It was not nearly so picturesque as she had hoped, she confessed to herself, as her thoughts came down to their customary level. The vineyard of her dreams, with its long, trailing vines, was not found in this country; there were only close-clipped plants trained to stakes. But there was a sound of talking and of laughter, and the pickers, moving among the even lines in their gay rags, lent motley color to the picture. There was scarlet of waistcoat or of petticoat, blue and saffron of jacket and apron, and a blending of all bright tints in the kerchiefs above the hair. The rich dark soil made a background for it all: the moving figures, the clumps of pale green vine leaves, the great baskets of piled-up grapes.
Assunta was chattering eagerly with a young man who smiled, and took off his hat to the Signorina, and said something polite, with a show of white teeth. Daphne did not know what it was, but she took the pair of scissors that were given her, and began to cut bunch after bunch of grapes. If she had realized that the peasant woman, her heart full of shame, had confessed to the overseer her young lady's whim, and had won permission for her to join the ranks of the pickers, she might have been less happy. As it was, she noticed nothing, but diligently cut her grapes, piling them, misty with bloom, flecked with gold sunlights, in her basket. Then she found a flat stone and sat on it, watching the workers and slowly eating a great bunch of grapes. She had woven green leaves into the cord of her red felt hat; the peasants as they passed smiled back to her in swift recognition of her friendliness and charm.
Her thoughts flamed up within her with sudden anger at herself. This vivid joy in the encompassing beauty had but one meaning: it was her sense of the glad presence of this new creature, man or god, who seemed continually with her, were he near or far.
"I'm as foolish as a sixteen-year-old girl," she murmured, fingering the grapes in the basket with their setting of green leaves, "and yet, and yet he isn't a man, really; he is only a state of mind!"
She sat, with the cool air of autumn on her cheeks, watching the pickers, who went with even motion up the great slope. Sometimes there was silence on the hillside; now and then there was a fragment of song. One gay, tripping air, started by three women who stood idle with arms akimbo for a moment on the hillside, was caught up and echoed back by invisible singers on the other side of the hill. And once the red-cheeked Italian lads who were carrying loaded baskets down toward the vineyard gates burst into responsive singing that made her think that she had found, on the Roman hills, some remnant of the old Bacchic music, of the alternate strains that marked the festival of the god of wine. It was something like this:—
Carlo.
"Of all the gifts of all the gods
I choose the ruddy wine.
The brimming glass shall be my lot"—
Giovanni (interrupting).
"Carlotta shall be mine!
Take you the grape, I only ask
The shadow of the vine
To screen Carlotta's golden head"—
Carlo (interrupting).