martedì 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[Pg 186] 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.

And Gaspare came running down from the terrace, the wide brim of his white linen hat flapping round his sun-browned face.

"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.[Pg 187] 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[Pg 188] 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."

And he read in Italian Hermione's message. Gaspare beamed with pride and pleasure.

"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."

Maurice began to read the letter again, slowly. It made him feel almost as if he were with Hermione. He seem[Pg 189]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—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.[Pg 190]

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.

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.

"You are more lazy than I, signore," said Gaspare. "Shall I write for you, too?"

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[Pg 191] night, warm and dark. The sick man was hot with fever, and Hermione bent over him and laid her cool hand on his forehead.

"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."

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.

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[Pg 192] 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:

He saw the boy's arm swing as he tapped Tito behind with his switch, and the donkey's legs moving in a canter.

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.

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.[Pg 193]

"Of course I do. I want to know Salvatore. Come along. We'll take his boat one day and go out fishing."

"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.

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.

"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?"

"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?"

"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."

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.

"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?"

"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.

"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 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:

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[Pg 196] 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:

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?

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.

"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."

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.

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.

A turkey strutted out through the doorway, elongating its neck and looking nervously intent.

"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?"

With not a little pride he led Maurice into the cottage, and showed him the bed on which he had already slept.

"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?"

"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."

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.[Pg 200] 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,[Pg 201] 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."

"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.

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.

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[Pg 202] 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!"

It must be Maddalena, but where was she? He[Pg 203] 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?"

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.

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."

"He will not know," she said. "With all that money Gaspare and he will play till dawn. Per Dio, signore, you are birbante!"

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!"[Pg 204]

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?"

"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.

He did not protest, for now they were down by the sea, and saw the fishing-boats swaying gently on the water.

He untied the rope, while she stepped lightly in, then he pushed the boat off, jumping in himself from the rocks.[Pg 205]

He smiled and drew the great bladed oars slowly through the calm water, leaning towards her with each stroke and looking into her eyes.

"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—"

"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.

"I don't know, Maddalena. But the rich scarcely ever live really as they please, I think. Their soldi won't let them, perhaps."

"Well, a man must do something, must get on, and if I lived always here I should do nothing but enjoy myself."

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.

"Why? Because it is different from other nights. On other nights I am alone with my father."

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.

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[Pg 208] 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."

"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."

Maurice unclasped his hands from his knees, and dropped his feet down from the bench.

"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.

"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—"

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.[Pg 210]

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.

"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."

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.

"A blue silk dress and a pair of ear-rings longer—much longer—than those women wore."

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.

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.

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.

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 naïveté. 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.

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[Pg 213] 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.

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.

He turned his head. In the darkness, high up, he saw a light, descending, ascending, then describing a wild circle.

"Row back, signorino! They have done playing, and my father will be angry."[Pg 214]

He moved, took the oars, and sent the boat towards the island. The physical exertion calmed him, restored him to himself.

"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.

"Salvatore is birbante!" said Gaspare, sullenly. "He did not win it fairly. I saw him—"

"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."

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[Pg 216] 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.

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[Pg 217] 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.

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,[Pg 218] 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.

"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[Pg 220] 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.

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.[Pg 221]

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.

The still silver of the sea drew him. He touched his forehead with his hand and felt the dampness on it.

"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.

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.

He let himself down slowly into the water, feet fore[Pg 222]most, 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.

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,[Pg 223] 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.

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.

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.

The hand still held him. The fingers were dug into[Pg 225] 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.

The boy let go of him and, still staring at him, burst into a passion of tears that seemed almost angry.

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.

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 smiled at the weeping boy almost sweetly, as if he could have found it in his heart to caress such a murderer.

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 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'?"

"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.[Pg 228]

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[Pg 229] 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?

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.[Pg 230]

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.

"The 11th of June, signore," said Salvatore. "There will be many donkeys there—good donkeys."

"I think of buying a donkey," added Salvatore, carelessly, with his small, shrewd eyes fixed upon Maurice's face.

"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."

He bade good-bye to the fisherman and his daughter, and set off with Gaspare through the trees.

"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.

"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—"

"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."

"Theatres? Yes, of course. But there is no sea, Gaspare, there are no mountains."

"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!"

"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."

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!"

"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 re[Pg 233]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."

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!"

"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?"

"Don't try his blessed comprehension of you and of me too far. You must go, indeed."

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.

"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."[Pg 234]

"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."

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.[Pg 235]

"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."[Pg 236]

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.

"Why not?" Maurice exclaimed, almost violently. "It will all be different! Yes, we had better go to London!"[Pg 237]

"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."

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?"

"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.

"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."

The boy began to look glum, understanding at once that he was being played with.

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[Pg 239] 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.

"How hot it is!" he would say to Gaspare. "If I don't have a bath I shall be suffocated."

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.[Pg 240] 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.

"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."

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[Pg 241] 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[Pg 242] 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 più birbante di Lei, mille volte più 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.[Pg 243]

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[Pg 244] 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,[Pg 245] 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.

"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?"

"Perhaps. But I don't think she will be here. She does not say she will be here."

"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[Pg 247] 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[Pg 248] 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.

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[Pg 249] 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[Pg 250] 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[Pg 251] 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 caffè, the Caffè 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 caffè was closed and the club was empty. For the[Pg 252] 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.

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.

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[Pg 253] 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...."

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.

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.

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!"

"And the fair, signorino—only four days now to the fair! I have been to order the donkeys for me and Maddalena."

"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."

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.

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."[Pg 255]

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.

"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."

"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!"

"In all this heat? But it's steep there, signore, and the path is all covered with stones. You'll never—"[Pg 256]

"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.[Pg 257]

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.

"Si, signore. He has gone on to Don Peppino's terreno now. There are many birds there. How hot you are, signorino! Shall I—"

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 com[Pg 258]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—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[Pg 259] 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."

XVI

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.

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.[Pg 261]

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!"

"Per Bacco! We shall make a fine show at the fair! I've got money, lot's of money, to spend!"

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.

"Signorino," said Gaspare, presently, when they were in the shadow of the ravine, "why did you say all that to Lucrezia?"

"If Lucrezia goes down to the village they'll be filling her ears with that stupid gossip about Sebastiano and that girl—Teodora."

"Yes, for Lucrezia. She's miserable enough already. I don't want her to be a spectacle when—when the signora returns."[Pg 263]

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[Pg 264] 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.

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[Pg 265] 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.

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.

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.

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[Pg 266] 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.

"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.

He looked at his girl with a certain pride, and then back at Maurice searchingly.

"Maddalena is beautiful to-day," Maurice answered,[Pg 267] 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!

"And isn't there a donkey auction sometimes, towards the end of the day, when they go cheap?"

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?"

"Then perhaps you can do something for me. Perhaps you can buy me a donkey. Didn't I speak of it before?"

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.

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' è 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:

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.

They leaped simultaneously onto their donkeys, Sal[Pg 269]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—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 naïve curiosity, her girlish, simple gayety, so accustomed to it all that he[Pg 270] 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?

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.

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.

For a moment her face clouded. But the influence of joy was very strong upon her to-day, and the cloud passed.

A pretty slyness crept into her face, showed in the curve of the young lips, in the expression of the young eyes.

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[Pg 272] 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[Pg 273] 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.

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[Pg 274] 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

"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

Chapter I	Chapter II	Chapter III	Chapter IV	Chapter V
Chapter VI	Chapter VII	Chapter VIII	Chapter IX	Chapter X
Chapter XI	Chapter XII	Chapter XIII	Chapter XIV	Chapter XV
Chapter XVI	Chapter XVII	Chapter XVIII	Chapter XIX	Chapter XX
Chapter XXI	Chapter XXII	Chapter XXIII	Chapter XXIV	Chapter XXV

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Call of the Blood, by Robert Smythe Hichens, Illustrated by Orson Lowell

E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net/c/)

THE CALL

OF THE

BLOOD

ROBERT HICHENS

AUTHOR OF
"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

MCMVI

Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
Published October, 1906.

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE

CALL OF THE BLOOD

Go to chapter.

THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Call of the Blood, by Robert Smythe Hichens, Illustrated by Orson Lowell

E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)

THE CALL

OF THE

BLOOD

ROBERT HICHENS

AUTHOR OF "THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

MCMVI

Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. Published October, 1906.

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE

CALL OF THE BLOOD

Go to chapter.

THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net/c/)

AUTHOR OF
"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ORSON LOWELL

Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
Published October, 1906.