The Call of the Blood Part 9

"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 doc.u.ment 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 sh.o.r.e."

"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 ap.r.o.n. 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. n.o.body 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 cla.s.sical 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 l.u.s.ty 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 a.s.sistant 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 antic.i.p.ated. All her life had been pa.s.sed 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 encompa.s.sed 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. Pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s, 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 cus.h.i.+ons, 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 gla.s.s and china. A door at the back, which led into the kitchen, was covered with an Oriental portiere. 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 cus.h.i.+ons. 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 s.p.a.ce of far-off sea, a s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 l.u.s.ty 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 c.o.c.ked 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 s.h.i.+ning, 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Per Dio!"

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