"Gaspare," Hermione said, "everything is perfect. Tell Lucrezia."

"Better not, signora. I will say you are fairly satisfied, as it is only the first day. Then she will try to do better to-morrow. I know Lucrezia."

And he gazed at them calmly with his enormous liquid eyes.

"Do not say too much, signora. It makes people proud."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN THE HOUSE OF THE SIRENS"]

She thought that she heard an odd Sicilian echo of Artois. The peasant lad's mind reflected the mind of the subtle novelist for a moment.

"Very well, Gaspare," she said, submissively.

He smiled at her with satisfaction.

"I understand girls," he said. "You must keep them down or they will keep you down. Every girl in Marechiaro is like that. We keep them down therefore."

He spoke calmly, evidently quite without thought that he was speaking to a woman.

"May I go to bed, signora?" he added. "I got up at four this morning."

"At four!"

"To be sure all was ready for you and the signore."

"Gaspare! Go at once. We will go to bed, too. Shall we, Maurice?"

"Yes. I'm ready."

Just as they were going up the steps into the house, he turned to take a last look at the night. Far down below him over the terrace wall he saw a bright, steady light.

"Is that on the sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing to it. "Do they fish there at night?"

"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."

Gaspare shook his head.

"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.

"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."

"But no one lives there."

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

"Buon riposo, Gaspare."

And Maurice echoed it:

"Buon riposo."

As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near t.i.to's stable, Maurice added:

"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying good-night. I feel as if I'd said it before, somehow."

"Your blood has said it without your knowing it, perhaps many times. Are you coming, Maurice?"

He turned once more, looked down at the light shining in the house of the sirens, then followed Hermione in through the open door.

V

That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world--a world that never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased, instead of diminishing, her pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d might have created instead of what He had created, and had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material.

Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty something strange, something ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing, light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a "fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had been struck by in a London restaurant.

This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing seas.

"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the shining that came in answer to the words--"Let there be light!"

In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that there was nothing remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing, playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to know that she would be a little saddened were her husband to change, to grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had spoken to Artois of possible development in Maurice, of what she might do for him, and at first, just at first, she had instinctively exerted her influence over him to bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And he had eagerly striven to respond, stirred by his love for her, and his reverence--not a very clever, but certainly a very affectionate reverence--for her brilliant qualities of brain. In those very first days together, isolated in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go--as she herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious, love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of love but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love prompts thought, not stifles it. In their long mountain walks, in their rides on muleback to distant villages, hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests of the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when the noon wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on the terrace when the stars came out, and the shepherds led their flocks down to the valleys with little happy tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts, desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that beauty and solitude and nearness to nature in this isle of the south woke in her.

She did not fear to be subtle, she did not fear to be trivial. Everything she noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she noticed suggested to her, she related. The sound of the morning breeze in the olive-trees seemed to her different from the sound of the breeze of evening. She tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of the music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every sound, not only with the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came, like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then fading until taken softly by eternity--that was Hermione's feeling--that sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight, when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her pa.s.sionate 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 compa.s.s 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 pa.s.sion of grat.i.tude. But Gaspare was in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionate watcher, but he was the pa.s.sionate performer. Therefore she was his audience. She had travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it, had travelled out to be Sicily.

There was a great difference between them, but, having realized it thoroughly, Hermione was able not to regret but to delight in it. She did not wish to change her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand with her heart, he would be completely changed, and into something not natural, like a performing dog or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps amazement, combined too often with a faint disgust. And ceasing to desire she ceased to endeavor.

"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering her conversation with Artois. "And, thank G.o.d, 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, d.o.g.g.i.ng the steps of the heart like a spy, troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness. But she could trust where she loved. Maurice was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched him, then threw himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.

The strain of Sicilian blood that was in him worked in him curiously, making her sometimes marvel at the mysterious power of race, at the stubborn and almost tyrannical domination some dead have over some living, those who are dust over those who are quick with animation and pa.s.sion. Everything that was connected with Sicily and with Sicilian life not only reached his senses and sank easily into his heart, but seemed also to rouse his mind to an activity that astonished her. In connection with Sicily he showed a swiftness, almost a cleverness, she never noted in him when things Sicilian were not in question.

For instance, like most Englishmen, Maurice had no great talent for languages. He spoke French fairly well, having had a French nurse when he was a child, and his mother had taught him a little Italian. But till now he had never had any desire to be proficient in any language except his own. Hermione, on the other hand, was gifted as a linguist, loving languages and learning them easily. Yet Maurice picked up--in his case the expression, usually ridiculous, was absolutely applicable--Sicilian with a readiness that seemed to Hermione almost miraculous. He showed no delight in the musical beauty of Italian. What he wanted, and what his mind--or was it rather what his ears and his tongue and his lips?--took, and held and revelled in, was the Sicilian dialect spoken by Lucrezia and Gaspare when they were together, spoken by the peasants of Marechiaro and of the mountains. To Hermione Gaspare had always talked Italian, incorrect, but still Italian, and she spoke no dialect, although she could often guess at what the Sicilians meant when they addressed her in their vigorous but uncouth jargon, different from Italian almost as Gaelic is from English. But Maurice very soon began to speak a few words of Sicilian. Hermione laughed at him and discouraged him jokingly, telling him that he must learn Italian thoroughly, the language of love, the most melodious language in the world.

"Italian!" he said. "What's the use of it? I want to talk to the people.

A grammar! I won't open it. Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Gaspare came rushing bareheaded to them in the sun.

"The signora says I'm to learn Italian, but I say that I've Sicilian blood in my veins and must talk as you do."

"But I, signore, can speak Italian!" said Gaspare, with twinkling pride.

"As a bear dances. No, professor, you and I, we'll be good patriots.

We'll speak in our mother-tongue. You rascal, you know we've begun already."

And looking mischievously at Hermione, he began to sing in a loud, warm voice: