Chapter Twelve.
“Wasn’t I right? Come, confess that I was right?”
The question came of course from triumphant Mrs Maxwell, the centre of a group standing on the steps of the Greek theatre at Taormina. They looked on one side, over the rose-red ruins, at Etna, sweeping magnificently upwards into snow, at his purple slopes, his classic shore, then, facing round, they headed a sea divinely full of light, and saw across it aerial mountain ridges faintly cut against the sky.
“Oh, you were right,” said Wilbraham presently. “You deserve a splendid chorus in your honour, and this is the place in which to raise it.”
“There’s a German down there already declaiming Shakespeare to his wife,” announced Teresa, running to look over the edge on tiptoe.
“So long as you give me the credit, I’ll let you off the chorus,” said Mrs Maxwell, magnanimously; “and I’ll own more, I’ll own that if it hadn’t been for Peppina I should never have stood out. She knows how to get round me,” she added with a sigh.
“Nina, on the contrary, hasn’t come willingly at all.”
“She upset the oil just before starting yesterday,” said Sylvia hurriedly, “and that’s so unlucky! Wasn’t it unfortunate?”
“Very,” Wilbraham said drily.
“Look,” interposed Teresa—“look at that sheet of pink against the blue. That’s almond blossom. Oh, I must have some!”
When she went into her room at the Castello-a-mare before dinner, there lay bunches of the beautiful blossoms. She gave a cry of delight, and fell to sticking them about in all imaginable places. Nina, who came after her, explained that Wilbraham had brought them himself.
“Arms full,” she said, spreading out her own with a gay laugh.
And Teresa was touched, thinking that it must have cost him something to turn himself into a maypole for her pleasure. He was improving. She decked Sylvia with several of the pink flowers before going in to dinner, for only a pleasant Hungarian doctor and his wife would be there besides themselves, and twisted some into her own dress. The sisters went in together. Wilbraham was standing alone at the end of the room.
“Thank you for the almond blossom,” Teresa called out cheerfully. “There you see the result.”
And she made a little movement of her hand towards Sylvia, who stood like a charming woodland picture of Spring, all white and pink. But Wilbraham glanced coldly.
“I sent them to you,” he said with a touch of reproach in his tone which made Teresa open her eyes.
“Brought them, I hear,” she said teasingly. “It was heroic of you. How many ‘Buon giorno’s’ and ‘Porto io’s’ had you to face? I didn’t believe I could so quickly have got tired of the words. As we came along I heard mothers urging tiny shy babies of two or three—‘Vai, vai, di buon giorno, un soldo signora!’ They are so pretty, too! And the creatures, pertinacious as they are, bear no malice when one is cross; just laugh and make way for another troop.”
“Walter says that one ought not to give to beggars,” Sylvia announced.
“Ah! I shall, though, when a baby says ‘Bon zorno!’”
“For pity’s sake don’t make me out a prig, Sylvia!”
He spoke almost roughly, and Teresa fired.
“You should be flattered at her remembering your commands!”
“Was I rude? I beg your pardon,” said Wilbraham quickly.
But had Mrs Brodrick been in the room, she would have observed that he begged his pardon from Teresa.
If the first day carried with it a touch of uneasiness, those that followed swept by for some of them in a dream of enchantment.
The Castello-a-mare, where they were, stands a little out of the town, perched on the very top of the road which zigzags up from the station. And the view! There, ever-changing in colour, its blue and opal and tenderest green melting through each other or growing into dazzling brightness, lies the most classical of seas; far away behind a fine sweep of coast is Syracuse, a nearer promontory marks the first settlement of Greeks in Calypso’s lovely island; to your right, sweeps up the great volcano, with heart of fire and crest of snow, and all the foreground is broken and steep, with growth of almonds, and fennel, and tree-spurge. Sometimes the outlook is radiant beyond words; it is often so at sunrise, when Etna has flung off clouds, and his eternal snows flush rosy pink above the soft blue mists of the plain. Then everything is so light, so fresh, so sparkling, that it will make even a tired heart believe the old world and all its life is young again. But there are other times when storms rush madly forwards, and the sea grows grey, and the slopes of Etna are sullen purple, and wind and rain battle each other passionately on the heights of Taormina. You look with fear, and lo, the fierce southern rage is over, the clouds are gone, and, faint and lovely at first, presently out laughs the ethereal blue again.
A sketching fever possessed Donna Teresa. The others, clambering up and down the dirty, narrow, stony lanes, would come upon her sitting alone and profoundly content before some arcaded window set in a wall, an orange-tree peeping from behind the dainty centre shaft, unbroken blue above. Or she might be found under Duca Stefano’s tower, peaceful now after, so says tradition, its strange and wicked cruelties, where, for a few soldi, you may rest undisturbed in a wilderness garden, and look through palms at a luminous sea, or at queer corners of houses with deep eaves and wooden balconies, where bright rags flutter, vines clamber, and women lean for gossip. High behind is a sweep of arid hill, rough with prickly pear, and catching the shadow of every passing cloud and the glory of the sun as it sinks behind Etna.
And it was for these minutes that Wilbraham—as yet unconsciously—lived.
Then one day he came upon her in the Greek theatre.
Little of the Greek is left, except here and there a white pillar, or a slab built into the wall, for where marble had shone the Romans have set their brickwork. But who can quarrel with brick which takes such glory of colour and offers such crannies for tufted weeds, hanging in delicate masses of yellow, white, and green? Teresa had laid down her brushes, and with her chin resting on her hands was looking through a nobly-rounded arch at that view which is surely all but satisfying. White clouds wrapped Etna, but between them pierced an occasional whiteness which was not cloud, and, below, the purple slopes swept in great curves, taking strange greens and violets as they advanced. Only one building broke their line, the Dominican monastery, and that, with the mysterious gloom of fading day upon it, and the ground falling precipitously in front, did no more than add a suggestive human interest to the grandeur it shared.
The spot always moved Teresa, but she liked to keep her emotions to herself; and as Wilbraham came towards her, she sprang to her feet, and began to gather two or three of the dwarf irises which starred the grass.
“Are you going?” he said in a disappointed tone. “Have you finished painting so soon?”
“I refuse to caricature, and so I haven’t begun,” she replied with a gay laugh. “What have you done with Sylvia?”
“Gone to tea.”
“Oh, tea!”—she looked at her watch.
“And what brought you here? Were you afraid I should be briganded between the Messina gate and the hotel?”
“Not in the least. I should as soon expect you to have an encounter with the shade of Dionysios.”
She began to stroll round the face of the grass slope which sweeps up to where the poorer people stood to see the plays.
“Nina would not agree with you,” she said suddenly; “she throws out mysterious hints of bad characters in Sicily.”
“I daresay. If one went into the interior and out of the beaten track, for instance; but here, where strangers are their best harvest, they wouldn’t be disposed to snipe them. Self-interest would go hand-in-hand with law and order, you see.”
“And that’s the best you’ll say?”
“Oh, well,” he allowed carelessly, “I own they’re wretchedly poor and I shouldn’t like to live myself on a hunch of bread and a root of fennel. Won’t you sit down?”
She turned to answer, hesitated, finally dropped on the grass. A lighter, tenderer view lay before them here. For now the sea filled the openings between the brickwork—the many-coloured sea along which Ulysses rowed—and there was the line of coast above which Polyphemus herded his flocks, and flung Cyclopean rocks at his tormentors.
“I can’t,” she said unexpectedly.
“Can’t what?”
“Realise their misery with all this beauty around. It’s heartless, hateful, but one pushes out the other.”
“Let it go,” he said, watching her changing face.
“It must,” she smiled. “All the same I shall hush up my conscience in ways which will shock you. Look!” She drew from her pocket a handful of soldi. “I mean the children to have a real good time, in spite of you and Sylvia.”
She tossed pennies into the air and caught them, without noticing that a sudden silence had fallen.
Wilbraham had gone on day after day refusing to look before him, refusing to go beyond the events of the day. He was often irritated or provoked by Sylvia; but often, alas, he was happy, without asking himself why. Now, all of a sudden it flashed upon him that it was Teresa’s nearness, and with the knowledge rushed a wild, scarcely controllable, impulse to strain her in his arms. The self-control of all his years luckily came to his help, and the young marchesa, looking out at the lovely world before her, and thinking of nothing less than her companion, except as he touched Sylvia’s life, was quite unconscious of the struggle in the man’s heart.
“We ought to go—I suppose,” she said reluctantly, without moving.
Wilbraham was silent. Unseen by her, he was fingering a fold of her dress which lay on the grass close to him. Teresa laughed lightly the next minute.
“It is a pity, isn’t it, that one never can enjoy an exquisite moment without thinking what has to be done in the next? At least I can’t.”
“Why should one think?” he said. His voice sounded so queerly in his own ears that he half hoped, half feared, she must detect something, “No; as I say, it’s a pity, it’s stupid. I suppose it’s the penalty one has to pay for the drive of life.”
“Tell me—” he began and suddenly stopped. She looked round, surprised.
“Tell you what?”
“No, I won’t say it.”
She thought he might be going to ask something about Sylvia, and wondered how she could help him.
“As we are here,” she said, “we may as well see the sunset.”
For already there was a throb of pink in the clear western sky, pink, of which the almond blossom seemed the reflection. Teresa’s face was turned from him to watch it grow, and for a long time neither spoke. It was a dangerous silence, had she but known it. At last she drew a deep breath.
“There must be a golden sea on the other side of Etna,” she said, “and I wish I was there. Don’t you?”
“No. I’m content.”
She laughed, and sprang up.
“No? Well this ought to content one, certainly. But to punish you for not fretting after the unattainable, I am going back.”
He followed silently, and they said very little as they went down the uneven street, past the Palazzo Corvaij, where slender columns support Gothic arches, and bands of black lava contrast with yellow stone, past the vast dark holes in which the people live and die and have shops and make merry, and so out of the little hillside town by the Messina gate. But just as they reached a great sumach-tree in a bend of the road, Teresa, who had been thinking, put an imprudent question—
“Do you really never want the unattainable?”
Wilbraham’s hands were clenched, his face turned away.
“Oh, my God!” he cried, under his breath, “do I not!”