The voice was speaking now with a sort of whimsical and half-pathetic merriment, as if inclined to break into laughter at its own childish wistfulness.
"M'ama; nun m'ama?"
It broke off. He heard a little laugh. Then the song began again:
"Maju viju, e maju cògghiu,
Bona sorti di Diù vògghiu;
Ciuri di maju cògghiu a la campía,
Diù, pinzàticci vu a la sorti mia!"
The voice was not in the house. Delarey was sure of that now. He was almost sure, too, that it was the same voice which had cried out to him from the rocks. Moving with precaution, he stole round the house to the farther side, which looked out upon the open sea, keeping among the trees, which grew thickly about the house on three sides, but which left it unprotected to the sea-winds on the fourth.
A girl was standing in this open space, alone, looking seaward, with one arm out-stretched, one hand laid lightly, almost caressingly, upon the gnarled trunk of a solitary old olive-tree, the other arm hanging at her side. She was dressed in some dark, coarse stuff, with a short skirt, and a red handkerchief tied round her head, and seemed in the pale and almost ghastly light in which night and day were drawing near to each other to be tall and slim of waist. Her head was thrown back, as if she were drinking in the breeze that heralded the dawn—drinking it in like a voluptuary.
Delarey stood and watched her. He could not see her face.
She spoke some words in dialect in a clear voice. There was no one else visible. Evidently she was talking to herself. Presently she laughed again, and began to sing once more:
"Maju viju, e maju cògghiu,
A la me'casa guaj nu' nni vògghiu;
Ciuri di maju cògghiu a la campía,
Oru ed argentu a la sacchetta mia!"
There was an African sound in the girl's voice—a sound of mystery that suggested heat and a force that could be languorous and stretch itself at ease. She was singing the song the Sicilian peasant girls join in on the first of May, when the ciuri di maju is in blossom, and the young countrywomen go forth in merry bands to pick the flower of May, and, turning their eyes to the wayside shrine, or, if there be none near, to the east and the rising sun, lift their hands full of the flowers above their heads, and, making the sign of the cross, murmur devoutly: