She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture
indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was
calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the
stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand,
she held up a silver lira.
Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's
brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long,
and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply
crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.
She called to the men, and one seeing and hearing her would have thought
they must abandon everything, and spring to do her bidding. But they
didn't. Pausing only long enough to give her a phlegmatic stare, as if
in doubt whether conceivably she could have the impertinence to be
addressing _them_, and vouchsafing not a word, each went calmly on with
his employment;--very, very calmly, _piano_, _piano_, gently, languidly,
filling small baskets with fallen olives, and emptying them upon
outspread canvas sheets. There are, and more's the pity, two types of
Italian peasant. There's the old type, which we knew in our youth, and
happily it still survives in some numbers,--the peasant who, for all his
rags and tatters, has manners that will often put one's own to shame,
and, with a _simpatia_ like second-sight, is before one's wishes, in his
eagerness to serve and please. And there is the new type, which we know
to our disgust, and unhappily it multiplies like vermin,--the peasant
who has lent his ear to the social democrat, and, his heart envenomed by
class hatred, meets your civility with black glances and the behaviour
of a churl in the sulks.
So, though her voice was sweet to hear, and though, standing there in
the warm penumbra of the olive orchard, tall and erect and graceful, in
her bright frock, she made a charming picture, and though she offered a
silver lira as a prize, the men merely stared at her churlishly, and
went on with their work--languidly, sluggishly, as men who deemed the
necessity to work an outrage, and weren't going to condone it by working
with anything like a will.
Now, John Blanchemain, as I have previously mentioned, was an
unselfconscious sort of fellow. In his unselfconsciousness, forgetting
several trifles that might properly have weighed with him, (forgetting
the tarnished gorgeousness of his Turkish slippers for example, and his
towzled head, and the bathing-towel that flowed like a piece of classic
drapery from his shoulder), obeying impulse and instinct, he flung
himself into the breach.
"Brutes," he muttered between his teeth. Then, in his easiest
man-of-the-worldy accents, "If you can wait two minutes," he called
aloud to her. And therewith he went scrambling down the terraces and
picked his way from stone to stone across the shallows, to the field of
anemones, where their satiny petals, like crisping wavelets, all
a-ripple in the moving air, shimmered with constantly changing lights.
And in a twinkling he had gathered a great armful, and was clambering
back.
"I beg of you," he said, in his abrupt fashion, holding them out to
her, and slightly bowing, with that nothing-doubting assurance of his,
while his blue eyes (to put her entirely at her ease) smiled, frank and
friendly and serene, into her dark ones.
But hers seemed troubled. She looked at the flowers, she looked at John,
I think she even looked at her lira. Her eyes seemed undecided.
"Do pray take them," said he, still smiling, still frank and assured,
but as if a little puzzled, a little amused, by her hesitation, and more
airily a man-of-the-world than ever, his tone one of high detachment, to
spare her any possible feeling of personal obligation, and to place his
performance in the light of a matter of course,--as if indeed he had
done nothing more than pick up and return, say, a handkerchief she might
have dropped. "You were right," he owned to his thought of Lady
Blanchemain; "she is beautiful." Here, at close quarters with her, one's
perception of her beauty became acute,--here, under the grey old trees,
in the leafy dimness, alone with her, at two paces from her, where the
birds sang and the violets gave forth their fragrant breath. He saw that
her eyes were beautiful (soft and deep and luminous, despite their
trouble), and her low white brow, and the dark masses of her hair, under
her garden-hat, and the rose in her cheeks, and the red-rose of her
mouth. And he saw and felt the beauty and the vitality of her strong
young body.
But meanwhile she had stretched forth, rather timidly, that ungloved
fair hand of hers, and taken the flowers.
"You are very good, I am sure. Thank you very much," she said, rather
faintly, with a grave little inclination of the head.
John, always with magnificent assurance, put up his hand, to doff a
man-of-the-worldy hat, and bow himself away;--and it encountered his
bare locks, bare, and still wet from recent ducking. Whereupon,
suddenly, the trifles he had forgotten were remembered, and at last (in
the formula of the criminologist) "he realized his position:" hatless
and uncombed, with the bathing-towel slung from his shoulder, in that
weather-beaten old frieze coat with its ridiculous buttons, in those
awful Turkish slippers,--offering, with his grand manner, flowers to a
woman he didn't know, and smiling, to put her at her ease! His pink
face burned to a livelier pink, his ears went hot, his heart went cold.
The bow he finally accomplished was the blighted bud of the bow he had
projected; and, as the earth didn't, of its charity, open and engulf
him, he hastened as best he could, and with a painful sense of slinking,
to remove his crestfallen person from her range of view.
When these unselfconscious fellows are startled into selfconsciousness,
I fancy they take it hard. I don't know how long it was before John had
done heaping silent curses, silent but savage, upon himself; his luck,
his "beastly officiousness," upon the whole afflicting incident: curses
that he couldn't help diversifying now and then with a catch of
splenetic laughter, as a vision of the figure he had cut would
recurrently
"--_flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude_."
"Oh, you _ape!_" he groaned. "Rigged out like Pudding Jack, and, with
your ineffable simagrees, offering a strange woman flowers!"
If _she_ had only laughed, had only smiled, it wouldn't have been so
bad, it would have shown that she understood. "But through it all," he
writhed to recollect, "she was as solemn as a mourner. I suppose she was
shocked--perhaps she was frightened--very likely she took me for a
tramp. I wonder she didn't crown my beatitude by giving me her lira.
These foreigners do so lack certain discernments."
And with that rather an odd detail came back to him. _Was_ she a
foreigner? For it came vaguely back that he, impulsive and unthinking,
had spoken to her throughout in English. "And anyhow,"--this came
distinctly back,--"it was certainly in English that she thanked me."