"Yes, do!" begged all the children, crowding round Mr. Stacey. "We want to hear your English story!"
"It's not an English one, but a very old Greek one. Shall we rest on this wall while I tell it? Luigia shall come on my knee. Yes, there's room for Pepino too, and Gaspare and Vincent may sit next to me. Well, in the old Golden Age, when the world was young, Ceres, the Goddess of the Harvest, who gave all the fruits of earth to men, had a beautiful daughter named Proserpine, or, as the Greeks called her, Persephone. She made Sicily her place of residence, and she and her nymphs used to delight themselves with its flowery meadows and limpid streams, and beautiful views. One day she and her companions were wandering in the plain of Enna, gathering flowers, when there suddenly appeared the god Pluto, king of Hades, the regions of the dead. Falling in love with beautiful Proserpine, he seized her, and forced her to get into his chariot. She screamed to her maidens, but they could not help her, and Pluto carried her off. With his trident he struck a hole in the ground, so that chariot and horses fell through into Hades, of which place Proserpine became the queen. Now Ceres did not know what had happened to her daughter, and she wandered all over the earth seeking for her. At last she found Proserpine's girdle on the surface of the waters of a fountain where Pluto had struck his hole in the ground, and the nymph Arethusa told her how her daughter had been stolen away. Full of indignation, Ceres went to complain to Jupiter, who promised that Proserpine should be restored if she had taken nothing to eat in the realm of Hades. Unfortunately Proserpine, as she walked in the Elysian fields, had gathered and eaten a pomegranate, which act constituted her a subject of those regions. To pacify Ceres, Jupiter permitted that Proserpine should spend six months of every year with Pluto in Hades, and the other six months with her mother on earth. Each spring Ceres went to the entrance of a great gloomy grotto to meet her daughter, and with her return all the flowers bloomed on earth again. There is a very celebrated picture by Sir Frederick Leighton, called 'The Return of Persephone.' The artist has painted Ceres at the entrance of the grotto with the sunshine behind her, holding out her arms to the lovely daughter whom the god Mercury is bringing back to her out of the darkness.
"The story is one of those old nature myths of which the Greeks were so fond. The time Proserpine spent in Hades symbolized winter, when winds blew cold, and few flowers bloomed, and her return symbolized the advent of spring. It has a deeper meaning, also, to those who look for it, because it is a type of the Resurrection, and shows that our dear ones are not really taken from us, but will come again in more glorious life and beauty. Many of the old Greek myths had this meaning hidden under them, as if they were sent to prepare people for the truth that Christ was to reveal more fully later on. Nearly all early religions began with pure and beautiful conceptions of God, and then trailed down to earth, because their followers were too ignorant to understand. The ancient Egyptians believed in God, and said that one of His attributes was strength. The strongest thing they knew was a bull, so they made colossal statues of bulls in black marble, to show God's strength, but the populace worshipped the statues instead of God himself, and became idolaters. In the same way the ancient Greeks realized that Beauty was part of God's scheme of work, and they came to worship Beauty quite apart from Goodness, forgetting that the two must go together. They imagined their gods and goddesses as magnificent men and women, with superb bodies but no beauty of soul, and as there was nothing uplifting in this religion, it soon died out, as all things die in time, if they don't help us to grow nearer to God. The story of Proserpine is one of the prettiest of the old Greek legends, and I can just imagine her gathering these lovely flowers. I believe we're going on to see her fountain, aren't we, Vittore? She made it with her tears when Pluto carried her off."
The object of the expedition was indeed to see Proserpine's fountain, a clear spring out of which flowed a small river. After walking another mile across the meadows, the party came to this river, where they were able to engage boats to row them up to the fount. It was a unique spot, for the whole of the banks were bordered with an avenue of papyrus, which grew there in greatest profusion. Legend said that it had been planted by an Egyptian princess who brought it from the Nile, and that it grew in no other place in Europe, a statement which was satisfactory enough, though rather difficult to verify. There was much bargaining, after true Sicilian fashion, with the native boatmen, who demanded at least four times what they meant to take, protesting that they would be ruined at the sum Ernesto named to them, and finally, when he pretended to walk away, accepting his offer with enthusiasm. This very necessary preliminary satisfactorily settled, the company was packed into the small boats, about four going in each. In the distribution of the guests occurred the first hitch in the Ingletons' visit. Mr. Stacey suggested that it was advisable to sandwich children and grown-ups, and he and Lilias started in the first "barca" in charge of little Luigia, Vincent, and Pepino. Dulcie and Douglas were responsible for Gaspare, Rosalia, and Nina, while Vittore, and Aimée, Claude, and Bertram went together. Carmel held Tito and Berta each by a hand, and Ernesto helped them all three into a boat. Everard was in the very act of jumping in after them, when Ernesto stopped him.
"Excuse me, Signore, that is my place! There is plenty of room for you in the other boat."
"And surely in this too?" said Everard, flushing with annoyance.
Ernesto shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, no! You and I are too heavy to be together. Vittore and the others are light; you will just make weight." And, stepping in, Ernesto took his seat beside Carmel, and told the boatman to push off, while Everard, with a face like a thundercloud, joined the younger children.
Up the narrow little river the light boats pushed, under an overhanging archway of papyrus reeds, so that they seemed as if penetrating through a green jungle. The boatmen began to sing Sicilian folk-songs, and Vittore and Rosalia and Tito and some of the others joined in. To everyone except Everard the excursion was delightful, but he, considering himself treated with scant politeness, sat sulking in Vittore's boat, and would scarcely speak to Aimée, who made a really heroic effort to amuse him.
Proserpine's fountain, where after half an hour's rowing the boatmen took them, was a clear deep pool reflecting the blue of the sky, and encircled with papyrus, donax reeds, and beautiful irises. It seemed a fit setting for the legend of antiquity, and a fertile imagination could almost conjure up a vision of Pluto, with his chariot and black horses, carrying off the lovely nymph from her meadows of flowers to his gloomy realm of darkness. On the way back the second boat made a halt to cut some pieces of papyrus reed, and Dulcie called out in much excitement to the occupants of the other "barcas."