"She is the loveliest creature on the island, and as good as she is beautiful. She came as straight from the heart of Nature as a flower or a bird's song. Neither poetry nor painting could ever grasp the freshness of her wild sweetness: one must see her to know the abject poverty of their highest efforts."
To hear such adolescent rubbish from middle-aged lips what sensible mortal would not have giggled in his sleeve?
Strangely enough, it was the donkey-woman who proved her good sense and surprised them both not only by laughing discordantly aloud, but by speaking in very broken but intelligible English: "Si, si, I remember. And why have you come back to the island, signor?"
Actually, the bachelor blushed. "To marry Antonia," he said as bashfully as if he weighed one hundred instead of two hundred and twenty pounds, "and to remain on this savagely-beautiful isle all the rest of my life."
This he had said in Italian. But he continued, half musingly, in his mother tongue: "I could not take her away with me then, even though I loved her with all my heart and she was willing to share my poverty. I had not the heart to see her pine and pale in narrow city streets. I knew that she was a wild flower that would lose fragrance and beauty, would die, if transplanted from its native soil. I went away to earn money enough that I might come back and live with my darling where only she could live at her best. I have worked hard for her in all these years. I know I ought to have come sooner, but it insensibly grew a habit with me each year to wait yet one year more, that I might come to her a little richer. But I have come at last. I have sent her letters and presents each year, and she has written me often through some amanuensis, for she cannot write herself; and I am come to her able to say truly that she is the only woman I ever loved, or ever imagined myself to have loved, in all my life."
How little that man dreamed who heard him say this—that one heard him who for fifteen long years had guarded in the purest crystal of her memory the belief, "though all things fade and die, and even he forget me, yet once he loved me"! This to her, the faded, slight little old maid, thumping up and down on her donkey like a Neapolitan girl's fist on her tambourine, whose crystal-guarded treasure turned to dust before her eyes, and who knew thus for the first time that it was but a spurious treasure she had guarded since that summer by the sea!
She seemed somehow much smaller and paler, more faded and wrinkled, than before, when the donkey-woman laughed again. That unlovely creature said, with witch-like laughter, "You told Antonia that you loved her better than Giuseppe ever could—that you would marry her and make her a signora who should wear a gold ring and have shoes for every day. You went away saying that you would come back when you had sold your pictures. You have not come back until to-day, and you come back to laugh at poor Antonia for being such a fool as to believe a foreign signor would tell the truth to an island-girl."
She gave a thundering thwack upon the donkeys' flanks as the party rushed across the tiny lava-paved piazza where all the island was gathered to see the new arrivals pass on through a dusky-arched street to the albergo-door.
The cook, chambermaid, landlord, facchino and landlady rushed to bid the travellers welcome in island fashion. The landlord was barefooted; the landlady was the fruitful bough from which hung an apple-shaped infant; the cook, chambermaid and facchino were each armed with the insignia of their different professions—stewpan, broom and blacking-brush.
Returning their salutations, the gentleman and lady descended from their steeds. Mr. Shaw turned to pay the donkey-woman for her services.