That thought was almost more terrible than the thought that God had been cruel to her.
She sat for a long time wondering, thinking, but not praying. She did not feel as if she could ever pray any more. The world was lighted up by the sun. The sea began to gleam, the coast-line to grow more distinct, the outlines of the mountains and of the Saracenic Castle on the height opposite to her more hard and more barbaric against the deepening blue. She saw smoke coming from the mouth of Etna, sideways, as if blown towards the sea. A shepherd boy piped somewhere below her. And still the tune was the tarantella. She listened to it—the tarantella. So short a time ago Maurice had danced with the boys upon the terrace! How can such life be so easily extinguished? How can such joy be not merely clouded but utterly destroyed? A moment, and from the body everything is expelled; light from the eyes, speech from the lips, movement from the limbs, joy, passion from the heart. How can such a thing be?
The little shepherd boy played on and on. He was nearer now. He was ascending the slope of the mountain, coming up towards heaven with his little happy tune. She heard him presently among the oak-trees immediately below her, passing almost at her feet.
To Hermione the thin sound of the reed-flute always had suggested Arcady. Even now it suggested Arcady—the Arcady of the imagination: wide soft airs, blue skies and seas, eternal sunshine and delicious shade, and happiness where is a sweet noise of waters and of birds, a sweet and deep breathing of kind and bounteous nature.
And that little boy with the flute would die. His foot might slip now as he came upward, and no more could he play souls into Arcady!
The tune wound away to her left, like a gay and careless living thing that was travelling ever upward, then once more came towards her. But now it was above her. She turned her head and she saw the little player against the blue. He was on a rock, and for a moment he stood still. On his head was a long woollen cap, hanging over at one side. It made Hermione think of the woollen cap she had seen come out of the darkness of the ravine as she waited with Gaspare for the padrone. Against the blue, standing on the gray and sunlit rock, with the flute at his lips, and his tiny, deep-brown fingers moving swiftly, he looked at one with the mountain and yet almost unearthly, almost as if the blue had given birth to him for a moment, and in a moment would draw him back again into the womb of its wonder. His goats were all around him, treading delicately among the rocks. As Hermione watched he turned and went away into the blue, and the tarantella went away into the blue with him.
Her Sicilian and his tarantella, the tarantella of his joy in Sicily—they had gone away into the blue.
She looked at it, deep, quivering, passionate, intense; thousands and thousands of miles of blue! And she listened as she looked; listened for some far-off tarantella, for some echo of a fainting tarantella, that might be a message to her, a message left on the sweet air of the enchanted island, telling her where the winged feet of her beloved one mounted towards the sun.