E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell,
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Transcriber's Notes:

Some minor changes have been made to correct typographical errors and inconsistencies.
The original book has no table of contents. In this version I have added one to allow the reader to jump to a particular chapter.

THE CALL

OF THE

BLOOD

ROBERT HICHENS

AUTHOR OF
"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

MCMVI

Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
Published October, 1906.

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE

CALL OF THE BLOOD

Go to chapter.

THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

I

On a dreary afternoon of November, when London was closely wrapped in a yellow fog, Hermione Lester was sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton Place reading a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from the writer of the letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to her on the previous day that he was coming over from Paris by the night train and boat.

Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten in height, flat, thin, but strongly built, with a large waist and limbs which, though vigorous, were rather unwieldy. Her face was plain: rather square and harsh in outline, with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good complexion, clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and slightly prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy, and brightness, full, too, of eager intelligence and of energy, eyes of a woman who was intensely alive both in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look most attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent from her body but was present in her eyes, which showed forth the spirit in her with a glorious frankness and a keen intensity. Nevertheless, despite these eyes and her thickly growing, warm-colored, and wavy brown hair, she was a plain, almost an ugly woman, whose attractive force issued from within, inviting inquiry and advance, as the flame of a fire does, playing on the blurred glass of a window with many flaws in it.

Hermione was, in fact, found very attractive by a great many people of varying temperaments and abilities, who were captured by her spirit and by her intellect, the soul of the woman and the brains, and who, while seeing clearly and acknowledging frankly the plainness of her face and the almost masculine ruggedness of her form, said, with a good deal of truth, that "somehow they didn't seem to matter in Hermione." Whether Hermione herself was of this opinion not many knew. Her general popularity, perhaps, made the world incurious about the subject.

The room in which Hermione was reading the letters of Artois was small and crammed with books. There were books in cases uncovered by glass from floor to ceiling, some in beautiful bindings, but many in tattered paper covers, books that looked as if they had been very much read. On several tables, among photographs and vases of flowers, were more books and many magazines, both English and foreign. A large writing-table was littered with notes and letters. An upright grand-piano stood open, with a quantity of music upon it. On the thick Persian carpet before the fire was stretched a very large St. Bernard dog, with his muzzle resting on his paws and his eyes blinking drowsily in serene contentment.

As Hermione read the letters one by one her face showed a panorama of expressions, almost laughably indicative of her swiftly passing thoughts. Sometimes she smiled. Once or twice she laughed aloud, startling the dog, who lifted his massive head and gazed at her with profound inquiry. Then she shook her head, looked grave, even sad, or earnest and full of sympathy, which seemed longing to express itself in a torrent of comforting words. Presently she put the letters together, tied them up carelessly with a piece of twine, and put them back into the drawer from which she had taken them. Just as she had finished doing this the door of the room, which was ajar, was pushed softly open, and a dark-eyed, Eastern-looking boy dressed in livery appeared.

"What is it, Selim?" asked Hermione, in French.

"Monsieur Artois, madame."

"Emile!" cried Hermione, getting up out of her chair with a sort of eager slowness. "Where is he?"

"He is here!" said a loud voice, also speaking French.

Selim stood gracefully aside, and a big man stepped into the room and took the two hands which Hermione stretched out in his.

"Don't let any one else in, Selim," said Hermione to the boy.

"Especially the little Townly," said Artois, menacingly.

"Hush, Emile! Not even Miss Townly if she calls, Selim."

Selim smiled with grave intelligence at the big man, said, "I understand, madame," and glided out.

"Why, in Heaven's name, have you—you, pilgrim of the Orient—insulted the East by putting Selim into a coat with buttons and cloth trousers?" exclaimed Artois, still holding Hermione's hands.

"It's an outrage, I know. But I had to. He was stared at and followed, and he actually minded it. As soon as I found out that, I trampled on all my artistic prejudices, and behold him—horrible but happy! Thank you for coming—thank you."

She let his hands go, and they stood for a moment looking at each other in the firelight.

Artois was a tall man of about forty-three, with large, almost Herculean limbs, a handsome face, with regular but rather heavy features, and very big gray eyes, that always looked penetrating and often melancholy. His forehead was noble and markedly intellectual, and his well-shaped, massive head was covered with thick, short, mouse-colored hair. He wore a mustache and a magnificent beard. His barber, who was partly responsible for the latter, always said of it that it was the "most beautiful fan-shaped beard in Paris," and regarded it with a pride which was probably shared by its owner. His hands and feet were good, capable-looking, but not clumsy, and his whole appearance gave an impression of power, both physical and intellectual, and of indomitable will combined with subtlety. He was well dressed, fashionably not artistically, yet he suggested an artist, not necessarily a painter. As he looked at Hermione the smile which had played about his lips when he entered the little room died away.

"I've come to hear about it all," he said, in his resonant voice—a voice which matched his appearance. "Do you know"—and here his accent was grave, almost reproachful—"that in all your letters to me—I looked them over before I left Paris—there is no allusion, not one, to this Monsieur Delarey."

"Why should there be?" she answered.

She sat down, but Artois continued to stand.

"We seldom wrote of persons, I think. We wrote of events, ideas, of work, of conditions of life; of man, woman, child—yes—but not often of special men, women, children. I am almost sure—in fact, quite sure, for I've just been reading them—that in your letters to me there is very little discussion of our mutual friends, less of friends who weren't common to us both."

As she spoke she stretched out a long, thin arm, and pulled open the drawer into which she had put the bundle tied with twine.

"They're all in here."

"You don't lock that drawer?"

"Never."

He looked at her with a sort of severity.

"I lock the door of the room, or, rather, it locks itself. You haven't noticed it?"

"No."

"It's the same as the outer door of a flat. I have a latch-key to it."

He said nothing, but smiled. All the sudden grimness had gone out of his face.

Hermione withdrew her hand from the drawer holding the letters.

"Here they are!"

"My complaints, my egoism, my ambitions, my views—Mon Dieu! Hermione, what a good friend you've been!"

"And some people say you're not modest!"

"I—modest! What is modesty? I know my own value as compared with that of others, and that knowledge to others must often seem conceit."

She began to untie the packet, but he stretched out his hand and stopped her.

"No, I didn't come from Paris to read my letters, or even to hear you read them! I came to hear about this Monsieur Delarey."

Selim stole in with tea and stole out silently, shutting the door this time. As soon as he had gone, Artois drew a case from his pocket, took out of it a pipe, filled it, and lit it. Meanwhile, Hermione poured out tea, and, putting three lumps of sugar into one of the cups, handed it to Artois.

"I haven't come to protest. You know we both worship individual freedom. How often in those letters haven't we written it—our respect of the right of the individual to act for him or herself, without the interference of outsiders? No, I've come to hear about it all, to hear how you managed to get into the pleasant state of mania."

On the last words his deep voice sounded sarcastic, almost patronizing. Hermione fired up at once.

"None of that from you, Emile!" she exclaimed.

Artois stirred his tea rather more than was necessary, but did not begin to drink it.

"You mustn't look down on me from a height," she continued. "I won't have it. We're all on a level when we're doing certain things, when we're truly living, simply, frankly, following our fates, and when we're dying. You feel that. Drop the analyst, dear Emile, drop the professional point of view. I see right through it into your warm old heart. I never was afraid of you, although I place you high, higher than your critics, higher than your public, higher than you place yourself. Every woman ought to be able to love, and every man. There's nothing at all absurd in the fact, though there may be infinite absurdities in the manifestation of it. But those you haven't yet had an opportunity of seeing in me, so you've nothing yet to laugh at or label. Now drink your tea."

He laughed a loud, roaring laugh, drank some of his tea, puffed out a cloud of smoke, and said:

"Whom will you ever respect?"

"Every one who is sincere—myself included."

"Be sincere with me now, and I'll go back to Paris to-morrow like a shorn lamb. Be sincere about Monsieur Delarey."

Hermione sat quite still for a moment with the bundle of letters in her lap. At last she said:

"It's difficult sometimes to tell the truth about a feeling, isn't it?"

"Ah, you don't know yourself what the truth is."

"I'm not sure that I do. The history of the growth of a feeling may be almost more complicated than the history of France."

Artois, who was a novelist, nodded his head with the air of a man who knew all about that.

"Maurice—Maurice Delarey has cared for me, in that way, for a long time. I was very much surprised when I first found it out."

"Why, in the name of Heaven?"

"Well, he's wonderfully good-looking."

"No explanation of your astonishment."

"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which astonished me, the fact of a very handsome man loving me."

"Now, what's your theory?"

He bent down his head a little towards her, and fixed his great, gray eyes on her face.

"Theory! Look here, Emile, I dare say it's difficult for a man like you, genius, insight, and all, thoroughly to understand how an ugly woman regards beauty, an ugly woman like me, who's got intellect and passion and intense feeling for form, color, every manifestation of beauty. When I look at beauty I feel rather like a dirty little beggar staring at an angel. My intellect doesn't seem to help me at all. In me, perhaps, the sensation arises from an inward conviction that humanity was meant originally to be beautiful, and that the ugly ones among us are—well, like sins among virtues. You remember that book of yours which was and deserved to be your one artistic failure, because you hadn't put yourself really into it?"

Artois made a wry face.

"Eventually you paid a lot of money to prevent it from being published any more. You withdrew it from circulation. I sometimes feel that we ugly ones ought to be withdrawn from circulation. It's silly, perhaps, and I hope I never show it, but there the feeling is. So when the handsomest man I had ever seen loved me, I was simply amazed. It seemed to me ridiculous and impossible. And then, when I was convinced it was possible, very wonderful, and, I confess it to you, very splendid. It seemed to help to reconcile me with myself in a way in which I had never been reconciled before."

"And that was the beginning?"

"I dare say. There were other things, too. Maurice Delarey isn't at all stupid, but he's not nearly so intelligent as I am."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"The fact of this physical perfection being humble with me, looking up to me, seemed to mean a great deal. I think Maurice feels about intellect rather as I do about beauty. He made me understand that he must. And that seemed to open my heart to him in an extraordinary way. Can you understand?"

"Yes. Give me some more tea, please."

He held out his cup. She filled it, talking while she did so. She had become absorbed in what she was saying, and spoke without any self-consciousness.

"I knew my gift, such as it is, the gift of brains, could do something for him, though his gift of beauty could do nothing for me—in the way of development. And that, too, seemed to lead me a step towards him. Finally—well, one day I knew I wanted to marry him. And so, Emile, I'm going to marry him. Here!"

She held out to him his cup full of tea.

"There's no sugar," he said.

"Oh—the first time I've forgotten."

"Yes."

The tone of his voice made her look up at him quickly and exclaim:

"No, it won't make any difference!"

"But it has. You've forgotten for the first time. Cursed be the egotism of man."

He sat down in an arm-chair on the other side of the tea-table.

"It ought to make a difference. Maurice Delarey, if he is a man—and if you are going to marry him he must be—will not allow you to be the Egeria of a fellow who has shocked even Paris by telling it the naked truth."

"Yes, he will. I shall drop no friendship for him, and he knows it. There is not one that is not honest and innocent. Thank God I can say that. If you care for it, Emile, we can both add to the size of the letter bundles."

He looked at her meditatively, even rather sadly.

"You are capable of everything in the way of friendship, I believe," he said. "Even of making the bundle bigger with a husband's consent. A husband's—I suppose the little Townly's upset? But she always is."

"When you're there. You don't know Evelyn. You never will. She's at her worst with you because you terrify her. Your talent frightens her, but your appearance frightens her even more."

"I am as God made me."

"With the help of the barber. It's your beard as much as anything else."

"What does she say of this affair? What do all your innumerable adorers say?"

"What should they say? Why should anybody be surprised? It's surely the most natural thing in the world for a woman, even a very plain woman, to marry. I have always heard that marriage is woman's destiny, and though I don't altogether believe that, still I see no special reason why I should never marry if I wish to. And I do wish to."

"That's what will surprise the little Townly and the gaping crowd."

"I shall begin to think I've seemed unwomanly all these years."

"No. You're an extraordinary woman who astonishes because she is going to do a very important thing that is very ordinary."

"It doesn't seem at all ordinary to me."

Emile Artois began to stroke his beard. He was determined not to feel jealous. He had never wished to marry Hermione, and did not wish to marry her now, but he had come over from Paris secretly a man of wrath.

"You needn't tell me that," he said. "Of course it is the great event to you. Otherwise you would never have thought of doing it."

"Exactly. Are you astonished?"

"I suppose I am. Yes, I am."

"I should have thought you were far too clever to be so."

"Exactly what I should have thought. But what living man is too clever to be an idiot? I never met the gentleman and never hope to."

"You looked upon me as the eternal spinster?"

"I looked upon you as Hermione Lester, a great creature, an extraordinary creature, free from the prejudices of your sex and from its pettinesses, unconventional, big brained, generous hearted, free as the wind in a world of monkey slaves, careless of all opinion save your own, but humbly obedient to the truth that is in you, human as very few human beings are, one who ought to have been an artist but who apparently preferred to be simply a woman."

Hermione laughed, winking away two tears.

"Well, Emile dear, I'm being very simply a woman now, I assure you."

"And why should I be surprised? You're right. What is it makes me surprised?"

He sat considering.

"Perhaps it is that you are so unusual, so individual, that my imagination refuses to project the man on whom your choice could fall. I project the snuffy professor—Impossible! I project the Greek god—again my mind cries, 'Impossible!' Yet, behold, it is in very truth the Greek god, the ideal of the ordinary woman."

"You know nothing about it. You're shooting arrows into the air."

"Tell me more then. Hold up a torch in the darkness."

"I can't. You pretend to know a woman, and you ask her coldly to explain to you the attraction of the man she loves, to dissect it. I won't try to."

"But," he said, with now a sort of joking persistence, which was only a mask for an almost irritable curiosity, "I want to know."

"And you shall. Maurice and I are dining to-night at Caminiti's in Peathill Street, just off Regent Street. Come and meet us there, and we'll all three spend the evening together. Half-past eight, of course no evening dress, and the most delicious Turkish coffee in London."

"Does Monsieur Delarey like Turkish coffee?"

"Loves it."

"Intelligently?"

"How do you mean?"

"Does he love it inherently, or because you do?"

"You can find that out to-night."

"I shall come."

He got up, put his pipe into a case, and the case into his pocket, and said:

"Hermione, if the analyst may have a word—"

"Yes—now."

"Don't let Monsieur Delarey, whatever his character, see now, or in the future, the dirty little beggar staring at the angel. I use your own preposterously inflated phrase. Men can't stand certain things and remain true to the good in their characters. Humble adoration from a woman like you would be destructive of blessed virtues in Antinous. Think well of yourself, my friend, think well of your sphinxlike eyes. Haven't they beauty? Doesn't intellect shoot its fires from them? Mon Dieu! Don't let me see any prostration to-night, or I shall put three grains of something I know—I always call it Turkish delight—into the Turkish coffee of Monsieur Delarey, and send him to sleep with his fathers."

Hermione got up and held out her hands to him impulsively.

"Bless you, Emile!" she said. "You're a—"

There was a gentle tap on the door. Hermione went to it and opened it. Selim stood outside with a pencil note on a salver.

"Ha! The little Townly has been!" said Artois.

"Yes, it's from her. You told her, Selim, that I was with Monsieur Artois?"

"Yes, madame."

"Did she say anything?"

"She said, 'Very well,' madame, and then she wrote this. Then she said again, 'Very well,' and then she went away."

"All right, Selim."

Selim departed.

"Delicious!" said Artois. "I can hear her speaking and see her drifting away consumed by jealousy, in the fog."

"Hush, Emile, don't be so malicious."

"P'f! I must be to-day, for I too am—"

"Nonsense. Be good this evening, be very good."

"I will try."

He kissed her hand, bending his great form down with a slightly burlesque air, and strode out without another word. Hermione sat down to read Miss Townly's note:

"Dearest, never mind. I know that I must now accustom myself to be nothing in your life. It is difficult at first, but what is existence but a struggle? I feel that I am going to have another of my neuralgic seizures. I wonder what it all means?—Your, Evelyn."

Hermione laid the note down, with a sigh and a little laugh.

"I wonder what it all means? Poor, dear Evelyn! Thank God, it sometimes means—" She did not finish the sentence, but knelt down on the carpet and took the St. Bernard's great head in her hands.

"You don't bother, do you, old boy, as long as you have your bone. Ah, I'm a selfish wretch. But I am going to have my bone, and I can't help feeling happy—gloriously, supremely happy!"

And she kissed the dog's cold nose and repeated:

"Supremely—supremely happy!"

II

Miss Townly, gracefully turned away from Hermione's door by Selim, did, as Artois had surmised, drift away in the fog to the house of her friend Mrs. Creswick, who lived in Sloane Street. She felt she must unburden herself to somebody, and Mrs. Creswick's tea, a blend of China tea with another whose origin was a closely guarded secret, was the most delicious in London. There are merciful dispensations of Providence even for Miss Townlys, and Mrs. Creswick was at home with a blazing fire. When she saw Miss Townly coming sideways into the room with a slightly drooping head, she said, briskly:

"Comfort me with crumpets, for I am sick with love! Cheer up, my dear Evelyn. Fogs will pass and even neuralgia has its limits. I don't ask you what is the matter, because I know perfectly well."

Miss Townly went into a very large arm-chair and waveringly selected a crumpet.

"What does it all mean?" she murmured, looking obliquely at her friend's parquet.

"Ask the baker, No. 5 Allitch Street. I always get them from there. And he's a remarkably well-informed man."

"No, I mean life with its extraordinary changes, things you never expected, never dreamed of—and all coming so abruptly. I don't think I'm a stupid person, but I certainly never looked for this."

"For what?"

"This most extraordinary engagement of Hermione's."

Mrs. Creswick, who was a short woman who looked tall, with a briskly conceited but not unkind manner, and a decisive and very English nose, rejoined:

"I don't know why we should call it extraordinary. Everybody gets engaged at some time or other, and Hermione's a woman like the rest of us and subject to aberration. But I confess I never thought she would marry Maurice Delarey. He never seemed to mean more to her than any one else, so far as I could see."

"Everybody seems to mean so much to Hermione that it makes things difficult to outsiders," replied Miss Townly, plaintively. "She is so wide-minded and has so many interests that she dwarfs everybody else. I always feel quite squeezed when I compare my poor little life with hers. But then she has such physical endurance. She breaks the ice, you know, in her bath in the winter—of course I mean when there is ice."

"It isn't only in her bath that she breaks the ice," said Mrs. Creswick.

"I perfectly understand," Miss Townly said, vaguely. "You mean—yes, you're right. Well, I prefer my bath warmed for me, but my circulation was never of the best."

"Hermione is extraordinary," said Mrs. Creswick, trying to look at her profile in the glass and making her face as Roman as she could, "I know all London, but I never met another Hermione. She can do things that other women can't dream of even, and nobody minds."

"Well, now she is going to do a thing we all dream of and a great many of us do. Will it answer? He's ten years younger than she is. Can it answer?"

"One can never tell whether a union of two human mysteries will answer," said Mrs. Creswick, judicially. "Maurice Delarey is wonderfully good-looking."

"Yes, and Hermione isn't."

"That has never mattered in the least."

"I know. I didn't say it had. But will it now?"

"Why should it?"

"Men care so much for looks. Do you think Hermione loves Mr. Delarey for his?"

"She dives deep."

"Yes, as a rule."

"Why not now? She ought to have dived deeper than ever this time."

"She ought, of course. I perfectly understand that. But it's very odd, I think we often marry the man we understand less than any one else in the world. Mystery is so very attractive."

Miss Townly sighed. She was emaciated, dark, and always dressed to look mysterious.

"Maurice Delarey is scarcely my idea of a mystery," said Mrs. Creswick, taking joyously a marron glacé. "In my opinion he's an ordinarily intelligent but an extraordinarily handsome man. Hermione is exactly the reverse, extraordinarily intelligent and almost ugly."

"Oh no, not ugly!" said Miss Townly, with unexpected warmth.

Though of a tepid personality, she was a worshipper at Hermione's shrine.

"Her eyes are beautiful," she added.

"Good eyes don't make a beauty," said Mrs. Creswick again, looking at her three-quarters face in the glass. "Hermione is too large, and her face is too square, and—but as I said before, it doesn't matter the least. Hermione's got a temperament that carries all before it."

"I do wish I had a temperament," said Miss Townly. "I try to cultivate one."

"You might as well try to cultivate a mustache," Mrs. Creswick rather brutally rejoined. "If it's there, it's there, but if it isn't one prays in vain."

"I used to think Hermione would do something," continued Miss Townly, finishing her second cup of tea with thirsty languor.

"Do something?"

"Something important, great, something that would make her famous, but of course now"—she paused—"now it's too late," she concluded. "Marriage destroys, not creates talent. Some celebrated man—I forget which—has said something like that."

"Perhaps he'd destroyed his wife's. I think Hermione might be a great mother."

Miss Townly blushed faintly. She did nearly everything faintly. That was partly why she admired Hermione.

"And a great mother is rare," continued Mrs. Creswick. "Good mothers are, thank God, quite common even in London, whatever those foolish people who rail at the society they can't get into may say. But great mothers are seldom met with. I don't know one."

"What do you mean by a great mother?" inquired Miss Townly.

"A mother who makes seeds grow. Hermione has a genius for friendship and a special gift for inspiring others. If she ever has a child, I can imagine that she will make of that child something wonderful."

"Do you mean an infant prodigy?" asked Miss Townly, innocently.

"No, dear, I don't!" said Mrs. Creswick; "I mean nothing of the sort. Never mind!"

When Mrs. Creswick said "Never mind!" Miss Townly usually got up to go. She got up to go now, and went forth into Sloane Street meditating, as she would have expressed it, "profoundly."

Meanwhile Artois went back to the Hans Crescent Hotel on foot. He walked slowly along the greasy pavement through the yellow November fog, trying to combat a sensation of dreariness which had floated round his spirit, as the fog floated round his body, directly he stepped into the street. He often felt depressed without a special cause, but this afternoon there was a special cause for his melancholy. Hermione was going to be married.

She often came to Paris, where she had many friends, and some years ago they had met at a dinner given by a brilliant Jewess, who delighted in clever people, not because she was stupid, but for the opposite reason. Artois was already famous, though not loved, as a novelist. He had published two books; works of art, cruel, piercing, brutal, true. Hermione had read them. Her intellect had revelled in them, but they had set ice about her heart, and when Madame Enthoven told her who was going to take her in to dinner, she very nearly begged to be given another partner. She felt that her nature must be in opposition to this man's.

Artois was not eager for the honor of her company. He was a careful dissecter of women, and, therefore, understood how mysterious women are; but in his intimate life they counted for little. He regarded them there rather as the European traveller regards the Mousmés of Japan, as playthings, and insisted on one thing only—that they must be pretty. A Frenchman, despite his unusual intellectual power, he was not wholly emancipated from the la petite femme tradition, which will never be outmoded in Paris while Paris hums with life, and, therefore, when he was informed that he was to take in to dinner the tall, solidly built, big-waisted, rugged-faced woman, whom he had been observing from a distance ever since he came into the drawing-room, he felt that he was being badly treated by his hostess.

Yet he had been observing this woman closely.

Something unusual, something vital in her had drawn his attention, fixed it, held it. He knew that, but said to himself that it was the attention of the novelist that had been grasped by an uncommon human specimen, and that the man of the world, the diner-out, did not want to eat in company with a specimen, but to throw off professional cares with a gay little chatterbox of the Mousmé type. Therefore he came over to be presented to Hermione with rather a bad grace.

And that introduction was the beginning of the great friendship which was now troubling him in the fog.

By the end of that evening Hermione and he had entirely rid themselves of their preconceived notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once began to show to Artois how much interested she was in him. By doing so she captivated him at once. He would not, perhaps, have been captivated by the heart without the brains, but the two in combination took possession of him with an ease which, when the evening was over, but only then, caused him some astonishment.

Hermione had a divining-rod to discover the heart in another, and she found out at once that Artois had a big heart as well as a fine intellect. He was deceptive because he was always ready to show the latter, and almost always determined to conceal the former. Even to himself he was not quite frank about his heart, but often strove to minimize its influence upon him, if not to ignore totally its promptings and its utterances. Why this was so he could not perhaps have explained even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of his temperament. From the first moment of their intercourse Hermione showed to him her conviction that he had a warm heart, and that it could be relied upon without hesitation. This piqued but presently delighted, and also soothed Artois, who was accustomed to be misunderstood, and had often thought he liked to be misunderstood, but who now found out how pleasant a brilliant woman's intuition may be, even at a Parisian dinner. Before the evening was over they knew that they were friends; and friends they had remained ever since.

Artois was a reserved man, but, like many reserved people, if once he showed himself as he really was, he could continue to be singularly frank. He was singularly frank with Hermione. She became his confidante, often at a distance. He scarcely ever came to London, which he disliked exceedingly, but from Paris or from the many lands in which he wandered—he was no pavement lounger, although he loved Paris rather as a man may love a very chic cocotte—he wrote to Hermione long letters, into which he put his mind and heart, his aspirations, struggles, failures, triumphs. They were human documents, and contained much of his secret history.

It was of this history that he was now thinking, and of Hermione's comments upon it, tied up with a ribbon in Paris. The news of her approaching marriage with a man whom he had never seen had given him a rude shock, had awakened in him a strange feeling of jealousy. He had grown accustomed to the thought that Hermione was in a certain sense his property. He realized thoroughly the egotism, the dog-in-the-manger spirit which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish it. As a friend he certainly loved Hermione. She knew that. But he did not love her as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her, and she loved but was not in love with him. Why, then, should this marriage make a difference in their friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a mother. The latter thought made his egotism shudder. She would be involved in the happy turmoil of a family existence, while he would remain without in that loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom. Yes, his egotism shuddered, and he was angry at the weakness. He chastised the frailties of others, but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of helplessness came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven. How unworthy was his sensation of hostility against Delarey, his sensation that Hermione was wronging him by entering into this alliance, and how powerless he was to rid himself of either sensation! There was good cause for his melancholy—his own folly. He must try to conquer it, and, if that were impossible, to rein it in before the evening.

When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room and worked for an hour and a half, producing a short paragraph, which did not please him. Then he took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.

Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual spirit.

He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick, low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small, straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that denoted health and an out-door life—an out-door life in the south, Artois thought.

As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity, he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate, leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous, unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.

Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body—sympathy, enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a Delarey for her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he still felt angry.

Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced that in order to do so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of a willing horse, a fine racing pace of the nature that woke pleasure and admiration in those who watched it.

Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards him, but was ready to admire and rejoice in him as Hermione's greatest friend. He was met more than half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost touching him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike within Artois increased, and he consciously determined not to yield to the charm of this younger man who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not speak much English, but fortunately Delarey talked French fairly well, not with great fluency like Hermione, but enough to take a modest share in conversation, which was apparently all the share that he desired. Artois believed that he was no great talker. His eyes were more eager than was his tongue, and seemed to betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could not, perhaps, show forth in words. The conversation at first was mainly between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional word from Delarey—generally interrogative—and was confined to generalities. But this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale topics—the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished by them—were whipped away to limbo, and some subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two people in Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who had been very intimate, but who had now quarrelled, and every one said, irrevocably. The question arose whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the facts of the case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced, said it was the woman's.

"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but in this instance it has failed her, it has been warped by jealousy; not the jealousy that often accompanies passion, for she and Robert Meunier were only great friends, linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much more subtle form of that mental disease. You know, Hermione, that both of them are brilliant critics of literature?"

"Yes, yes."

"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in this walk of letters, each striving to be more unerring than the other in dividing the sheep from the goats. I am the guilty person who made discord where there had been harmony."

"You, Emile! How was that?"

"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a creator. You two, now would you even dare to try to create?' They were nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a magnificent subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine, a conte. If you like I will give it you, and leave you to create—separately, not together—what you have so often written about, the perfect conte.' They accepted my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month to work it out. At the end of that time the two contes were to be submitted to a jury of competent literary men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but created great interest in our circle—you know it, Hermione, that dines at Réneau's on Thursday nights?"

"Yes. Well, what happened?"

"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but Robert Meunier astonished us all. He produced certainly one of the best contes that was ever written in the French language."

"And Madame Lagrande?"

"It is not too much to say that from that moment she has almost hated Robert."

"And you dare to say she has a noble nature?"

"Yes, a noble nature from which, under some apparently irresistible impulse, she has lapsed."

"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on the table and leaning forward to her fiancé, "you're not in literature any more than I am, you're an outsider—bless you! What d'you say to that?"

Delarey hesitated and looked modestly at Artois.

"No, no," cried Hermione, "none of that, Maurice! You may be a better judge in this than Emile is with all his knowledge of the human heart. You're the man in the street, and sometimes I'd give a hundred pounds for his opinion and not twopence for the big man's who's in the profession. Would—could a noble nature yield to such an impulse?"

"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.

"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's possible. For a moment, yes, perhaps. But you say, Emile, that there's an actual breach between them."

"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study of jealousy in its various forms?"

"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't understand it."

"Yet you must be capable of it."

"You think every one is?"

"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not. And you, I am certain, are."

Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang out wholesomely in the narrow room.

"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For instance, if I cared for some one and was cared for—"

"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had only a certain, limited faculty of affection and transferred his affection elsewhere—what then?"

"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe my affection would die. My love subsists on sympathy—take that food from it and it would starve and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask. If I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And without the love there could be no jealousy. But that isn't the point, Emile."

He smiled.

"What is?"

"The point is—can a noble nature lapse like that from its nobility?"

"Yes, it can."

"Then it changes, it ceases to be noble. You would not say that a brave man can show cowardice and remain a brave man."

"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave, might, under certain circumstances, show fear, without being what is called a coward. Human nature is full of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of extraordinary contradictions. But this point I will concede you, that it is like the boomerang, which flies forward, circles, and returns to the point from which it started. The inherently noble nature will, because it must, return eventually to its nobility. Then comes the really tragic moment with the passion of remorse."

He spoke quietly, almost coldly. Hermione looked at him with shining eyes. She had quite forgotten Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier, had lost the sense of the special in her love of the general.

"That's a grand theory," she said. "That we must come back to the good that is in us in the end, that we must be true to that somehow, almost whether we will or no. I shall try to think of that when I am sinning."

"You—sinning!" exclaimed Delarey.

"Maurice, dear, you think too well of me."

Delarey flushed like a boy, and glanced quickly at Artois, who did not return his gaze.

"But if that's true, Emile," Hermione continued, "Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier will be friends again."

"Some day I know she will hold out the olive-branch, but what if he refuses it?"

"You literary people are dreadfully difficile."

"True. Our jealousies are ferocious, but so are the jealousies of thousands who can neither read nor write."

"Jealousy," she said, forgetting to eat in her keen interest in the subject. "I told you I didn't believe myself capable of it, but I don't know. The jealousy that is born of passion I might understand and suffer, perhaps, but jealousy of a talent greater than my own, or of one that I didn't possess—that seems to me inexplicable. I could never be jealous of a talent."

"You mean that you could never hate a person for a talent in them?"

"Yes."

"Suppose that some one, by means of a talent which you had not, won from you a love which you had? Talent is a weapon, you know."

"You think it is a weapon to conquer the affections! Ah, Emile, after all you don't know us!"

"You go too fast. I did not say a weapon to conquer the affection of a woman."

"You're speaking of men?"

"I know," Delarey said, suddenly, forgetting to be modest for once, "you mean that a man might be won away from one woman by a talent in another. Isn't that it?"

"Ah," said Hermione, "a man—I see."

She sat for a moment considering deeply, with her luminous eyes fixed on the food in her plate, food which she did not see.

"What horrible ideas you sometimes have, Emile," she said, at last.

"You mean what horrible truths exist," he answered, quietly.

"Could a man be won so? Yes, I suppose he might be if there were a combination."

"Exactly," said Artois.

"I see now. Suppose a man had two strains in him, say: the adoration of beauty, of the physical; and the adoration of talent, of the mental. He might fall in love with a merely beautiful woman and transfer his affections if he came across an equally beautiful woman who had some great talent."

"Or he might fall in love with a plain, talented woman, and be taken from her by one in whom talent was allied with beauty. But in either case are you sure that the woman deserted could never be jealous, bitterly jealous, of the talent possessed by the other woman? I think talent often creates jealousy in your sex."

"But beauty much oftener, oh, much! Every woman, I feel sure, could more easily be jealous of physical beauty in another woman than of mental gifts. There's something so personal in beauty."

"And is genius not equally personal?"

"I suppose it is, but I doubt if it seems so."

"I think you leave out of account the advance of civilization, which is greatly changing men and women in our day. The tragedies of the mind are increasing."

"And the tragedies of the heart—are they diminishing in consequence? Oh, Emile!" And she laughed.

"Hermione—your food! You are not eating anything!" said Delarey, gently, pointing to her plate. "And it's all getting cold."

"Thank you, Maurice."

She began to eat at once with an air of happy submission, which made Artois understand a good deal about her feeling for Delarey.

"The heart will always rule the head, I dare say, in this world where the majority will always be thoughtless," said Artois. "But the greatest jealousy, the jealousy which is most difficult to resist and to govern, is that in which both heart and brain are concerned. That is, indeed, a full-fledged monster."

Artois generally spoke with a good deal of authority, often without meaning to do so. He thought so clearly, knew so exactly what he was thinking and what he meant, that he felt very safe in conversation, and from this sense of safety sprang his air of masterfulness. It was an air that was always impressive, but to-night it specially struck Hermione. Now she laid down her knife and fork once more, to Delarey's half-amused despair, and exclaimed:

"I shall never forget the way you said that. Even if it were nonsense one would have to believe it for the moment, and of course it's dreadfully true. Intellect and heart suffering in combination must be far more terrible than the one suffering without the other. No, Maurice, I've really finished. I don't want any more. Let's have our coffee."

"The Turkish coffee," said Artois, with a smile. "Do you like Turkish coffee, Monsieur Delarey?"

"Yes, monsieur. Hermione has taught me to."

"Ah!"

"At first it seemed to me too full of grounds," he explained.

"Perhaps a taste for it must be an acquired one among Europeans. Do we have it here?"

"No, no," said Hermione, "Caminiti has taken my advice, and now there's a charming smoke-room behind this. Come along."

She got up and led the way out. The two men followed her, Artois coming last. He noticed now more definitely the very great contrast between Hermione and her future husband. Delarey, when in movement, looked more than ever like a Mercury. His footstep was light and elastic, and his whole body seemed to breathe out a gay activity, a fulness of the joy of life. Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the tarantella, and when they were in the small smoke-room, which Caminiti had fitted up in what he believed to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely accurate, was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire:

"Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?"

"No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her veins. But I have never been in Sicily or Italy."

"Ah, Emile," said Hermione, "how clever of you to find that out. I notice it, too, sometimes, that touch of the blessed South. I shall take him there some day, and see if the Southern blood doesn't wake up in his veins when he's in the rays of the real sun we never see in England."

"She'll take you to Italy, you fortunate, damned dog!" thought Artois. "What luck for you to go there with such a companion!"

They sat down and the two men began to smoke. Hermione never smoked because she had tried smoking and knew she hated it. They were alone in the room, which was warm, but not too warm, and faintly lit by shaded lamps. Artois began to feel more genial, he scarcely knew why. Perhaps the good dinner had comforted him, or perhaps he was beginning to yield to the charm of Delarey's gay and boyish modesty, which was untainted and unspoiled by any awkward shyness.

Artois did not know or seek to know, but he was aware that he was more ready to be happy with the flying moment than he had been, or had expected to be that evening. Something almost paternal shone in his gray eyes as he stretched his large limbs on Caminiti's notion of a Turkish divan, and watched the first smoke-wreaths rise from his cigar, a light which made his face most pleasantly expressive to Hermione.

"He likes Maurice," she thought, with a glow of pleasure, and with the thought came into her heart an even deeper love for Maurice. For it was a triumph, indeed, if Artois were captured speedily by any one. It seemed to her just then as if she had never known what perfect happiness was till now, when she sat between her best friend and her lover, and sensitively felt that in the room there were not three separate persons but a Trinity. For a moment there was a comfortable silence. Then an Italian boy brought in the coffee. Artois spoke to him in Italian. His eyes lit up as he answered with the accent of Naples, lit up still more when Artois spoke to him again in his own dialect. When he had served the coffee he went out, glowing.

"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.

"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I—it doesn't matter to me. Wherever it is will be the same to me."

"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said Artois. "I expect that's profoundly true."

"Don't you—don't you know?" ventured Delarey.

"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every branch of knowledge."

He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm that had in it something more sad than bitterness. It struck both Hermione and Delarey as almost monstrous that anybody with whom they were connected should be feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life presented itself to them in a glorious radiance of sunshine, in a passionate light, in a torrent of color. Their knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by their dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as if every one ought to be as happy as they were, almost as if every one could be as happy as they were.

"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you can't mean to say that you have never known the happiness that makes of every place—Clapham, Lippe-Detmold, a West African swamp, a Siberian convict settlement—an Italy? You have had a wonderful life. You have worked, you have wandered, had your ambition and your freedom—"

"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted, "wide open on life watching the manifestations of life."

"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a minute to everything but your own happiness? Oh, it's selfish, I know, but it does one good, Emile, any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one sees—one must see—everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery, not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps I don't put it well, but—"

"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what you say."

"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.

His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration and love.

Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had arrived.

"There's truth in what you say. But there's another truth, too, which you bring to my mind at this moment."

"What's that, Emile?"

"The payment that is exacted from great happiness. These intense joys of which you speak—what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably, followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."

"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"

"Of what other parent can it be the child? In my opinion those who are said to be 'born in misery' never know what real misery is. It is only those who have drunk deep of the cup of joy who can drink deep of the cup of sorrow."

Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly burst in with the vehement exclamation:

"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track? Where's the courage in avoiding the garden for fear of the swamp?"

"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Hermione, her whole face lighting up. "I never expected to hear a counsel of cowardice from you, Emile."

"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"

He looked at them both steadily, feeling still as if he were face to face with children. For a man he was unusually intuitive, and to-night suddenly, and after he had begun to yield to his desire to be cruel, to say something that would cloud this dual happiness in which he had no share, he felt a strange, an almost prophetic conviction that out of the joy he now contemplated would be born the gaunt offspring, misery, of which he had just spoken. With the coming of this conviction, which he did not even try to explain to himself or to combat, came an abrupt change in his feelings. Bitterness gave place to an anxiety that was far more human, to a desire to afford some protection to these two people with whom he was sitting. But how? And against what? He did not know. His intuition stopped short when he strove to urge it on.

"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent to avoid the joy life throws at your feet?"

Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry, too, with his erratic mental departure from the realm of reason into the realm of fantasy—for so he called the debatable land over which intuition held sway—Artois hounded out his mood and turned upon himself.

"Don't listen to me," he said. "I am the professional analyst of life. As I sit over a sentence, examining, selecting, rejecting, replacing its words, so do I sit over the emotions of myself and others till I cease really to live, and could almost find it in my head to try to prevent them from living, too. Live, live—enter into the garden of paradise and never mind what comes after."

"I could not do anything else," said Hermione. "It is unnatural to me to look forward. The 'now' nearly always has complete possession of me."

"And I," said Artois, lightly, "am always trying to peer round the corner to see what is coming. And you, Monsieur Delarey?"

"I!" said Delarey.

He had not expected to be addressed just then, and for a moment looked confused.

"I don't know if I can say," he answered, at last. "But I think if the present was happy I should try to live in that, and if it was sad I should have a shot at looking forward to something better."

"That's one of the best philosophies I ever heard," said Hermione, "and after my own heart. Long live the philosophy of Maurice Delarey!"

Delarey blushed with pleasure like a boy. Just then three men came in smoking cigars. Hermione looked at her watch.

"Past eleven," she said. "I think I'd better go. Emile, will you drive with me home?"

"I!" he said, with an unusual diffidence. "May I?"

He glanced at Delarey.

"I want to have a talk with you. Maurice quite understands. He knows you go back to Paris to-morrow."

They all got up, and Delarey at once held out his hand to Artois.

"I am glad to have been allowed to meet Hermione's best friend," he said, simply. "I know how much you are to her, and I hope you'll let me be a friend, too, perhaps, some day."

He wrung Artois's hand warmly.

"Thank you, monsieur," replied Artois.

He strove hard to speak as cordially as Delarey.

Two or three minutes later Hermione and he were in a hansom driving down Regent Street. The fog had lifted, and it was possible to see to right and left of the greasy thoroughfare.

"Need we go straight back?" said Hermione. "Why not tell him to drive down to the Embankment? It's quiet there at night, and open and fine—one of the few fine things in dreary old London. And I want to have a last talk with you, Emile."

Artois pushed up the little door in the roof with his stick.

"The Embankment—Thames," he said to the cabman, with a strong foreign accent.

"Right, sir," replied the man, in the purest cockney.

As soon as the trap was shut down above her head Hermione exclaimed:

"Emile, I'm so happy, so—so happy! I think you must understand why now. You don't wonder any more, do you?"

"No, I don't wonder. But did I ever express any wonder?"

"I think you felt some. But I knew when you saw him it would go. He's got one beautiful quality that's very rare in these days, I think—reverence. I love that in him. He really reverences everything that is fine, every one who has fine and noble aspirations and powers. He reverences you."

"If that is the case he shows very little insight."

"Don't abuse yourself to me to-night. There's nothing the matter now, is there?"

Her intonation demanded a negative, but Artois did not hasten to give it. Instead he turned the conversation once more to Delarey.

"Tell me something more about him," he said. "What sort of family does he come from?"

"Oh, a very ordinary family, well off, but not what is called specially well-born. His father has a large shipping business. He's a cultivated man, and went to Eton and Oxford, as Maurice did. Maurice's mother is very handsome, not at all intellectual, but fascinating. The Southern blood comes from her side."

"Oh—how?"

"Her mother was a Sicilian."

"Of the aristocracy, or of the people?"

"She was a lovely contadina. But what does it matter? I am not marrying Maurice's grandmother."

"How do you know that?"

"You mean that our ancestors live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry him to-morrow if he'd have me."

"I'm quite sure you would."

"Besides, probably the grandmother was a delicious old dear. But didn't you like Maurice, Emile? I felt so sure you did."

"I—yes, I liked him. I see his fascination. It is almost absurdly obvious, and yet it is quite natural. He is handsome and he is charming."

"And he's good, too."

"Why not? He does not look evil. I thought of him as a Mercury."

"The messenger of the gods—yes, he is like that."

She laid her hand on his arm, as if her happiness and longing for sympathy in it impelled her to draw very near to a human being.

"A bearer of good tidings—that is what he has been to me. I want you to like and understand him so much, Emile; you more, far more, than any one else."

The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading down from the Strand to the Thames Embankment—a street that was obscure and that looked sad and evil by night. Artois glanced out at it, and Hermione, seeing that he did so, followed his eyes. They saw a man and a woman quarrelling under a gas-lamp. The woman was cursing and crying. The man put out his hand and pushed her roughly. She fell up against some railings, caught hold of them, turned her head and shrieked at the man, opening her mouth wide.

"Poor things!" Hermione said. "Poor things! If we could only all be good to each other! It seems as if it ought to be so simple."

"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."

"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have been good to me—you for one, you most of all my friends. Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"

She leaned over the wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the spreading night.

"Space seems to liberate the soul," she said. "It's wrong to live in cities, but we shall have to a good deal, I suppose. Maurice needn't work, but I'm glad to say he does."

"What does he do?"

"I don't know exactly, but he's in his father's shipping business. I'm an awful idiot at understanding anything of that sort, but I understand Maurice, and that's the important matter."

They were now on the Thames Embankment, driving slowly along the broad and almost deserted road. Far off lights, green, red, and yellow, shone faintly upon the drifting and uneasy waters of the river on the one side; on the other gleamed the lights from the houses and hotels, in which people were supping after the theatres. Artois, who, like most fine artists, was extremely susceptible to the influence of place and of the hour, with its gift of light or darkness, began to lose in this larger atmosphere of mystery and vaguely visible movement the hitherto dominating sense of himself, to regain the more valuable and more mystical sense of life and its strange and pathetic relation with nature and the spirit behind nature, which often floated upon him like a tide when he was creating, but which he was accustomed to hold sternly in leash. Now he was not in the mood to rein it in. Maurice Delarey and his business, Hermione, her understanding of him and happiness in him, Artois himself in his sharply realized solitude of the third person, melted into the crowd of beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of existence?

"Look at those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and cryptic like our thoughts. Is anything important?"

"Almost everything, I think, certainly everything in us. If I didn't feel so, I could scarcely go on living. And you must really feel so, too. You do. I have your letters to prove it. Why, how often have I written begging you not to lash yourself into fury over the follies of men!"

"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my brain. That happens in many."

"You trust too much to your brain and too little to your heart."

"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too easily carried away by your impulses."

She was silent for a moment. The cabman was driving slowly. She watched a distant barge drifting, like a great shadow, at the mercy of the tide. Then she turned a little, looked at Artois's shadowy profile, and said:

"Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly—don't be afraid now. What is it?"

He did not answer.

"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."

"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"

He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at himself if she began to laugh.

But she said, gravely:

"Go on."

"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery will be born."

"Yes? What sort of misery?"

"I don't know."

"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"

"To you."

"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise and the deadly swamp?"

"I think it must have been."

"Well?"

"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."

"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."

"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has he faithfulness?"

"Oh, Emile!"

"You told me to be frank."

"And I wish you to be. Go on, say everything."

"I've only seen Delarey once, and I'll confess that I came prepared to see faults as clearly as, perhaps more clearly than, virtues. I don't pretend to read character at a glance. Only fools can do that—I am relying on their frequent assertion that they can. He strikes me as a man of great charm, with an unusual faculty of admiration for the gifts of others and a modest estimate of himself. I believe he's sincere."

"He is, through and through."

"I think so—now. But does he know his own blood? Our blood governs us when the time comes. He is modest about his intellect. I think it quick, but I doubt its being strong enough to prove a good restraining influence."

"Against what?"

"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."

"You speak almost as if he were a child," Hermione said. "He's much younger than I am, but he's twenty-four."

"He is very young looking, and you are at least twenty years ahead of him in all essentials. Don't you feel it?"

"I suppose—yes, I do."

"Mercury—he should be mercurial."

"He is. That's partly why I love him, perhaps. He is full of swiftness."

"So is the butterfly when it comes out into the sun."

"Emile, forgive me, but sometimes you seem to me deliberately to lie down and roll in pessimism rather as a horse—"

"Why not say an ass?"

She laughed.

"An ass, then, my dear, lies down sometimes and rolls in dust. I think you are doing it to-night. I think you were preparing to do it this afternoon. Perhaps it is the effect of London upon you?"

"London—by-the-way, where are you going for your honeymoon? I am sure you know, though Monsieur Delarey may not."

"Why are you sure?"

"Your face to-night when I asked if it was to be Italian."

She laid her hand again upon his arm and spoke eagerly, forgetting in a moment his pessimism and the little cloud it had brought across her happiness.

"You're right; I've decided."

"Italy—and hotels?"

"No, a thousand times no!"

"Where then?"

"Sicily, and my peasant's cottage."

"The cottage on Monte Amato where you spent a summer four or five years ago contemplating Etna?"

"Yes. I've not said a word to Maurice, but I've taken it again. All the little furniture I had—beds, straw chairs, folding-tables—is stored in a big room in the village at the foot of the mountain. Gaspare, the Sicilian boy who was my servant, will superintend the carrying up of it on women's heads—his dear old grandmother takes the heaviest things, arm-chairs and so on—and it will all be got ready in no time. I'm having the house whitewashed again, and the shutters painted, and the stone vases on the terrace will be filled with scarlet geraniums, and—oh, Emile, I shall hear the piping of the shepherds in the ravine at twilight again with him, and see the boys dance the tarantella under the moon again with him, and—and—"

She stopped with a break in her voice.

"Put away your pessimism, dear Emile," she continued, after a moment. "Tell me you think we shall be happy in our garden of paradise—tell me that!"

But he only said, even more gravely:

"So you're taking him to the real South?"

"Yes, to the blue and the genuine gold, and the quivering heat, and the balmy nights when Etna sends up its plume of ivory smoke to the moon. He's got the south in his blood. Well, he shall see the south first with me, and he shall love it as I love it."

He said nothing. No spark of her enthusiasm called forth a spark from him. And now she saw that, and said again:

"London is making you horrible to-night. You are doing London and yourself an injustice, and Maurice, too."

"It's very possible," he replied. "But—I can say it to you—I have a certain gift of—shall I call it divination?—where men and women are concerned. It is not merely that I am observant of what is, but that I can often instinctively feel that which must be inevitably produced by what is. Very few people can read the future in the present. I often can, almost as clearly as I can read the present. Even pessimism, accentuated by the influence of the Infernal City, may contain some grains of truth."

"What do you see for us, Emile? Don't you think we shall be happy together, then? Don't you think that we are suited to be happy together?"

When she asked Artois this direct question he was suddenly aware of a vagueness brooding in his mind, and knew that he had no definite answer to make.

"I see nothing," he said, abruptly. "I know nothing. It may be London. It may be my own egoism."

And then he suddenly explained himself to Hermione with the extraordinary frankness of which he was only capable when he was with her, or was writing to her.

"I am the dog in the manger," he concluded. "Don't let my growling distress you. Your happiness has made me envious."

"I'll never believe it," she exclaimed. "You are too good a friend and too great a man for that. Why can't you be happy, too? Why can't you find some one?"

"Married life wouldn't suit me. I dislike loneliness yet I couldn't do without it. In it I find my liberty as an artist."

"Sometimes I think it must be a curse to be an artist, and yet I have often longed to be one."

"Why have you never tried to be one?"

"I hardly know. Perhaps in my inmost being I feel I never could be. I am too impulsive, too unrestrained, too shapeless in mind. If I wrote a book it might be interesting, human, heart-felt, true to life, I hope, not stupid, I believe; but it would be a chaos. You—how it would shock your critical mind! I could never select and prune and blend and graft. I should have to throw my mind and heart down on the paper and just leave them there."

"If you did that you might produce a human document that would live almost as long as literature, that even just criticism would be powerless to destroy."

"I shall never write that book, but I dare say I shall live it."

"Yes," he said. "You will live it, perhaps with Monsieur Delarey."

And he smiled.

"When is the wedding to be?"

"In January, I think."

"Ah! When you are in your garden of paradise I shall not be very far off—just across your blue sea on the African shore."

"Why, where are you going, Emile?"

"I shall spend the spring at the sacred city of Kairouan, among the pilgrims and the mosques, making some studies, taking some notes."

"For a book? Come over to Sicily and see us."

"I don't think you will want me there."

The trap in the roof was opened, and a beery eye, with a luscious smile in it, peered down upon them.

"'Ad enough of the river, sir?"

"Comment?" said Artois.

"We'd better go home, I suppose," Hermione said.

She gave her address to the cabman, and they drove in silence to Eaton Place.

III

Lucrezia Gabbi came out onto the terrace of the Casa del Prete on Monte Amato, shaded her eyes with her brown hands, and gazed down across the ravine over the olive-trees and the vines to the mountain-side opposite, along which, among rocks and Barbary figs, wound a tiny track trodden by the few contadini whose stone cottages, some of them scarcely more than huts, were scattered here and there upon the surrounding heights that looked towards Etna and the sea. Lucrezia was dressed in her best. She wore a dark-stuff gown covered in the front by a long blue-and-white apron. Although really happiest in her mind when her feet were bare, she had donned a pair of white stockings and low slippers, and over her thick, dark hair was tied a handkerchief gay with a pattern of brilliant yellow flowers on a white ground. This was a present from Gaspare bought at the town of Cattaro at the foot of the mountains, and worn now for the first time in honor of a great occasion.

To-day Lucrezia was in the service of distinguished forestieri, and she was gazing now across the ravine straining her eyes to see a procession winding up from the sea: donkeys laden with luggage, and her new padrone and padrona pioneered by the radiant Gaspare towards their mountain home. It was a good day for their arrival. Nobody could deny that. Even Lucrezia, who was accustomed to fine weather, having lived all her life in Sicily, was struck to a certain blinking admiration as she stepped out on to the terrace, and murmured to herself and a cat which was basking on the stone seat that faced the cottage between broken columns, round which roses twined:

"Che tempo fa oggi! Santa Madonna, che bel tempo!"

On this morning of February the clearness of the atmosphere was in truth almost African. Under the cloudless sky every detail of the great view from the terrace stood out with a magical distinctness. The lines of the mountains were sharply defined against the profound blue. The forms of the gray rocks scattered upon their slopes, of the peasants' houses, of the olive and oak trees which grew thickly on the left flank of Monte Amato below the priest's house, showed themselves in the sunshine with the bold frankness which is part of the glory of all things in the south. The figures of stationary or moving goatherds and laborers, watching their flocks or toiling among the vineyards and the orchards, were relieved against the face of nature in the shimmer of the glad gold in this Eden, with a mingling of delicacy and significance which had in it something ethereal and mysterious, a hint of fairy-land. Far off, rising calmly in an immense slope, a slope that was classical in its dignity, profound in its sobriety, remote, yet neither cold nor sad, Etna soared towards the heaven, sending from its summit, on which the snows still lingered, a steady plume of ivory smoke. In the nearer foreground, upon a jagged crest of beetling rock, the ruins of a Saracenic castle dominated a huddled village, whose houses seemed to cling frantically to the cliff, as if each one were in fear of being separated from its brethren and tossed into the sea. And far below that sea spread forth its waveless, silent wonder to a horizon-line so distant that the eyes which looked upon it could scarcely distinguish sea from sky—a line which surely united not divided two shades of flawless blue, linking them in a brotherhood which should be everlasting. Few sounds, and these but slight ones, stirred in the breast of the ardent silence; some little notes of birds, fragmentary and wandering, wayward as pilgrims who had forgotten to what shrine they bent their steps, some little notes of bells swinging beneath the tufted chins of goats, the wail of a woman's song, old in its quiet melancholy, Oriental in its strange irregularity of rhythm, and the careless twitter of a tarantella, played upon a reed-flute by a secluded shepherd-boy beneath the bending silver green of tressy olives beside a tiny stream.

Lucrezia was accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea. Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental song—she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well. And she had many a time danced to the tarantella that the shepherd-boy was fluting, clapping her strong hands and swinging her broad hips, while the great rings in her ears shook to and fro, and her whole healthy body quivered to the spirit of the tune. She knew it all. It was and had always been part of her life.

Hermione's garden of paradise generally seemed homely enough to Lucrezia. Yet to-day, perhaps because she was dressed in her best on a day that was not a festa, and wore a silver chain with a coral charm on it, and had shoes on her feet, there seemed to her a newness, almost a strangeness in the wideness and the silence, in the sunshine and the music, something that made her breathe out a sigh, and stare with almost wondering eyes on Etna and the sea. She soon lost her vague sensation that her life lay, perhaps, in a home of magic, however, when she looked again at the mule track which wound upward from the distant town, in which the train from Messina must by this time have deposited her forestieri, and began to think more naturally of the days that lay before her, of her novel and important duties, and of the unusual sums of money that her activities were to earn her.

Gaspare, who, as major-domo, had chosen her imperiously for his assistant and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved and excited her.

She was to live in a splendidly furnished house with wealthy and distinguished people; she was to sleep in a room all to herself, in a bed that no one had a right to except herself. This was an experience that in her most sanguine moments she had never anticipated. All her life had been passed en famille in the village of Marechiaro, which lay on a table-land at the foot of Monte Amato, half-way down to the sea. The Gabbis were numerous, and they all lived in one room, to which cats, hens, and turkeys resorted with much freedom and in considerable numbers. Lucrezia had never known, perhaps had never desired, a moment of privacy, but now she began to awake to the fact that privacy and daintiness and pretty furniture were very interesting, and even touching, as well as very phenomenal additions to a young woman's existence. What could the people who had the power to provide them be like? She scanned the mule-track with growing eagerness, but the procession did not appear. She saw only an old contadino in a long woollen cap riding slowly into the recesses of the hills on a donkey, and a small boy leading his goats to pasture. The train must have been late. She turned round from the view and examined her new home once more. Already she knew it by heart, yet the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.

Hermione's cottage, the eyrie to which she was bringing Maurice Delarey, was only a cottage, although to Lucrezia it seemed almost a palace. It was whitewashed, with a sloping roof of tiles, and windows with green Venetian shutters. Although it now belonged to a contadino, it had originally been built by a priest, who had possessed vineyards on the mountain-side, and who wished to have a home to which he could escape from the town where he lived when the burning heats of the summer set in. Above his vineyards, some hundreds of yards from the summit of the mountain, and close to a grove of oaks and olive-trees, which grew among a turmoil of mighty boulders, he had terraced out the slope and set his country home. At the edge of the rough path which led to the cottage from the ravine below was a ruined Norman arch. This served as a portal of entrance. Between it and the cottage was a well surrounded by crumbling walls, with stone seats built into them. Passing that, one came at once to the terrace of earth, fronted by a low wall with narrow seats covered with white tiles, and divided by broken columns that edged the ravine and commanded the great view on which Lucrezia had been gazing. On the wall of this terrace were stone vases, in which scarlet geraniums were growing. Red roses twined around the columns, and, beneath, the steep side of the ravine was clothed with a tangle of vegetation, olive and peach, pear and apple trees. Behind the cottage rose the bare mountain-side, covered with loose stones and rocks, among which in every available interstice the diligent peasants had sown corn and barley. Here and there upon the mountains distant cottages were visible, but on Monte Amato Hermione's was the last, the most intrepid. None other ventured to cling to the warm earth so high above the sea and in a place so solitary. That was why Hermione loved it, because it was near the sky and very far away.

Now, after an earnest, ruminating glance at the cottage, Lucrezia walked across the terrace and reverently entered it by a door which opened onto a flight of three steps leading down to the terrace. Already she knew the interior by heart, but she had not lost her awe of it, her sense almost of being in a church when she stood among the furniture, the hangings, and the pictures which she had helped to arrange under Gaspare's orders. The room she now stood in was the parlor of the cottage, serving as dining-room, drawing-room, boudoir, and den. Although it must be put to so many purposes, it was only a small, square chamber, and very simply furnished. The walls, like all the walls of the cottage inside and out, were whitewashed. On the floor was a carpet that had been woven in Kairouan, the sacred African town where Artois was now staying and making notes for his new book. It was thick and rough, and many-colored almost as Joseph's coat; brilliant but not garish, for the African has a strange art of making colors friends instead of enemies, of blending them into harmonies that are gay yet touched with peace. On the walls hung a few reproductions of fine pictures: an old woman of Rembrandt, in whose wrinkled face and glittering dark eyes the past pleasures and past sorrows of life seemed tenderly, pensively united, mellowed by the years into a soft bloom, a quiet beauty; an allegory of Watts, fierce with inspiration like fire mounting up to an opening heaven; a landscape of Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land; Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old Venetian mirror in a curiously twisted golden frame.

At the two small windows on either side of the door, which was half glass, half white-painted wood, were thin curtains of pale gray-blue and white, bought in the bazaars of Tunis. For furniture there were a folding-table of brown, polished wood, a large divan with many cushions, two deck-chairs of the telescope species, that can be made long or short at will, a writing-table, a cottage piano, and four round wicker chairs with arms. In one corner of the room stood a tall clock with a burnished copper face, and in another a cupboard containing glass and china. A door at the back, which led into the kitchen, was covered with an Oriental portière. On the writing-table, and on some dwarf bookcases already filled with books left behind by Hermione on her last visit to Sicily, stood rough jars of blue, yellow, and white pottery, filled with roses and geraniums arranged by Gaspare. To the left of the room, as Lucrezia faced it, was a door leading into the bedroom, of the master and mistress.

After a long moment of admiring contemplation, Lucrezia went into this bedroom, in which she was specially interested, as it was to be her special care. All was white here, walls, ceiling, wooden beds, tables, the toilet service, the bookcases. For there were books here, too, books which Lucrezia examined with an awful wonder, not knowing how to read. In the window-seat were white cushions. On the chest of drawers were more red roses and geraniums. It was a virginal room, into which the bright, golden sunbeams stole under the striped awning outside the low window with surely a hesitating modesty, as if afraid to find themselves intruders. The whiteness, the intense quietness of the room, through whose window could be seen a space of far-off sea, a space of mountain-flank, and, when one came near to it, and the awning was drawn up, the snowy cone of Etna, struck now to the soul of Lucrezia a sense of half-puzzled peace. Her large eyes opened wider, and she laid her hands on her hips and fell into a sort of dream as she stood there, hearing only the faint and regular ticking of the clock in the sitting-room. She was well accustomed to the silence of the mountain world and never heeded it, but peace within four walls was almost unknown to her. Here no hens fluttered, no turkeys went to and fro elongating their necks, no children played and squalled, no women argued and gossiped, quarrelled and worked, no men tramped in and out, grumbled and spat. A perfectly clean and perfectly peaceful room—it was marvellous, it was—she sighed again. What must it be like to be gentlefolk, to have the money to buy calm and cleanliness?

Suddenly she moved, took her hands from her hips, settled her yellow handkerchief, and smiled. The silence had been broken by a sound all true Sicilians love, the buzz and the drowsy wail of the ceramella, the bagpipes which the shepherds play as they come down from the hills to the villages when the festival of the Natale is approaching. It was as yet very faint and distant, coming from the mountain-side behind the cottage, but Lucrezia knew the tune. It was part of her existence, part of Etna, the olive groves, the vineyards, and the sea, part of that old, old Sicily which dwells in the blood and shines in the eyes, and is alive in the songs and the dances of these children of the sun, and of legends and of mingled races from many lands. It was the "Pastorale," and she knew who was playing it—Sebastiano, the shepherd, who had lived with the brigands in the forests that look down upon the Isles of Lipari, who now kept his father's goats among the rocks, and knew every stone and every cave on Etna, and who had a chest and arms of iron, and legs that no climbing could fatigue, and whose great, brown fingers, that could break a man's wrist, drew such delicate tones from the reed pipe that, when he played it, even the old man's thoughts were turned to dancing and the old woman's to love. But now he was being important, he was playing the ceramella, into which no shepherd could pour such a volume of breath as he, from which none could bring such a volume of warm and lusty music. It was Sebastiano coming down from the top of Monte Amato to welcome the forestieri.

The music grew louder, and presently a dog barked outside on the terrace. Lucrezia ran to the window. A great white-and-yellow, blunt-faced, pale-eyed dog, his neck surrounded by a spiked collar, stood there sniffing and looking savage, his feathery tail cocked up pugnaciously over his back.

"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the window under the awning—"Sebastiano!"

Then she drew back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia called out once more:

"Sebastiano!"

Abruptly the tune ceased and the silence returned, emphasized by the vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and very masculine face, roughened by wind and toughened by sun, with keen, steady, almost insolent eyes, black and shining, stiff, black hair, that looked as if it had been crimped, a mustache sprouting above a wide, slightly animal mouth full of splendid teeth, and a square, brutal, but very manly chin. On the head was a Sicilian cap, long and hanging down at the left side. There were ear-rings in the man's large, well-shaped ears, and over the window-ledge protruded the swollen bladder, like a dead, bloated monster, from which he had been drawing his antique tune.

He stared down at Lucrezia with a half-contemptuous humor, and she up at him with a wide-eyed, unconcealed adoration. Then he looked curiously round the room, with a sharp intelligence that took in every detail in a moment.

"Per Dio!" he ejaculated. "Per Dio!"

He looked at Lucrezia, folded his brawny arms on the window-sill, and said:

"They've got plenty of soldi."

Lucrezia nodded, not without personal pride.

"Gaspare says—"

"Oh, I know as much as Gaspare," interrupted Sebastiano, brusquely. "The signora is my friend. When she was here before I saw her many times. But for me she would never have taken the Casa del Prete."

"Why was that?" asked Lucrezia, with reverence.

"They told her in Marechiaro that it was not safe for a lady to live up here alone, that when the night came no one could tell what would happen."

"But, Gaspare—"

"Does Gaspare know every grotto on Etna? Has Gaspare lived eight years with the briganti? And the Mafia—has Gaspare—"

He paused, laughed, pulled his mustache, and added:

"If the signora had not been assured of my protection she would never have come up here."

"But now she has a husband."

"Yes."

He glanced again round the room.

"One can see that. Per Dio, it is like the snow on the top of Etna."

Lucrezia got up actively from the floor and came close to Sebastiano.

"What is the padrona like, Sebastiano?" she asked. "I have seen her, but I have never spoken to her."

"She is simpatica—she will do you no harm."

"And is she generous?"

"Ready to give soldi to every one who is in trouble. But if you once deceive her she will never look at you again."

"Then I will not deceive her," said Lucrezia, knitting her brows.

"Better not. She is not like us. She thinks to tell a lie is a sin against the Madonna, I believe."

"But then what will the padrone do?" asked Lucrezia, innocently.

"Tell his woman the truth, like all husbands," replied Sebastiano, with a broadly satirical grin. "As your man will some day, Lucrezia mia. All husbands are good and faithful. Don't you know that?"

"Macchè!"

She laughed loudly, with an incredulity quite free from bitterness.

"Men are not like us," she added. "They tell us whatever they please, and do always whatever they like. We must sit in the doorway and keep our back to the street for fear a man should smile at us, and they can stay out all night, and come back in the morning, and say they've been fishing at Isola Bella, or sleeping out to guard the vines, and we've got to say, 'Si, Salvatore!' or 'Si, Guido!' when we know very well—"

"What, Lucrezia?"

She looked into his twinkling eyes and reddened slightly, sticking out her under lip.

"I'm not going to tell you."

"You have no business to know."

"And how can I help—they're coming!"

Sebastiano's dog had barked again on the terrace. Sebastiano lifted the ceramalla quickly from the window-sill and turned round, while Lucrezia darted out through the door, across the sitting-room, and out onto the terrace.

"Are they there, Sebastiano? Are they there?"

He stood by the terrace wall, shading his eyes with his hand.

"Ecco!" he said, pointing across the ravine.

Far off, winding up from the sea slowly among the rocks and the olive-trees, was a procession of donkeys, faintly relieved in the brilliant sunshine against the mountain-side.

"One," counted Sebastiano, "two, three, four—there are four. The signore is walking, the signora is riding. Whose donkeys have they got? Gaspare's father's, of course. I told Gaspare to take Ciccio's, and—it is too far to see, but I'll soon make them hear me. The signora loves the 'Pastorale.' She says there is all Sicily in it. She loves it more than the tarantella, for she is good, Lucrezia—don't forget that—though she is not a Catholic, and perhaps it makes her think of the coming of the Bambino and of the Madonna. Ah! She will smile now and clap her hands when she hears."

He put the pipe to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and began to play the "Pastorale" with all his might, while Lucrezia listened, staring across the ravine at the creeping donkey, which was bearing Hermione upward to her garden of paradise near the sky.

IV

"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione, and you must be sure to—'"

"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard—Yes, it is, it is! Hush! Maurice—listen!"

Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath, looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished, with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.

"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"

Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian shore in the shadow of an orange grove, murmuring peace. In that old tune of the "Pastorale" all her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her imaginations, and her deep and passionately tender and even ecstatic love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus. Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into a fountain, hushed her music to let it have its way. And Hermione heard in it the voice of the Bambino, the Christ-child, to whose manger-cradle the shepherds followed the star, and the voice of the Madonna, Maria stella del mare, whom the peasants love in Sicily as the child loves its mother. And those peasants were in it, too, people of the lava wastes and the lava terraces where the vines are green against the black, people of the hazel and the beech forests, where the little owl cries at eve, people of the plains where, beneath the yellow lemons, spring the yellow flowers that are like their joyous reflection in the grasses, people of the sea, that wonderful purple sea in whose depth of color eternity seems caught. The altars of the pagan world were in it, and the wayside shrines before which the little lamps are lit by night upon the lonely mountain-sides, the old faith and the new, and the love of a land that lives on from generation to generation in the pulsing breasts of men.

And Maurice was in it, too, and Hermione and her love for him and his for her.

Gaspare did not move. He loved the "Pastorale" almost without knowing that he loved it. It reminded him of the festa of Natale, when, as a child, dressed in a long, white garment, he had carried a blazing torch of straw down the steps of the church of San Pancrazio before the canopy that sheltered the Bambino. It was a part of his life, as his mother was, and Tito the donkey, and the vineyards, the sea, the sun. It pleased him to hear it, and to feel that his padrona from a far country loved it, and his isle, his "Paese" in which it sounded. So, though he had been impatient to reach the Casa del Prete and enjoy the reward of praise which he considered was his due for his forethought and his labors, he stood very still by Tito, with his great, brown eyes fixed, and the donkey switch drooping in the hand that hung at his side.

And Hermione for a moment gave herself entirely to her dream.

She had carried out the plan which she had made. She and Maurice Delarey had been married quietly, early one morning in London, and had caught the boat-train at Victoria, and travelled through to Sicily without stopping on the way to rest. She wanted to plunge Maurice in the south at once, not to lead him slowly, step by step, towards it. And so, after three nights in the train, they had opened their eyes to the quiet sea near Reggio, to the clustering houses under the mountains of Messina, to the high-prowed fishermen's boats painted blue and yellow, to the coast-line which wound away from the straits till it stole out to that almost phantasmal point where Siracusa lies, to the slope of Etna, to the orange gardens and the olives, and the great, dry water courses like giant highways leading up into the mountains. And from the train they had come up here into the recesses of the hills to hear their welcome of the "Pastorale." It was a contrast to make a dream, the roar of ceaseless travel melting into this radiant silence, this inmost heart of peace. They had rushed through great cities to this old land of mountains and of legends, and up there on the height from which the droning music dropped to them through the sunshine was their home, the solitary house which was to shelter their true marriage.

Delarey was almost confused by it all. Half dazed by the noise of the journey, he was now half dazed by the wonder of the quiet as he stood near Gaspare and listened to Sebastiano's music, and looked upward to the white terrace wall.

Hermione was to be his possession here, in this strange and far-off land, among these simple peasant people. So he thought of them, not versed yet in the complex Sicilian character. He listened, and he looked at Gaspare. He saw a boy of eighteen, short as are most Sicilians, but straight as an arrow, well made, active as a cat, rather of the Greek than of the Arab type so often met with in Sicily, with bold, well-cut features, wonderfully regular and wonderfully small, square, white teeth, thick, black eyebrows, and enormous brown eyes sheltered by the largest lashes he had ever seen. The very low forehead was edged by a mass of hair that had small gleams of bright gold here and there in the front, but that farther back on the head was of a brown so dark as to look nearly black. Gaspare was dressed in a homely suit of light-colored linen with no collar and a shirt open at the throat, showing a section of chest tanned by the sun. Stout mountain boots were on his feet, and a white linen hat was tipped carelessly to the back of his head, leaving his expressive, ardently audacious, but not unpleasantly impudent face exposed to the golden rays of which he had no fear.

As Delarey looked at him he felt oddly at home with him, almost as if he stood beside a young brother. Yet he could scarcely speak Gaspare's language, and knew nothing of his thoughts, his feelings, his hopes, his way of life. It was an odd sensation, a subtle sympathy not founded upon knowledge. It seemed to now into Delarey's heart out of the heart of the sun, to steal into it with the music of the "Pastorale."

"I feel—I feel almost as if I belonged here," he whispered to Hermione, at last.

She turned her head and looked down on him from her donkey. The tears were still in her eyes.

"I always knew you belonged to the blessed, blessed south," she said, in a low voice. "Do you care for that?"

She pointed towards the terrace.

"That music?"

"Yes."

"Tremendously, but I don't know why. Is it very beautiful?"

"I sometimes think it is the most beautiful music I have ever heard. At any rate, I have always loved it more than all other music, and now—well, you can guess if I love it now."

She dropped one hand against the donkey's warm shoulder. Maurice took it in his warm hand.

"All Sicily, all the real, wild Sicily seems to be in it. They play it in the churches on the night of the Natale," she went on, after a moment. "I shall never forget hearing it for the first time. I felt as if it took hold of my very soul with hands like the hands of the Bambino."

She broke off. A tear had fallen down upon her cheek.

"Avanti Gaspare!" she said.

Gaspare lifted his switch and gave Tito a tap, calling out "Ah!" in a loud, manly voice. The donkey moved on, tripping carefully among the stones. They mounted slowly up towards the "Pastorale." Presently Hermione said to Maurice, who kept beside her in spite of the narrowness of the path:

"Everything seems very strange to me to-day. Can you guess why?"

"I don't know. Tell me," he answered.

"It's this. I never expected to be perfectly happy. We all have our dreams, I suppose. We all think now and then, 'If only I could have this with that, this person in that place, I could be happy.' And perhaps we have sometimes a part of our dream turned into reality, though even that comes seldom. But to have the two, to have the two halves of our dream fitted together and made reality—isn't that rare? Long ago, when I was a girl, I always used to think—'If I could ever be with the one I loved in the south—alone, quite alone, quite away from the world, I could be perfectly happy.' Well, years after I thought that I came here. I knew at once I had found my ideal place. One-half of my dream was made real and was mine. That was much, wasn't it? But getting this part of what I longed for sometimes made me feel unutterably sad. I had never seen you then, but often when I sat on that little terrace up there I felt a passionate desire to have a human being whom I loved beside me. I loved no one then, but I wanted, I needed to love. Do men ever feel that? Women do, often, nearly always I think. The beauty made me want to love. Sometimes, as I leaned over the wall, I heard a shepherd-boy below in the ravine play on his pipe, or I heard the goat-bells ringing under the olives. Sometimes at night I saw distant lights, like fire-flies, lamps carried by peasants going to their homes in the mountains from a festa in honor of some saint, stealing upward through the darkness, or I saw the fishermen's lights burning in the boats far off upon the sea. Then—then I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation, the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now—now I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should he? What have I ever done to be worthy of such a gift?"

"You've been yourself," he answered.

At this moment the path narrowed and he had to fall behind, and they did not speak again till they had clambered up the last bit of the way, steep almost as the side of a house, passed through the old ruined arch, and came out upon the terrace before the Casa del Prete.

Sebastiano met them, still playing lustily upon his pipe, while the sweat dripped from his sunburned face; but Lucrezia, suddenly overcome by shyness, had disappeared round the corner of the cottage to the kitchen. The donkey boys were resting on the stone seats in easy attitudes, waiting for Gaspare's orders to unload, and looking forward to a drink of the Monte Amato wine. When they had had it they meant to carry out a plan devised by the radiant Gaspare, to dance a tarantella for the forestieri while Sebastiano played the flute. But no hint of this intention was to be given till the luggage had been taken down and carried into the house. Their bright faces were all twinkling with the knowledge of their secret. When at length Sebastiano had put down the ceramella and shaken Hermione and Maurice warmly by the hand, and Gaspare had roughly, but with roars of laughter, dragged Lucrezia into the light of day to be presented, Hermione took her husband in to see their home. On the table in the sitting-room lay a letter.

"A letter already!" she said.

There was a sound almost of vexation in her voice. The little white thing lying there seemed to bring a breath of the world she wanted to forget into their solitude.

"Who can have written?"

She took it up and felt contrition.

"It's from Emile!" she exclaimed. "How good of him to remember! This must be his welcome."

"Read it, Hermione," said Maurice. "I'll look after Gaspare."

She laughed.

"Better not. He's here to look after us. But you'll soon understand him, very soon, and he you. You speak different languages, but you both belong to the south. Let him alone, Maurice. We'll read this together. I'm sure it's for you as well as me."

And while Gaspare and the boys carried in the trunks she sat down by the table and opened Emile's letter. It was very short, and was addressed from Kairouan, where Artois had established himself for the spring in an Arab house. She began reading it aloud in French:

"This is a word—perhaps unwelcome, for I think I understand, dear friend, something of what you are feeling and of what you desire just now—a word of welcome to your garden of paradise. May there never be an angel with a flaming sword to keep the gate against you. Listen to the shepherds fluting, dream, or, better, live, as you are grandly capable of living, under the old olives of Sicily. Take your golden time boldly with both hands. Life may seem to most of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured thing, but when it is not so for a while to one who can think as you can think, the power of thought, of deep thought, intensifies its glory. You will never enjoy as might a pagan, perhaps never as might a saint. But you will enjoy as a generous-blooded woman with a heart that only your friends—I should like to dare to say only one friend—know in its rare entirety. There is an egoist here, in the shadow of the mosques, who turns his face towards Mecca, and prays that you may never leave your garden. E. A."

"Does the Sicilian grandmother respond to the magic of the south?"

When she drew near to the end of this letter Hermione hesitated.

"He—there's something," she said, "that is too kind to me. I don't think I'll read it."

"Don't," said Delarey. "But it can't be too kind."

She saw the postscript and smiled.

"And quite at the end there's an allusion to you."

"Is there?"

"I must read that."

And she read it.

"He needn't be afraid of the grandmother's not responding, need he, Maurice?"

"No," he said, smiling too. "But is that it, do you think? Why should it be? Who wouldn't love this place?"

And he went to the open door and looked out towards the sea.

"Who wouldn't?" he repeated.

"Oh, I have met an Englishman who was angry with Etna for being the shape it is."

"What an ass!"

"I thought so, too. But, seriously, I expect the grandmother has something to say in that matter of your feeling already, as if you belonged here."

"Perhaps."

He was still looking towards the distant sea far down below them.

"Is that an island?" he asked.

"Where?" said Hermione, getting up and coming towards him. "Oh, that—no, it is a promontory, but it's almost surrounded by the sea. There is only a narrow ledge of rock, like a wall, connecting it with the main-land, and in the rock there's a sort of natural tunnel through which the sea flows. I've sometimes been to picnic there. On the plateau hidden among the trees there's a ruined house. I have spent many hours reading and writing in it. They call it, in Marechiaro, Casa delle Sirene—the house of the sirens."

"Questo vino è bello e fino,"

cried Gaspare's voice outside.

"A Brindisi!" said Hermione. "Gaspare's treating the boys. Questo vino—oh, how glorious to be here in Sicily!"

She put her arm through Delarey's, and drew him out onto the terrace. Gaspare, Lucrezia, Sebastiano, and the three boys stood there with glasses of red wine in their hands raised high above their heads.

"Questo vino è bello e fino,
È portato da Castel Perini,
Faccio brindisi alla Signora Ermini,"

continued Gaspare, joyously, and with an obvious pride in his poetical powers.

They all drank simultaneously, Lucrezia spluttering a little out of shyness.

"Monte Amato, Gaspare, not Castel Perini. But that doesn't rhyme, eh? Bravo! But we must drink, too."

Gaspare hastened to fill two more glasses.

"Now it's our turn," cried Hermione.

"Questo vino è bello e fino,
È portato da Castello a mare,
Faccio brindisi al Signor Gaspare."

The boys burst into a hearty laugh, and Gaspare's eyes gleamed with pleasure while Hermione and Maurice drank. Then Sebastiano drew from the inner pocket of his old jacket a little flute, smiling with an air of intense and comic slyness which contorted his face.

"Ah," said Hermione, "I know—it's the tarantella!"

She clapped her hands.

"It only wanted that," she said to Maurice. "Only that—the tarantella!"

"Guai Lucrezia!" cried Gaspare, tyrannically.

Lucrezia bounded to one side, bent her body inward, and giggled with all her heart. Sebastiano leaned his back against a column and put the flute to his lips.

"Here, Maurice, here!" said Hermione.

She made him sit down on one of the seats under the parlor window, facing the view, while the four boys took their places, one couple opposite to the other. Then Sebastiano began to twitter the tune familiar to the Sicilians of Marechiaro, in which all the careless pagan joy of life in the sun seems caught and flung out upon a laughing, dancing world. Delarey laid his hands on the warm tiles of the seat, leaned forward, and watched with eager eyes. He had never seen the tarantella, yet now with his sensation of expectation there was blended another feeling. It seemed to him as if he were going to see something he had known once, perhaps very long ago, something that he had forgotten and that was now going to be recalled to his memory. Some nerve in his body responded to Sebastiano's lively tune. A desire of movement came to him as he saw the gay boys waiting on the terrace, their eyes already dancing, although their bodies were still.

Gaspare bent forward, lifted his hands above his head, and began to snap his fingers in time to the music. A look of joyous invitation had come into his eyes—an expression that was almost coquettish, like the expression of a child who has conceived some lively, innocent design of which he thinks that no one knows except himself. His young figure surely quivered with a passion of merry mischief which was communicated to his companions. In it there began to flame a spirit that suggested undying youth. Even before they began to dance the boys were transformed. If they had ever known cares those cares had fled, for in the breasts of those who can really dance the tarantella there is no room for the smallest sorrow, in their hearts no place for the most minute regret, anxiety, or wonder, when the rapture of the measure is upon them. Away goes everything but the pagan joy of life, the pagan ecstasy of swift movement, and the leaping blood that is quick as the motes in a sunray falling from a southern sky. Delarey began to smile as he watched them, and their expression was reflected in his eyes. Hermione glanced at him and thought what a boy he looked. His eyes made her feel almost as if she were sitting with a child.

The mischief, the coquettish joy of the boys increased. They snapped their fingers more loudly, swayed their bodies, poised themselves first on one foot, then on the other, then abruptly, and with a wildness that was like the sudden crash of all the instruments in an orchestra breaking in upon the melody of a solitary flute, burst into the full frenzy of the dance. And in the dance each seemed to be sportively creative, ruled by his own sweet will.

"That's why I love the tarantella more than any other dance," Hermione murmured to her husband, "because it seems to be the invention of the moment, as if they were wild with joy and had to show it somehow, and showed it beautifully by dancing. Look at Gaspare now."

With his hands held high above his head, and linked together, Gaspare was springing into the air, as if propelled by one of those boards which are used by acrobats in circuses for leaping over horses. He had thrown off his hat, and his low-growing hair, which was rather long on the forehead, moved as he sprang upward, as if his excitement, penetrating through every nerve in his body, had filled it with electricity. While Hermione watched him she almost expected to see its golden tufts give off sparks in response to the sparkling radiance that flashed from his laughing eyes. For in all the wild activity of his changing movements Gaspare never lost his coquettish expression, the look of seductive mischief that seemed to invite the whole world to be merry and mad as he was. His ever-smiling lips and ever-smiling eyes defied fatigue, and his young body—grace made a living, pulsing, aspiring reality—suggested the tireless intensity of a flame. The other boys danced well, but Gaspare outdid them all, for they only looked gay while he looked mad with joy. And to-day, at this moment, he felt exultant. He had a padrona to whom he was devoted with that peculiar sensitive devotion of the Sicilian which, once it is fully aroused, is tremendous in its strength and jealous in its doggedness. He was in command of Lucrezia, and was respectfully looked up to by all his boy friends of Marechiaro as one who could dispense patronage, being a sort of purse-bearer and conductor of rich forestieri in a strange land. Even Sebastiano, a personage rather apt to be a little haughty in his physical strength, and, though no longer a brigand, no great respecter of others, showed him to-day a certain deference which elated his boyish spirit. And all his elation, all his joy in the present and hopes for the future, he let out in the dance. To dance the tarantella almost intoxicated him, even when he only danced it in the village among the contadini, but to-day the admiring eyes of his padrona were upon him. He knew how she loved the tarantella. He knew, too, that she wanted the padrone, her husband, to love it as she did. Gaspare was very shrewd to read a woman's thoughts so long as her love ran in them. Though but eighteen, he was a man in certain knowledge. He understood, almost unconsciously, a good deal of what Hermione was feeling as she watched, and he put his whole soul into the effort to shine, to dazzle, to rouse gayety and wonder in the padrone, who saw him dance for the first time. He was untiring in his variety and his invention. Sometimes, light-footed in his mountain boots, with an almost incredible swiftness and vim, he rushed from end to end of the terrace. His feet twinkled in steps so complicated and various that he made the eyes that watched him wink as at a play of sparks in a furnace, and his arms and hands were never still, yet never, even for a second, fell into a curve that was ungraceful. Sometimes his head was bent whimsically forward as if in invitation. Sometimes he threw his whole body backward, exposing his brown throat, and staring up at the sun like a sun worshipper dancing to his divinity. Sometimes he crouched on his haunches, clapping his hands together rhythmically, and, with bent knees, shooting out his legs like some jovially grotesque dwarf promenading among a crowd of Follies. And always the spirit of the dance seemed to increase within him, and the intoxication of it to take more hold upon him, and his eyes grew brighter and his face more radiant, and his body more active, more utterly untiring, till he was the living embodiment surely of all the youth and all the gladness of the world.

Hermione had kept Artois's letter in her hand, and now, as she danced in spirit with Gaspare, and rejoiced not only in her own joy, but in his, she thought suddenly of that sentence in it—"Life may seem to most of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured, thing." Life a tortured thing! She was thinking now, exultantly thinking. Her thoughts were leaping, spinning, crouching, whirling, rushing with Gaspare in the sunshine. But life was a happy, a radiant reality. No dream, it was more beautiful than any dream, as the clear, when lovely, is more lovely than even that which is exquisite and vague. She had, of course, always known that in the world there is much joy. Now she felt it, she felt all the joy of the world. She felt the joy of sunshine and of blue, the joy of love and of sympathy, the joy of health and of activity, the joy of sane passion that fights not against any law of God or man, the joy of liberty in a joyous land where the climate is kindly, and, despite poverty and toil, there are songs upon the lips of men, there are tarantellas in their sun-browned bodies, there are the fires of gayety in their bold, dark eyes. Joy, joy twittered in the reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the boys were joys made manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off drone of the "Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy that was different, less subtly sweet, perhaps, but more buoyant, more fearless, more careless. The glory of the pagan world was round about her, and for a moment her heart was like the heart of a nymph scattering roses in a Bacchic triumph.

Maurice moved beside her, and she heard him breathing quickly.

"What is it, Maurice?" she asked. "You—do you—"

"Yes," he answered, understanding the question she had not fully asked. "It drives me almost mad to sit still and see those boys. Gaspare's like a merry devil tempting one."

As if Gaspare had understood what Maurice said, he suddenly spun round from his companions, and began to dance in front of Maurice and Hermione, provocatively, invitingly, bending his head towards them, and laughing almost in their faces, but without a trace of impertinence. He did not speak, though his lips were parted, showing two rows of even, tiny teeth, but his radiant eyes called to them, scolded them for their inactivity, chaffed them for it, wondered how long it would last, and seemed to deny that it could last forever.

"What eyes!" said Hermione. "Did you ever see anything so expressive?"

Maurice did not answer. He was watching Gaspare, fascinated, completely under the spell of the dance. The blood was beginning to boil in his veins, warm blood of the south that he had never before felt in his body. Artois had spoken to Hermione of "the call of the blood." Maurice began to hear it now, to long to obey it.

Gaspare clapped his hands alternately in front of him and behind him, leaping from side to side, with a step in which one foot crossed over the other, and holding his body slightly curved inward. And all the time he kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation grew stronger in them.

"Venga!" he whispered, always dancing. "Venga, signorino, venga—venga!"

He spun round, clapped his hands furiously, snapped his fingers, and jumped back. Then he held out his hands to Delarey, with a gay authority that was irresistible.

"Venga, venga, signorino! Venga, venga!"

All the blood in Delarey responded, chasing away something—was it a shyness, a self-consciousness of love—that till now had held him back from the gratification of his desire? He sprang up and he danced the tarantella, danced it almost as if he had danced it all his life, with a natural grace, a frolicsome abandon that no pure-blooded Englishman could ever achieve, danced it as perhaps once the Sicilian grandmother had danced it under the shadow of Etna. Whatever Gaspare did he imitated, with a swiftness and a certainty that were amazing, and Gaspare, intoxicated by having such a pupil, outdid himself in countless changing activities. It was like a game and like a duel, for Gaspare presently began almost to fight for supremacy as he watched Delarey's startling aptitude in the tarantella, which, till this moment, he had considered the possession of those born in Sicily and of Sicilian blood. He seemed to feel that this pupil might in time become the master, and to be put upon his mettle, and he put forth all his cunning to be too much for Delarey.

And Hermione was left alone, watching, for Lucrezia had disappeared, suddenly mindful of some household duty.

When Delarey sprang up she felt a thrill of responsive excitement, and when she watched his first steps, and noted the look of youth in him, the supple southern grace that rivalled the boyish grace of Gaspare, she was filled with that warm, that almost yearning admiration which is the child of love. But another feeling followed—a feeling of melancholy. As she watched him dancing with the four boys, a gulf seemed to yawn between her and them. She was alone on her side of this gulf, quite alone. They were remote from her. She suddenly realized that Delarey belonged to the south, and that she did not. Despite all her understanding of the beauty of the south, all her sympathy for the spirit of the south, all her passionate love of the south, she was not of it. She came to it as a guest. But Delarey was of it. She had never realized that absolutely till this moment. Despite his English parentage and upbringing, the southern strain in his ancestry had been revived in him. The drop of southern blood in his veins was his master. She had not married an Englishman.

Once again, and in all the glowing sunshine, with Etna and the sea before her, and the sound of Sebastiano's flute in her ears, she was on the Thames Embankment in the night with Artois, and heard his deep voice speaking to her.

"Does he know his own blood?" said the voice. "Our blood governs us when the time comes."

And again the voice said:

"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."

"The call of the blood." There was now something almost terrible to Hermione in that phrase, something menacing and irresistible. Were men, then, governed irrevocably, dominated by the blood that was in them? Artois had certainly seemed to imply that they were, and he knew men as few knew them. His powerful intellect, like a search-light, illumined the hidden places, discovering the concealed things of the souls of men. But Artois was not a religious man, and Hermione had a strong sense of religion, though she did not cling, as many do, to any one creed. If the call of the blood were irresistible in a man, then man was only a slave. The criminal must not be condemned, nor the saint exalted. Conduct was but obedience in one who had no choice but to obey. Could she believe that?

The dance grew wilder, swifter. Sebastiano quickened the time till he was playing it prestissimo. One of the boys, Giulio, dropped out exhausted. Then another, Alfio, fell against the terrace wall, laughing and wiping his streaming face. Finally Giuseppe gave in, too, obviously against his will. But Gaspare and Maurice still kept on. The game was certainly a duel now—a duel which would not cease till Sebastiano put an end to it by laying down his flute. But he, too, was on his mettle and would not own fatigue. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could not bear the dance any more. It was, perhaps, absurd of her. Her brain, fatigued by travel, was perhaps playing her tricks. But she felt as if Maurice were escaping from her in this wild tarantella, like a man escaping through a fantastic grotto from some one who called to him near its entrance. A faint sensation of something that was surely jealousy, the first she had ever known, stirred in her heart—jealousy of a tarantella.

"Maurice!" she said.

He did not hear her.

"Maurice!" she called. "Sebastiano—Gaspare—stop! You'll kill yourselves!"

Sebastiano caught her eye, finished the tune, and took the flute from his lips. In truth he was not sorry to be commanded to do the thing his pride of music forbade him to do of his own will. Gaspare gave a wild, boyish shout, and flung himself down on Giuseppe's knees, clasping him round the neck jokingly. And Maurice—he stood still on the terrace for a moment looking dazed. Then the hot blood surged up to his head, making it tingle under his hair, and he came over slowly, almost shamefacedly, and sat down by Hermione.

"This sun's made me mad, I think," he said, looking at her. "Why, how pale you are, Hermione!"

"Am I? No, it must be the shadow of the awning makes me look so. Oh, Maurice, you are indeed a southerner! Do you know, I feel—I feel as if I had never really seen you till now, here on this terrace, as if I had never known you as you are till now, now that I've watched you dance the tarantella."

"I can't dance it, of course. It was absurd of me to try."

"Ask Gaspare! No, I'll ask him. Gaspare, can the padrone dance the tarantella?"

"Eh—altro!" said Gaspare, with admiring conviction.

He got off Giuseppe's knee, where he had been curled up almost like a big kitten, came and stood by Hermione, and added:

"Per Dio, signora, but the padrone is like one of us!"

Hermione laughed. Now that the dance was over and the twittering flute was silent, her sense of loneliness and melancholy was departing. Soon, no doubt, she would be able to look back upon it and laugh at it as one laughs at moods that have passed away.

"This is his first day in Sicily, Gaspare."

"There are forestieri who come here every year, and who stay for months, and who can talk our language—yes, and can even swear in dialetto as we can—but they are not like the padrone. Not one of them could dance the tarantella like that. Per Dio!"

A radiant look of pleasure came into Maurice's face.

"I'm glad you've brought me here," he said. "Ah, when you chose this place for our honeymoon you understood me better than I understand myself, Hermione."

"Did I?" she said, slowly. "But no, Maurice, I think I chose a little selfishly. I was thinking of what I wanted. Oh, the boys are going, and Sebastiano."

That evening, when they had finished supper—they did not wish to test Lucrezia's powers too severely by dining the first day—they came out onto the terrace. Lucrezia and Gaspare were busily talking in the kitchen. Tito, the donkey, was munching his hay under the low-pitched roof of the out-house. Now and then they could faintly hear the sound of his moving jaws, Lucrezia's laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence that lay about them, the night hush of the mountains and the sea. Hermione sat down on the seat in the terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars. There was a cool breeze blowing from Etna. Here and there upon the mountains shone solitary lights, and one was moving slowly through the darkness along the crest of a hill opposite to them, a torch carried by some peasant going to his hidden cottage among the olive-trees.

Maurice lit his cigar and stood by Hermione, who was sitting sideways and leaning her arms on the wall, and looking out into the wide dimness in which, somewhere, lay the ravine. He did not want to talk just then, and she kept silence. This was really their wedding night, and both of them were unusually conscious, but in different ways, of the mystery that lay about them, and that lay, too, within them. It was strange to be together up here, far up in the mountains, isolated in their love. Below the wall, on the side of the ravine, the leaves of the olives rustled faintly as the wind passed by. And this whisper of the leaves seemed to be meant for them, to be addressed to them. They were surely being told something by the little voices of the night.

"Maurice," Hermione said, at last, "does this silence of the mountains make you wish for anything?"

"Wish?" he said. "I don't know—no, I think not. I have got what I wanted. I have got you. Why should I wish for anything more? And I feel at home here. It's extraordinary how I feel at home."

"You! No, it isn't extraordinary at all."

She looked up at him, still keeping her arms on the terrace wall. His physical beauty, which had always fascinated her, moved her more than ever in the south, seemed to her to become greater, to have more meaning in this setting of beauty and romance. She thought of the old pagan gods. He was, indeed, suited to be their happy messenger. At that moment something within her more than loved him, worshipped him, felt for him an idolatry that had something in it of pain. A number of thoughts ran through her mind swiftly. One was this: "Can it be possible that he will die some day, that he will be dead?" And the awfulness, the unspeakable horror of the death of the body gripped her and shook her in the dark.

"Oh, Maurice!" she said. "Maurice!"

"What is it?"

She held out her hands to him. He took them and sat down by her.

"What is it, Hermione?" he said again.

"If beauty were only deathless!"

"But—but all this is, for us. It was here for the old Greeks to see, and I suppose it will be here—"

"I didn't mean that."

"I've been stupid," he said, humbly.

"No, my dearest—my dearest one. Oh, how did you ever love me?"

She had forgotten the warning of Artois. The dirty little beggar was staring at the angel and wanted the angel to know it.

"Hermione! What do you mean?"

He looked at her, and there was genuine surprise in his face and in his voice.

"How can you love me? I'm so ugly. Oh, I feel it here, I feel it horribly in the midst of—of all this loveliness, with you."

She hid her face against his shoulder almost like one afraid.

"But you are not ugly! What nonsense! Hermione!"

He put his hand under her face and raised it, and the touch of his hand against her cheek made her tremble. To-night she more than loved, she worshipped him. Her intellect did not speak any more. Its voice was silenced by the voice of the heart, by the voices of the senses. She felt as if she would like to go down on her knees to him and thank him for having loved her, for loving her. Abasement would have been a joy to her just then, was almost a necessity, and yet there was pride in her, the decent pride of a pure-natured woman who has never let herself be soiled.

"Hermione," he said, looking into her face. "Don't speak to me like that. It's all wrong. It puts me in the wrong place, I a fool and you—what you are. If that friend of yours could hear you—by Jove!"

There was something so boyish, so simple in his voice that Hermione suddenly threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, as she might have kissed a delightful child. She began to laugh through tears.

"Thank God you're not conceited!" she exclaimed.

"What about?" he asked.

But she did not answer. Presently they heard Gaspare's step on the terrace. He came to them bareheaded, with shining eyes, to ask if they were satisfied with Lucrezia. About himself he did not ask. He felt that he had done all things for his padrona as he alone could have done them, knowing her so well.

"Gaspare," Hermione said, "everything is perfect. Tell Lucrezia."

"Better not, signora. I will say you are fairly satisfied, as it is only the first day. Then she will try to do better to-morrow. I know Lucrezia."

And he gazed at them calmly with his enormous liquid eyes.

"Do not say too much, signora. It makes people proud."

She thought that she heard an odd Sicilian echo of Artois. The peasant lad's mind reflected the mind of the subtle novelist for a moment.

"Very well, Gaspare," she said, submissively.

He smiled at her with satisfaction.

"I understand girls," he said. "You must keep them down or they will keep you down. Every girl in Marechiaro is like that. We keep them down therefore."

He spoke calmly, evidently quite without thought that he was speaking to a woman.

"May I go to bed, signora?" he added. "I got up at four this morning."

"At four!"

"To be sure all was ready for you and the signore."

"Gaspare! Go at once. We will go to bed, too. Shall we, Maurice?"

"Yes. I'm ready."

Just as they were going up the steps into the house, he turned to take a last look at the night. Far down below him over the terrace wall he saw a bright, steady light.

"Is that on the sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing to it. "Do they fish there at night?"

"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."

Gaspare shook his head.

"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.

"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."

"But no one lives there."

"Oh, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista lives there with Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora. Buon riposo, signore."

"Buon riposo, Gaspare."

And Maurice echoed it:

"Buon riposo."

As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near Tito's stable, Maurice added:

"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying good-night. I feel as if I'd said it before, somehow."

"Your blood has said it without your knowing it, perhaps many times. Are you coming, Maurice?"

He turned once more, looked down at the light shining in the house of the sirens, then followed Hermione in through the open door.

V

That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world—a world that never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased, instead of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this sometimes surprised her. For she had thought till now that the dead sculptors of Greece and Rome had in their works succeeded in transcending humanity, had shown what God might have created instead of what He had created, and had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material. Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty something strange, something ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing, light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a "fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had been struck by in a London restaurant.

This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing seas.

"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the shining that came in answer to the words—"Let there be light!"

In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that there was nothing remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing, playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to know that she would be a little saddened were her husband to change, to grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had spoken to Artois of possible development in Maurice, of what she might do for him, and at first, just at first, she had instinctively exerted her influence over him to bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And he had eagerly striven to respond, stirred by his love for her, and his reverence—not a very clever, but certainly a very affectionate reverence—for her brilliant qualities of brain. In those very first days together, isolated in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go—as she herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious, love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of love but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love prompts thought, not stifles it. In their long mountain walks, in their rides on muleback to distant villages, hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests of the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when the noon wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on the terrace when the stars came out, and the shepherds led their flocks down to the valleys with little happy tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts, desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that beauty and solitude and nearness to nature in this isle of the south woke in her. She did not fear to be subtle, she did not fear to be trivial. Everything she noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she noticed suggested to her, she related. The sound of the morning breeze in the olive-trees seemed to her different from the sound of the breeze of evening. She tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of the music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every sound, not only with the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came, like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then fading until taken softly by eternity—that was Hermione's feeling—that sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight, when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her passionate imagination now threw gossamers before, now drew gossamers away from a holy of holies that no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was a tender, glorious attempt to compass the impossible.

All this was at first. But Hermione was generally too clear-brained to be long tricked even by her own enthusiasms. She soon began to understand that though Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she saw and felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant attempt of love in a man who thought he had married his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and the spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She watched in a rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion of gratitude. But Gaspare was in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of the phenomenon, a dancer in the exquisite tarantella. And Maurice, too, on that first day had he not obeyed Sebastiano's call? Soon she knew that when she had sat alone on the terrace seat, and seen the dancers losing all thought of time and the hour in the joy of their moving bodies, while hers was still, the scene had been prophetic. In that moment Maurice had instinctively taken his place in the mask of the spring and she hers. Their bodies had uttered their minds. She was the passionate watcher, but he was the passionate performer. Therefore she was his audience. She had travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it, had travelled out to be Sicily.

There was a great difference between them, but, having realized it thoroughly, Hermione was able not to regret but to delight in it. She did not wish to change her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand with her heart, he would be completely changed, and into something not natural, like a performing dog or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps amazement, combined too often with a faint disgust. And ceasing to desire she ceased to endeavor.

"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering her conversation with Artois. "And, thank God, I don't want to now."

And then she set herself to watch her Sicilian, as she loved to call him, enjoying the spring in Sicily in his own way, dancing the tarantella with surely the spirit of eternal youth. He had, she thought, heard the call of the blood and responded to it fully and openly, fearless and unashamed. Day by day, seeing his boyish happiness in this life of the mountains and the sea, she laughed at the creeping, momentary sense of apprehension that had been roused in her during her conversation with Artois upon the Thames Embankment. Artois had said that he distrusted what he loved. That was the flaw in an over-intellectual man. The mind was too alert, too restless, dogging the steps of the heart like a spy, troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness. But she could trust where she loved. Maurice was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched him, then threw himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.

The strain of Sicilian blood that was in him worked in him curiously, making her sometimes marvel at the mysterious power of race, at the stubborn and almost tyrannical domination some dead have over some living, those who are dust over those who are quick with animation and passion. Everything that was connected with Sicily and with Sicilian life not only reached his senses and sank easily into his heart, but seemed also to rouse his mind to an activity that astonished her. In connection with Sicily he showed a swiftness, almost a cleverness, she never noted in him when things Sicilian were not in question.

For instance, like most Englishmen, Maurice had no great talent for languages. He spoke French fairly well, having had a French nurse when he was a child, and his mother had taught him a little Italian. But till now he had never had any desire to be proficient in any language except his own. Hermione, on the other hand, was gifted as a linguist, loving languages and learning them easily. Yet Maurice picked up—in his case the expression, usually ridiculous, was absolutely applicable—Sicilian with a readiness that seemed to Hermione almost miraculous. He showed no delight in the musical beauty of Italian. What he wanted, and what his mind—or was it rather what his ears and his tongue and his lips?—took, and held and revelled in, was the Sicilian dialect spoken by Lucrezia and Gaspare when they were together, spoken by the peasants of Marechiaro and of the mountains. To Hermione Gaspare had always talked Italian, incorrect, but still Italian, and she spoke no dialect, although she could often guess at what the Sicilians meant when they addressed her in their vigorous but uncouth jargon, different from Italian almost as Gaelic is from English. But Maurice very soon began to speak a few words of Sicilian. Hermione laughed at him and discouraged him jokingly, telling him that he must learn Italian thoroughly, the language of love, the most melodious language in the world.

"Italian!" he said. "What's the use of it? I want to talk to the people. A grammar! I won't open it. Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Gaspare came rushing bareheaded to them in the sun.

"The signora says I'm to learn Italian, but I say that I've Sicilian blood in my veins and must talk as you do."

"But I, signore, can speak Italian!" said Gaspare, with twinkling pride.

"As a bear dances. No, professor, you and I, we'll be good patriots. We'll speak in our mother-tongue. You rascal, you know we've begun already."

And looking mischievously at Hermione, he began to sing in a loud, warm voice:

"Cu Gabbi e Jochi e Parti e Mascarati,
Si fa lu giubileu universali.
Tiripi-tùmpiti, tùmpiti, tùmpiti,
Milli cardùbuli 'n culu ti pùncinu!"

Gaspare burst into a roar of delighted laughter.

"It's the tarantella over again," Hermione said. "You're a hopeless Sicilian. I give you up."

That same day she said to him:

"You love the peasants, don't you, Maurice?"

"Yes. Are you surprised?"

"No; at least I'm not surprised at your loving them."

"Well, then, Hermione?"

"Perhaps a little at the way you love them."

"What way's that?"

"Almost as they love each other—that's to say, when they love each other at all. Gaspare now! I believe you feel more as if he were a young brother of yours than as if he were your servant."

"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna [¹] of a boy in spite of all his mischief and fun. You should hear him talk of you. He'd die for his padrona."

"I believe he would. In love, the love that means being in love, I think Sicilians, though tremendously jealous, are very fickle, but if they take a devotion to any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a splendid quality."

"If they've got faults, I love their faults," he said. "They're a lovable race."

"Praising yourself!" she said, laughing at him, but with tender eyes.

"Myself?"

"Never mind. What is it, Gaspare?"

Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes shining with happiness and a box under his arm.

"The signore knows."

"Revolver practice," said Maurice. "I promised him he should have a try to-day. We're going to a place close by on the mountain. He's warned off Ciccio and his goats. Got the paper, Gaspare?"

Gaspare pointed to a bulging pocket.

"Enough to write a novel on. Well—will you come, Hermione?"

"It's too hot in the sun, and I know you're going into the eye of the sun."

"You see, it's the best place up at the top. There's that stone wall, and—"

"I'll stay here and listen to your music."

They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into the heart of the gold, and singing as they went:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,
Morettina bella, ciao—"

Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise of stones falling downward from their feet on the sunbaked mountain-side. Hermione sat still on the seat by the ravine.

"Ciao, ciao, ciao!"

She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met many Sicilians of the nobility in Palermo—princes, senators, young men of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese. Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead. Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive! Things that had doubtless stirred in them—instincts, desires, repugnances, joys—were stirring in him, dominating his English inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was assisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat, socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman—and she was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high traditions—she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, that all men and women are just human beings, brothers and sisters of a great family. In judging of individuals she could never be influenced by anything except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart and mind, qualities that might belong to any man. She was affected by habits, manners—what woman of breeding is not?—but even these could scarcely warp her judgment if they covered anything fine. She could find gold beneath mud and forget the mud.

Maurice was like the peasants, not like the Palermitan aristocracy. He was near to the breast of Sicily, of that mother of many nations, who had come to conquer, and had fought, and bled, and died, or been expelled, but had left indefaceable traces behind them, traces of Norman of Greek of Arab. He was no cosmopolitan with characteristics blurred; he was of the soil. Well, she loved the soil dearly. The almond blossomed from it. The olive gave its fruit, and the vine its generous blood, and the orange its gold, at the word of the soil, the dear, warm earth of Sicily. She thought of Maurice's warm hands, brown now as Gaspare's. How she loved his hands, and his eyes that shone with the lustre of the south! Had not this soil, in very truth, given those hands and those eyes to her? She felt that it had. She loved it more for the gift. She had reaped and garnered in her blessed Sicilian harvest.

Lucrezia came to her round the angle of the cottage, knowing she was alone. Lucrezia was mending a hole in a sock for Gaspare. Now she sat down on the seat under the window, divided from Hermione by the terrace, but able to see her, to feel companionship. Had the padrone been there Lucrezia would not have ventured to come. Gaspare had often explained to her her very humble position in the household. But Gaspare and the padrone were away on the mountain-top, and she could not resist being near to her padrona, for whom she already felt a very real affection and admiration.

"Is it a big hole, Lucrezia?" said Hermione, smiling at her.

"Si, signora."

Lucrezia put her thumb through it, holding it up on her fist.

"Gaspare's holes are always big."

She spoke as if in praise.

"Gaspare is strong," she added. "But Sebastiano is stronger."

As she said the last words a dreamy look came into her round face, and she dropped the hand that held the stocking into her lap.

"Sebastiano is hard like the rocks, signora."

"Hard-hearted, Lucrezia."

Lucrezia said nothing.

"You like Sebastiano, Lucrezia?"

Lucrezia reddened under her brown skin.

"Si, signora."

"So do I. He's always been a good friend of mine."

Lucrezia shifted along the seat until she was nearly opposite to where Hermione was sitting.

"How old is he?"

"Twenty-five, signora."

"I suppose he will be marrying soon, won't he? The men all marry young round about Marechiaro."

Lucrezia began to darn.

"His father, Chinetti Urbano, wishes him to marry at once. It is better for a man."

"You understand men, Lucrezia?"

"Si, signora. They are all alike."

"And what are they like?"

"Oh, signora, you know as well as I do. They must have their own way and we must not think to have ours. They must roam where they like, love where they choose, day or night, and we must sit in the doorway and get to bed at dark, and not bother where they've been or what they've done. They say we've no right, except one or two. There's Francesco, to be sure. He's a lamb with Maria. She can sit with her face to the street. But she wouldn't sit any other way, and he knows it. But the rest! Eh, già!"

"You don't think much of men, Lucrezia!"

"Oh, signora, they're just as God made them. They can't help it any more than we can help—"

She stopped and pursed her lips suddenly, as if checking some words that were almost on them.

"Lucrezia, come here and sit by me."

Lucrezia looked up with a sort of doubtful pleasure and surprise.

"Signora?"

"Come here."

Lucrezia got up and came slowly to the seat by the ravine. Hermione took her hand.

"You like Sebastiano very much, don't you?"

Lucrezia hung her head.

"Si, signora," she whispered.

"Do you think he'd be good to a woman if she loved him?"

"I shouldn't care. Bad or good, I'd—I'd—"

Suddenly, with a sort of childish violence, she put her two hands on Hermione's arms.

"I want Sebastiano, signora; I want him!" she cried. "I've prayed to the Madonna della Rocca to give him to me; all last year I've prayed, and this. D'you think the Madonna's going to do it? Do you? Do you?"

Heat came out of her two hands, and heat flashed in her eyes. Her broad bosom heaved, and her lips, still parted when she had done speaking, seemed to interrogate Hermione fiercely in the silence. Before Hermione could reply two sounds came to them: from below in the ravine the distant drone of the ceramella, from above on the mountain-top the dry crack of a pistol-shot.

Swiftly Lucrezia turned and looked downward, but Hermione looked upward towards the bare flank that rose behind the cottage.

"It's Sebastiano, signora."

The ceramella droned on, moving slowly with its player on the hidden path beneath the olive-trees.

A second pistol-shot rang out sharply.

"Go down and meet him, Lucrezia."

"May I—may I, really, signora?"

"Yes; go quickly."

Lucrezia bent down and kissed her padrona's hand.

"Bacio la mano, bacio la mano a Lei!"

Then, bareheaded, she went out from the awning into the glare of the sunshine, passed through the ruined archway, and disappeared among the rocks. She had gone to her music. Hermione stayed to listen to hers, the crack of the pistol up there near the blue sky.

Sebastiano was playing the tune she loved, the "Pastorale," but to-day she did not heed it. Indeed, now that she was left alone she was not conscious that she heard it. Her heart was on the hill-top near the blue.

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.

"Crack! Crack!"

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.

"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost as a person calls for help. Another pistol-shot answered her, mocking at her in the sun. Then she heard a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the laughter of something she could not personify, of some jeering spirit of the mountain. It died away at last, and she stood there, shivering in the sunshine.

"Signora! Signora!"

Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below. She turned and saw him standing with Lucrezia on the terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's waist. He took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm round Lucrezia.

Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the mountain-top. But something within her held her back from climbing up to the distant laughter, a feeling, an idiotic feeling she called it to herself afterwards. She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling of fear.

"Am I wanted up there?"

That was what something within her said. And the answer was made by her body. She turned and began to descend towards the terrace.

And at that moment, for the first time in her life, she was conscious of a little stab of pain such as she had never known before. It was pain of the mind and of the heart, and yet it was like bodily pain, too. It made her angry with herself. It was like a betrayal, a betrayal of herself by her own intellect, she thought.

She stopped once more on the mountain-side.

"Am I going to be ridiculous?" she said to herself. "Am I going to be one of the women I despise?"

Just then she realized that love may become a tyrant, ministering to the soul with persecutions.

[1] The Sicilians use the word "donna" to express the meaning we convey by the word "trump."

VI

Sebastiano took his arm from Lucrezia's waist as Hermione came down to the terrace, and said:

"Buona sera, signora. Is the signore coming down yet?"

He flung out his arm towards the mountain.

"I don't know, Sebastiano. Why?"

"I've come with a message for him."

"Not for Lucrezia?"

Sebastiano laughed boldly, but Lucrezia, blushing red, disappeared into the kitchen.

"Don't play with her, Sebastiano," said Hermione. "She's a good girl."

"I know that, signora."

"She deserves to be well treated."

Sebastiano went over to the terrace wall, looked into the ravine, turned round, and came back.

"Who's treating Lucrezia badly, signora?"

"I did not say anybody was."

"The girls in Marechiaro can take care of themselves, signora. You don't know them as I do."

"D'you think any woman can take care of herself, Sebastiano?"

He looked into her face and laughed, but said nothing. Hermione sat down. She had a desire to-day, after Lucrezia's conversation with her, to get at the Sicilian man's point of view in regard to women.

"Don't you think women want to be protected?" she asked.

"What from, signora?"

There was still laughter in his eyes.

"Not from us, anyway," he added. "Lucrezia there—she wants me for her husband. All Marechiaro knows it."

Hermione felt that under the circumstances it was useless to blush for Lucrezia, useless to meet blatant frankness with sensitive delicacy.

"Do you want Lucrezia for your wife?" she said.

"Well, signora, I'm strong. A stick or a knife in my hand and no man can touch me. You've never seen me do the scherma con coltello? One day I'll show you with Gaspare. And I can play better even than the men from Bronte on the ceramella. You've heard me. Lucrezia knows I can have any girl I like."

There was a simplicity in his immense superiority to women that robbed it of offensiveness and almost made Hermione laugh. In it, too, she felt the touch of the East. Arabs had been in Sicily and left their traces there, not only in the buildings of Sicily, but in its people's songs, and in the treatment of the women by the men.

"And are you going to choose Lucrezia?" she asked, gravely.

"Signora, I wasn't sure. But yesterday, I had a letter from Messina. They want me there. I've got a job that'll pay me well to go to the Lipari Islands with a cargo."

"Are you a sailor, too?"

"Signora, I can do anything."

"And will you be long away?"

"Who knows, signora? But I told Lucrezia to-day, and when she cried I told her something else. We are 'promised.'"

"I am glad," Hermione said, holding out her hand to him.

He took it in an iron grip.

"Be very good to her when you're married, won't you?"

"Oh, she'll be all right with me," he answered, carelessly. "And I won't give her the slap in the face on the wedding-day."

"Hi—yi—yi—yi—yi!"

There was a shrill cry from the mountain and Maurice and Gaspare came leaping down, scattering the stones, the revolvers still in their hands.

"Look, signora, look!" cried Gaspare, pulling a sheet of paper from his pocket and holding it proudly up. "Do you see the holes? One, two, three—"

He began to count.

"And I made five. Didn't I, signore?"

"You're a dead shot, Gasparino. Did you hear us, Hermione?"

"Yes," she said. "But you didn't hear me."

"You? Did you call?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Sebastiano's got a message for you," Hermione said.

She could not tell him now the absurd impulse that had made her call him.

"What's the message, Sebastiano?" asked Maurice, in his stumbling Sicilian-Italian that was very imperfect, but that nevertheless had already the true accent of the peasants about Marechiaro.

"Signore, there will be a moon to-night."

"Già. Lo so."

"Are you sleepy, signorino?"

He touched his eyes with his sinewy hands and made his face look drowsy. Maurice laughed.

"No."

"Are you afraid of being naked in the sea at night? But you need not enter it. Are you afraid of sleeping at dawn in a cave upon the sands?"

"What is it all?" asked Maurice. "Gaspare, I understand you best."

"I know," said Gaspare, joyously. "It's the fishing. Nito has sent. I told him to. Is it Nito, Sebastiano?"

Sebastiano nodded. Gaspare turned eagerly to Maurice.

"Oh, signore, you must come, you will come!"

"Where? In a boat?"

"No. We go down to the shore, to Isola Bella. We take food, wine, red wine, and a net. Between twenty-two and twenty-three o'clock is the time to begin. And the sea must be calm. Is the sea calm to-day, Sebastiano?"

"Like that."

Sebastiano moved his hand to and fro in the air, keeping it absolutely level. Gaspare continued to explain with gathering excitement and persuasiveness, talking to his master as much by gesture as by the words that Maurice could only partially understand.

"The sea is calm. Nito has the net, but he will not go into the sea. Per Dio, he is birbante. He will say he has the rheumatism, I know, and walk like that." (Gaspare hobbled to and fro before them, making a face of acute suffering.) "He has asked for me. Hasn't Nito asked for me, Sebastiano?"

Here Gaspare made a grimace at Sebastiano, who answered, calmly:

"Yes, he has asked for you to come with the padrone."

"I knew it. Then I shall undress. I shall take one end of the net while Nito holds the other, and I shall go out into the sea. I shall go up to here." (He put his hands up to his chin, stretching his neck like one avoiding a rising wave.) "And I shall wade, you'll see!—and if I come to a hole I shall swim. I can swim for hours, all day if I choose."

"And all night too?" said Hermione, smiling at his excitement.

"Davvero! But at night I must drink wine to keep out the cold. I come out like this." (He shivered violently, making his teeth chatter.) "Then I drink a glass and I am warm, and when they have taken the fish I go in again. We fish all along the shore from Isola Bella round by the point there, where there's the Casa delle Sirene, and to the caves beyond the Caffè Berardi. And when we've got enough—many fish—at dawn we sleep on the sand. And when the sun is up Carmela will take the fish and make a frittura, and we all eat it and drink more wine, and then—"

"And then—you're ready for the Campo Santo?" said Hermione.

"No, signora. Then we will dance the tarantella, and come home up the mountain singing, 'O sole mio!' and 'A mezzanotte a punto,' and the song of the Mafioso, and—"

Hermione began to laugh unrestrainedly. Gaspare, by his voice, his face, his gestures, had made them assist at a veritable orgie of labor, feasting, sleep, and mirth, all mingled together and chasing one another like performers in a revel. Even his suggestion of slumber on the sands was violent, as if they were to sleep with a kind of fury of excitement and determination.

"Signora!" he cried, staring as if ready to be offended.

Then he looked at Maurice, who was laughing, too, threw himself back against the wall, opened his mouth, and joined in with all his heart. But suddenly he stopped. His face changed, became very serious.

"I may go, signora?" he asked. "No one can fish as I can. The others will not go in far, and they soon get cold and want to put on their clothes. And the padrone! I must take care of the padrone! Guglielmo, the contadino, will sleep in the house, I know. Shall I call him? Guglielmo! Guglielmo!"

He vanished like a flash, they scarcely knew in what direction.

"He's alive!" exclaimed Maurice. "By Jove, he's alive, that boy! Glorious, glorious life! Oh, there's something here that—"

He broke off, looked down at the broad sea shimmering in the sun, then said:

"The sun, the sea, the music, the people, the liberty—it goes to my head, it intoxicates me."

"You'll go to-night?" she said.

"D'you mind if I do?"

"Mind? No. I want you to go. I want you to revel in this happy time, this splendid, innocent, golden time. And to-morrow we'll watch for you, Lucrezia and I, watch for you down there on the path. But—you'll bring us some of the fish, Maurice? You won't forget us?"

"Forget you!" he said. "You shall have all—"

"No, no. Only the little fish, the babies that Carmela rejects from the frittura."

"I'll go into the sea with Gaspare," said Maurice.

"I'm sure you will, and farther out even than he does."

"Ah, he'll never allow that. He'd swim to Africa first!"

That night, at twenty-one o'clock, Hermione and Lucrezia stood under the arch, and watched Maurice and Gaspare springing down the mountain-side as if in seven-leagued boots. Soon they disappeared into the darkness of the ravine, but for some time their loud voices could be heard singing lustily:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,
Morettina bella ciao,
Prima di partire
Un bacio ti voglio da';
Un bacio al papà,
Un bacio alla mammà,
Cinquanta alla mia fidanzata,
Che vado a far solda'."

"I wish I were a man, Lucrezia," said Hermione, when the voices at length died away towards the sea.

"Signora, we were made for the men. They weren't made for us. But I like being a girl."

"To-night. I know why, Lucrezia."

And then the padrona and the cameriera sat down together on the terrace under the stars, and talked together about the man the cameriera loved, and his exceeding glory.

Meanwhile, Maurice and Gaspare were giving themselves joyously to the glory of the night. The glamour of the moon, which lay full upon the terrace where the two women sat, was softened, changed to a shadowy magic, in the ravine where the trees grew thickly, but the pilgrims did not lower their voices in obedience to the message of the twilight of the night. The joy of life which was leaping within them defied the subtle suggestions of mystery, was careless because it was triumphant, and all the way down to the sea they sang, Gaspare changing the song when it suited his mood to do so; and Maurice, as in the tarantella, imitating him with the swiftness that is born of sympathy. For to-night, despite their different ages, ranks, ways of life, their gayety linked them together, ruled out the differences, and made them closely akin, as they had been in Hermione's eyes when they danced upon the terrace. They did not watch the night. They were living too strongly to be watchful. The spirit of the dancing faun was upon them, and guided them down among the rocks and the olive-trees, across the Messina road, white under the moon, to the stony beach of Isola Bella, where Nito was waiting for them with the net.

Nito was not alone. He had brought friends of his and of Gaspare's, and a boy who staggered proudly beneath a pannier filled with bread and cheese, oranges and apples, and dark blocks of a mysterious dolce. The wine-bottles were not intrusted to him, but were in the care of Giulio, one of the donkey-boys who had carried up the luggage from the station. Gaspare and his padrone were welcomed with a lifting of hats, and for a moment there was a silence, while the little group regarded the "Inglese" searchingly. Had Maurice felt any strangeness, any aloofness, the sharp and sensitive Sicilians would have at once been conscious of it, and light-hearted gayety might have given way to gravity, though not to awkwardness. But he felt, and therefore showed, none. His soft hat cocked at an impudent angle over his sparkling, dark eyes, his laughing lips, his easy, eager manner, and his pleasant familiarity with Gaspare at once reassured everybody, and when he cried out, "Ciao, amici, ciao!" and waved a pair of bathing drawers towards the sea, indicating that he was prepared to be the first to go in with the net, there was a general laugh, and a babel of talk broke forth—talk which he did not fully understand, yet which did not make him feel even for a moment a stranger.

Gaspare at once took charge of the proceedings as one born to be a leader of fishermen. He began by ordering wine to be poured into the one glass provided, placed it in Maurice's hand, and smiled proudly at his pupil's quick "Alla vostra salute!" before tossing it off. Then each one in turn, with an "Alla sua salute!" to Maurice, took a drink from the great, leather bottle; and Nito, shaking out his long coil of net, declared that it was time to get to work.

Gaspare cast a sly glance at Maurice, warning him to be prepared for a comedy, and Maurice at once remembered the scene on the terrace when Gaspare had described Nito's "birbante" character, and looked out for rheumatics.

"Who goes into the sea, Nito?" asked Gaspare, very seriously.

Nito's wrinkled and weather-beaten face assumed an expression of surprise.

"Who goes into the sea!" he ejaculated. "Why, don't we all know who likes wading, and can always tell the best places for the fish?"

He paused, then as Gaspare said nothing, and the others, who had received a warning sign from him, stood round with deliberately vacant faces, he added, clapping Gaspare on the shoulder, and holding out one end of the net:

"Off with your clothes, compare, and we will soon have a fine frittura for Carmela."

But Gaspare shook his head.

"In summer I don't mind. But this is early in the year, and, besides—"

"Early in the year! Who told me the signore distinto would—"

"And besides, compare, I've got the stomach-ache."

He deftly doubled himself up and writhed, while the lips of the others twitched with suppressed amusement.

"Comparedro, I don't believe it!"

"Haven't I, signorino?" cried Gaspare, undoubling himself, pointing to his middleman, and staring hard at Maurice.

"Si, si! È vero, è vero!" cried Maurice.

"I've been eating Zampaglione, and I am full. If I go into the sea to-night I shall die."

"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Nito, throwing up his hands towards the stars.

He dared not give the lie to the "signore distinto," yet he had no trust in Gaspare's word, and had gained no sort of conviction from his eloquent writhings.

"You must go in, Nito," said Gaspare.

"I—Madonna!"

"Why not?"

"Why not?" cried Nito, in a plaintive whine that was almost feminine. "I go into the sea with my rheumatism!"

Abruptly one of his legs gave way, and he stood before them in a crooked attitude.

"Signore," he said to Maurice. "I would go into the sea, I would stay there all night, for I love it, but Dr. Marini has forbidden me to enter it. See how I walk!"

And he began to hobble up and down exactly as Gaspare had on the terrace, looking over his shoulder at Maurice all the time to see whether his deception was working well. Gaspare, seeing that Nito's attention was for the moment concentrated, slipped away behind a boat that was drawn up on the beach; and Maurice, guessing what he was doing, endeavored to make Nito understand his sympathy.

"Molto forte—molto dolore?" he said.

"Si, signore!"

And Nito burst forth into a vehement account of his sufferings, accompanied by pantomime.

"It takes me in the night, signore! Madonna, it is like rats gnawing at my legs, and nothing will stop it. Pancrazia—she is my wife, signore—Pancrazia, she gets out of bed and she heats oil to rub it on, but she might as well put it on the top of Etna for all the good it does me. And there I lie like a—"

"Hi—yi—yi—yi—yi!"

A wild shriek rent the air, and Gaspare, clad in a pair of bathing drawers, bounded out from behind the boat, gave Nito a cuff on the cheek, executed some steps of the tarantella, whirled round, snatched up one end of the net, and cried:

"Al mare, al mare!"

Nito's rheumatism was no more. His bent leg straightened itself as if by magic, and he returned Gaspare's cuff by an affectionate slap on his bare shoulder, exclaiming to Maurice:

"Isn't he terribile, signore? Isn't he terribile?"

Nito lifted up the other end of the net and they all went down to the shore.

That night it seemed to Delarey as if Sicily drew him closer to her breast. He did not know why he had now for the first time the sensation that at last he was really in his natural place, was really one with the soil from which an ancestor of his had sprung, and with the people who had been her people. That Hermione's absence had anything to do with his almost wild sense of freedom did not occur to him. All he knew was this, that alone among these Sicilian fishermen in the night, not understanding much of what they said, guessing at their jokes, and sharing in their laughter, without always knowing what had provoked it, he was perfectly at home, perfectly happy.

Gaspare went into the sea, wading carefully through the silver waters, and Maurice, from the shore, watched his slowly moving form, taking a lesson which would be useful to him later. The coast-line looked enchanted in the glory of the moon, in the warm silence of the night, but the little group of men upon the shore scarcely thought of its enchantment. They felt it, perhaps, sometimes faintly in their gayety, but they did not savor its wonder and its mystery as Hermione would have savored them had she been there.

The naked form of Gaspare, as he waded far out in the shallow sea, was like the form of a dream creature rising out of waves of a dream. When he called to them across the silver surely something of the magic of the night was caught and echoed in his voice. When he lifted the net, and its black and dripping meshes slipped down from his ghostly hands into the ghostly movement that was flickering about him, and the circles tipped with light widened towards sea and shore, there was a miracle of delicate and fantastic beauty delivered up tenderly like a marvellous gift to the wanderers of the dark hours. But Sicily scarcely wonders at Sicily. Gaspare was intent only on the catching of fish, and his companions smote the night with their jokes and their merry, almost riotous laughter.

The night wore on. Presently they left Isola Bella, crossed a stony spit of land, and came into a second and narrower bay, divided by a turmoil of jagged rocks and a bold promontory covered with stunted olive-trees, cactus, and seed-sown earth plots, from the wide sweep of coast that melted into the dimness towards Messina. Gathered together on the little stones of the beach, in the shadow of some drawn-up fishing-boats, they took stock of the fish that lay shining in the basket, and broke their fast on bread and cheese and more draughts from the generous wine-bottle.

Gaspare was dripping, and his thin body shook as he gulped down the wine.

"Basta Gaspare!" Maurice said to him. "You mustn't go in any more."

"No, no, signore, non basta! I can fish all night. Once the wine has warmed me, I can—"

"But I want to try it."

"Oh, signore, what would the signora say? You are a stranger. You will take cold, and then the signora will blame me and say I did not take proper care of my padrone."

But Delarey was determined. He stripped off his clothes, put on his bathing drawers, took up the net, and, carefully directed by the admiring though protesting Gaspare, he waded into the sea.

For a moment he shuddered as the calm water rose round him. Then, English fashion, he dipped under, with a splash that brought a roar of laughter to him from the shore.

"Meglio così!" he cried, coming up again in the moonlight. "Adesso sto bene!"

The plunge had made him suddenly feel tremendously young and triumphant, reckless with a happiness that thrilled with audacity. As he waded out he began to sing in a loud voice:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,
Morettina bella ciao,
Prima di partire
Un bacio ti voglio da'."

Gaspare, who was hastily dressing by the boats, called out to him that his singing would frighten away the fish, and he was obediently silent. He imprisoned the song in his heart, but that went on singing bravely. As he waded farther he felt splendid, as if he were a lord of life and of the sea. The water, now warm to him, seemed to be embracing him as it crept upward towards his throat. Nature was clasping him with amorous arms. Nature was taking him for her own.

"Nature, nature!" he said to himself. "That's why I'm so gloriously happy here, because I'm being right down natural."

His mind made an abrupt turn, like a coursed hare, and he suddenly found himself thinking of the night in London, when he had sat in the restaurant with Hermione and Artois and listened to their talk, reverently listened. Now, as the net tugged at his hand, influenced by the resisting sea, that talk, as he remembered it, struck him as unnatural, as useless, and the thoughts which he had then admired and wondered at, as complicated and extraordinary. Something in him said, "That's all unnatural." The touch of the water about his body, the light of the moon upon him, the breath of the air in his wet face drove out his reverence for what he called "intellectuality," and something savage got hold of his soul and shook it, as if to wake up the sleeping self within him, the self that was Sicilian.

As he waded in the water, coming ever nearer to the jagged rocks that shut out from his sight the wide sea and something else, he felt as if thinking and living were in opposition, as if the one were destructive of the other; and the desire to be clever, to be talented, which had often assailed him since he had known, and especially since he had loved, Hermione, died out of him, and he found himself vaguely pitying Artois, and almost despising the career and the fame of a writer. What did thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to live with your body, out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat as the savages live. When he waded to shore for the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he could have shouted like a boy.

He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now clothed, took hold of him by the arm with a familiarity that had in it nothing disrespectful.