"Ora basta, ch' è tardu: jamu ad accumpagnari li Zitti!" he continued, pronouncing the time-honored sentence which, at a rustic wedding, gives the signal to the musicians to stop their playing, and to the assembled company the hint that the moment has come to escort the bride to the new home which her bridegroom has prepared for her.
Maddalena laughed and blushed all over her face, and Salvatore shouted out a verse of a marriage song in high favor at Sicilian weddings:
"E cu saluti a li Zituzzi novi!
Chi bellu 'nguaggiamentu furtunatu!
Firma la menti, custanti lu cori,
E si cci arriva a lu jornu biatu—"
Meanwhile, Maurice helped Maddalena onto her donkey, and paid and dismissed the boy who had brought it and Salvatore's beast from Marechiaro. Then he took out his watch.
"A quarter-past ten," he said. "Off we go! Now, Gaspare—uno! due! tre!"
They leaped simultaneously onto their donkeys, Salvatore clambered up on his, and the little cavalcade started off on the long, white road that ran close along the sea, Maddalena and Maurice in the van, Salvatore and Gaspare behind. Just at first they all kept close together, but Sicilians are very careful of their festa clothes, and soon Salvatore and Gaspare dropped farther behind to avoid the clouds of dust stirred up by the tripping feet of the donkeys in front. Their chattering voices died away, and when Maurice looked back he saw them at a distance which rendered his privacy with Maddalena more complete than anything he had dared to hope for so early in the day. Yet now that they were thus alone he felt as if he had nothing to say to her. He did not feel exactly constrained, but it seemed to him that, to-day, he could not talk the familiar commonplaces to her, or pay her obvious compliments. They might, they would please her, but something in himself would resent them. This was to be such a great day. He had wanted it with such ardor, he had been so afraid of missing it, he had gained it at the cost of so much self-respect, that it ought to be extraordinary from dawn to dark, and he and Maddalena to be unusual, intense—something, at least, more eager, more happy, more intimate than usual in it.
And then, too, as he looked at her riding along by the sea, with her young head held rather high and a smile of innocent pride in her eyes, he remembered that this day was their good-bye. Maddalena did not know that. Probably she did not think about the future. But he knew it. They might meet again. They would doubtless meet again. But it would all be different. He would be a serious married man, who could no longer frolic as if he were still a boy like Gaspare. This was the last day of his intimate friendship with Maddalena.
That seemed to him very strange. He had become accustomed to her society, to her naïve curiosity, her girlish, simple gayety, so accustomed to it all that he could not imagine life without it, could scarcely realize what life had been before he knew Maddalena. It seemed to him that he must have always known Maddalena. And she—what did she feel about that?
"Maddalena!" he said.
"Si, signore."