Again and again the shots rang out. It seemed to Hermione that she knew which were fired by Maurice and which by Gaspare, and she whispered to herself "That's Maurice!" when she fancied one was his. Presently she was aware of some slight change and wondered what it was. Something had ceased, and its cessation recalled her mind to her surroundings. She looked round her, then down to the ravine, and then at once she understood. There was no more music from the ceramella. Lucrezia had met Sebastiano under the olives. That was certain. Hermione smiled. Her woman's imagination pictured easily enough why the player had stopped. She hoped Lucrezia was happy. Her first words, still more her manner, had shown Hermione the depth of her heart. There was fire there, fire that burned before a shrine when she prayed to the Madonna della Rocca. She was ready even to be badly treated if only she might have Sebastiano. It seemed to be all one to her. She had no illusions, but her heart knew what it needed.
Crack went the pistol up on the mountain-top.
"That's not Maurice!" Hermione thought.
There was another report, then another.
"That last one was Maurice!"
Lucrezia did not seem even to expect a man to be true and faithful. Perhaps she knew the Sicilian character too well. Hermione lifted her face up and looked towards the mountain. Her mind had gone once more to the Thames Embankment. As once she had mentally put Gaspare beside Artois, so now she mentally put Lucrezia. Lucrezia distrusted the south, and she was of it. Men must be as God had made them, she said, and evidently she thought that God had made them to run wild, careless of woman's feelings, careless of everything save their own vagrant desires. The tarantella—that was the dance of the soil here, the dance of the blood. And in the tarantella each of the dancers seemed governed by his own sweet will, possessed by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence, giving himself up joyously, eagerly, utterly—to what? To his whim. Was the tarantella an allegory of life here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of separation which brought with it a faint and creeping melancholy.
She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly the sound of the firing was distressing to her, almost sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music better. For it suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith, and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian. But the reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death, ugly things.
"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing up towards the mountain-top. "Maurice!"
The pistol made reply. They had not heard her. They were too far or were too intent upon their sport to hear.