"Was it a great storm? One day you told me that you have many mariners among your forefathers. Have you been thinking to-day of your home on the dunes? Are you homesick for the sand? Do you wish to go back there? You have worked a great deal there, and have done great work. It is a consecrated house. Your mother was with you while you worked. You could hear her stepping softly in the next room. Sometimes she stopped to listen, did she not?"
He embraced her silently. That voice penetrated his very soul, and refreshed it.
"And your sister was with you, too? You told me her name once, and I have not forgotten it. She is called Sofia. I know that she is like you. I should like to hear her speak once, or to watch her walking along the road. Once you praised her hands. They are beautiful, are they not? You told me one day that when she is sad her hands hurt her, as if they were the roots of her soul. That is what you said—'the roots of her soul.'"
He listened, almost happy. How had she discovered the secret of soothing him, the balm for his soul? From what hidden spring did she draw the fluid melody of those memories?
"Sofia never will know the good she has done to the poor traveler. I know little of Sofia herself, but I know that she resembles you, and I have often pictured her to myself. I can see her at this moment. When I have been in distant countries, far-away among strangers, feeling almost lost, she has appeared to me often, and borne me company. She has appeared to me suddenly, when I had neither called nor expected her. Once I saw her at Mürren, where I had arrived after a long, weary journey, made in order to see a poor friend who was at the point of death. Day was breaking; the mountains had that cold, delicate color of beryl that is seen only among glaciers. Why did she come? We waited, together. The sun touched the summits of the mountains. Then a brilliant rainbow crowned them for a moment, then vanished. And Sofia vanished with the rainbow, with the miracle."
He listened, almost happy. Were not all the beauty and all the truth that he himself would like to express contained in a stone, or in a flower of those mountains? The most tragic struggle of human passions was not worth the apparition of that mystic light upon the eternal snows.
"And another time?" he asked softly, for the pause was long, and he feared that she would not continue. She smiled, then looked sad.
"Another time I was at Alexandria in Egypt, in a time of confused horror, as if after a shipwreck. The city had an aspect of putrefaction, like a city in decay. I remember: a street full of muddy water; a white horse, thin as a skeleton, that splashed in the water, its mane and tail of an ochre color; the turrets of an Arabian cemetery, the far-away gleam of the marsh of Mareotis. What misery! What disgust!"
"Oh, dear soul, never, never again shall you be left alone and despairing," said Stelio in his heart, now filled with fraternal tenderness for the nomad woman who recalled the sadness of her continual wanderings.
"And another time?" he said aloud.