"They've got plenty of soldi."

Lucrezia nodded, not without personal pride.

"Gaspare says--"

"Oh, I know as much as Gaspare," interrupted Sebastiano, brusquely. "The signora is my friend. When she was here before I saw her many times. But for me she would never have taken the Casa del Prete."

"Why was that?" asked Lucrezia, with reverence.

"They told her in Marechiaro that it was not safe for a lady to live up here alone, that when the night came no one could tell what would happen."

"But, Gaspare--"

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

He paused, laughed, pulled his mustache, and added:

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

"But now she has a husband."

"Yes."

He glanced again round the room.

"One can see that. Per Dio, it is like the snow on the top of Etna."

Lucrezia got up actively from the floor and came close to Sebastiano.

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

"She is simpatica--she will do you no harm."

"And is she generous?"

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

"Then I will not deceive her," said Lucrezia, knitting her brows.

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

"But then what will the padrone do?" asked Lucrezia, innocently.

"Tell his woman the truth, like all husbands," replied Sebastiano, with a broadly satirical grin. "As your man will some day, Lucrezia mia. All husbands are good and faithful. Don't you know that?"

"Macche!"

She laughed loudly, with an incredulity quite free from bitterness.

"Men are not like us," she added. "They tell us whatever they please, and do always whatever they like. We must sit in the doorway and keep our back to the street for fear a man should smile at us, and they can stay out all night, and come back in the morning, and say they've been fishing at Isola Bella, or sleeping out to guard the vines, and we've got to say, 'Si, Salvatore!' or 'Si, Guido!' when we know very well--"

"What, Lucrezia?"

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

"I'm not going to tell you."

"You have no business to know."

"And how can I help--they're coming!"

Sebastiano's dog had barked again on the terrace. Sebastiano lifted the ceramalla quickly from the window-sill and turned round, while Lucrezia darted out through the door, across the sitting-room, and out onto the terrace.

"Are they there, Sebastiano? Are they there?"

He stood by the terrace wall, shading his eyes with his hand.

"Ecco!" he said, pointing across the ravine.

Far off, winding up from the sea slowly among the rocks and the olive-trees, was a procession of donkeys, faintly relieved in the brilliant sunshine against the mountain-side.

"One," counted Sebastiano, "two, three, four--there are four. The signore is walking, the signora is riding. Whose donkeys have they got? Gaspare's father's, of course. I told Gaspare to take Ciccio's, and--it is too far to see, but I'll soon make them hear me. The signora loves the 'Pastorale.' She says there is all Sicily in it. She loves it more than the tarantella, for she is good, Lucrezia--don't forget that--though she is not a Catholic, and perhaps it makes her think of the coming of the Bambino and of the Madonna. Ah! She will smile now and clap her hands when she hears."

He put the pipe to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and began to play the "Pastorale" with all his might, while Lucrezia listened, staring across the ravine at the creeping donkey, which was bearing Hermione upward to her garden of paradise near the sky.

IV

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

"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard--Yes, it is, it is! Hush!

Maurice--listen!"

Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath, looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished, with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.

"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"

Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sionately 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 ba.s.s, 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 gra.s.ses, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s of men.

And Maurice was in it, too, and Hermione and her love for him and his for her.

Gaspare did not move. He loved the "Pastorale" almost without knowing that he loved it. It reminded him of the festa of Natale, when, as a child, dressed in a long, white garment, he had carried a blazing torch of straw down the steps of the church of San Pancrazio before the canopy that sheltered the Bambino. It was a part of his life, as his mother was, and t.i.to 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 t.i.to, with his great, brown eyes fixed, and the donkey switch drooping in the hand that hung at his side.

And Hermione for a moment gave herself entirely to her dream.

She had carried out the plan which she had made. She and Maurice Delarey had been married quietly, early one morning in London, and had caught the boat-train at Victoria, and travelled through to Sicily without stopping on the way to rest. She wanted to plunge Maurice in the south at once, not to lead him slowly, step by step, towards it. And so, after three nights in the train, they had opened their eyes to the quiet sea near Reggio, to the cl.u.s.tering 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.