"Wasn't I right? Come, confess that I was right?"
The question came of course from triumphant Mrs Maxwell, the centre of
a group standing on the steps of the Greek theatre at Taormina. They
looked on one side, over the rose-red ruins, at Etna, sweeping
magnificently upwards into snow, at his purple slopes, his classic
shore, then, facing round, they headed a sea divinely full of light, and
saw across it aerial mountain ridges faintly cut against the sky.
"Oh, you were right," said Wilbraham presently. "You deserve a splendid
chorus in your honour, and this is the place in which to raise it."
"There's a German down there already declaiming Shakespeare to his
wife," announced Teresa, running to look over the edge on tiptoe.
"So long as you give me the credit, I'll let you off the chorus," said
Mrs Maxwell, magnanimously; "and I'll own more, I'll own that if it
hadn't been for Peppina I should never have stood out. She knows how to
get round me," she added with a sigh.
"Nina, on the contrary, hasn't come willingly at all."
"She upset the oil just before starting yesterday," said Sylvia
hurriedly, "and that's _so_ unlucky! Wasn't it unfortunate?"
"Very," Wilbraham said drily.
"Look," interposed Teresa--"look at that sheet of pink against the blue.
That's almond blossom. Oh, I must have some!"
When she went into her room at the Castello-a-mare before dinner, there
lay bunches of the beautiful blossoms. She gave a cry of delight, and
fell to sticking them about in all imaginable places. Nina, who came
after her, explained that Wilbraham had brought them himself.
"Arms full," she said, spreading out her own with a gay laugh.
And Teresa was touched, thinking that it must have cost him something to
turn himself into a maypole for her pleasure. He was improving. She
decked Sylvia with several of the pink flowers before going in to
dinner, for only a pleasant Hungarian doctor and his wife would be there
besides themselves, and twisted some into her own dress. The sisters
went in together. Wilbraham was standing alone at the end of the room.
"Thank you for the almond blossom," Teresa called out cheerfully.
"There you see the result."
And she made a little movement of her hand towards Sylvia, who stood
like a charming woodland picture of Spring, all white and pink. But
Wilbraham glanced coldly.
"I sent them to you," he said with a touch of reproach in his tone which
made Teresa open her eyes.
"Brought them, I hear," she said teasingly. "It was heroic of you. How
many `Buon giorno's' and `Porto io's' had you to face? I didn't believe
I could so quickly have got tired of the words. As we came along I
heard mothers urging tiny shy babies of two or three--`_Vai, vai, di
buon giorno, un soldo signora_!' They are so pretty, too! And the
creatures, pertinacious as they are, bear no malice when one is cross;
just laugh and make way for another troop."
"Walter says that one ought not to give to beggars," Sylvia announced.
"Ah! I shall, though, when a baby says `Bon zorno!'"
"For pity's sake don't make me out a prig, Sylvia!"
He spoke almost roughly, and Teresa fired.
"You should be flattered at her remembering your commands!"
"Was I rude? I beg your pardon," said Wilbraham quickly.
But had Mrs Brodrick been in the room, she would have observed that he
begged his pardon from Teresa.
If the first day carried with it a touch of uneasiness, those that
followed swept by for some of them in a dream of enchantment.
The Castello-a-mare, where they were, stands a little out of the town,
perched on the very top of the road which zigzags up from the station.
And the view! There, ever-changing in colour, its blue and opal and
tenderest green melting through each other or growing into dazzling
brightness, lies the most classical of seas; far away behind a fine
sweep of coast is Syracuse, a nearer promontory marks the first
settlement of Greeks in Calypso's lovely island; to your right, sweeps
up the great volcano, with heart of fire and crest of snow, and all the
foreground is broken and steep, with growth of almonds, and fennel, and
tree-spurge. Sometimes the outlook is radiant beyond words; it is often
so at sunrise, when Etna has flung off clouds, and his eternal snows
flush rosy pink above the soft blue mists of the plain. Then everything
is so light, so fresh, so sparkling, that it will make even a tired
heart believe the old world and all its life is young again. But there
are other times when storms rush madly forwards, and the sea grows grey,
and the slopes of Etna are sullen purple, and wind and rain battle each
other passionately on the heights of Taormina. You look with fear, and
lo, the fierce southern rage is over, the clouds are gone, and, faint
and lovely at first, presently out laughs the ethereal blue again.
A sketching fever possessed Donna Teresa. The others, clambering up and
down the dirty, narrow, stony lanes, would come upon her sitting alone
and profoundly content before some arcaded window set in a wall, an
orange-tree peeping from behind the dainty centre shaft, unbroken blue
above. Or she might be found under Duca Stefano's tower, peaceful now
after, so says tradition, its strange and wicked cruelties, where, for a
few soldi, you may rest undisturbed in a wilderness garden, and look
through palms at a luminous sea, or at queer corners of houses with deep
eaves and wooden balconies, where bright rags flutter, vines clamber,
and women lean for gossip. High behind is a sweep of arid hill, rough
with prickly pear, and catching the shadow of every passing cloud and
the glory of the sun as it sinks behind Etna.
And it was for these minutes that Wilbraham--as yet unconsciously--
lived.
Then one day he came upon her in the Greek theatre.
Little of the Greek is left, except here and there a white pillar, or a
slab built into the wall, for where marble had shone the Romans have set
their brickwork. But who can quarrel with brick which takes such glory
of colour and offers such crannies for tufted weeds, hanging in delicate
masses of yellow, white, and green? Teresa had laid down her brushes,
and with her chin resting on her hands was looking through a
nobly-rounded arch at that view which is surely all but satisfying.
White clouds wrapped Etna, but between them pierced an occasional
whiteness which was not cloud, and, below, the purple slopes swept in
great curves, taking strange greens and violets as they advanced. Only
one building broke their line, the Dominican monastery, and that, with
the mysterious gloom of fading day upon it, and the ground falling
precipitously in front, did no more than add a suggestive human interest
to the grandeur it shared.
The spot always moved Teresa, but she liked to keep her emotions to
herself; and as Wilbraham came towards her, she sprang to her feet, and
began to gather two or three of the dwarf irises which starred the
grass.
"Are you going?" he said in a disappointed tone. "Have you finished
painting so soon?"
"I refuse to caricature, and so I haven't begun," she replied with a gay
laugh. "What have you done with Sylvia?"
"Gone to tea."
"Oh, tea!"--she looked at her watch.
"And what brought you here? Were you afraid I should be briganded
between the Messina gate and the hotel?"
"Not in the least. I should as soon expect you to have an encounter
with the shade of Dionysios."
She began to stroll round the face of the grass slope which sweeps up to
where the poorer people stood to see the plays.
"Nina would not agree with you," she said suddenly; "she throws out
mysterious hints of bad characters in Sicily."
"I daresay. If one went into the interior and out of the beaten track,
for instance; but here, where strangers are their best harvest, they
wouldn't be disposed to snipe them. Self-interest would go hand-in-hand
with law and order, you see."
"And that's the best you'll say?"
"Oh, well," he allowed carelessly, "I own they're wretchedly poor and I
shouldn't like to live myself on a hunch of bread and a root of fennel.
Won't you sit down?"
She turned to answer, hesitated, finally dropped on the grass. A
lighter, tenderer view lay before them here. For now the sea filled the
openings between the brickwork--the many-coloured sea along which
Ulysses rowed--and there was the line of coast above which Polyphemus
herded his flocks, and flung Cyclopean rocks at his tormentors.
"I can't," she said unexpectedly.
"Can't what?"
"Realise their misery with all this beauty around. It's heartless,
hateful, but one pushes out the other."
"Let it go," he said, watching her changing face.
"It must," she smiled. "All the same I shall hush up my conscience in
ways which will shock you. Look!" She drew from her pocket a handful
of soldi. "I mean the children to have a real good time, in spite of
you and Sylvia."
She tossed pennies into the air and caught them, without noticing that a
sudden silence had fallen.
Wilbraham had gone on day after day refusing to look before him,
refusing to go beyond the events of the day. He was often irritated or
provoked by Sylvia; but often, alas, he was happy, without asking
himself why. Now, all of a sudden it flashed upon him that it was
Teresa's nearness, and with the knowledge rushed a wild, scarcely
controllable, impulse to strain her in his arms. The self-control of
all his years luckily came to his help, and the young marchesa, looking
out at the lovely world before her, and thinking of nothing less than
her companion, except as he touched Sylvia's life, was quite unconscious
of the struggle in the man's heart.
"We ought to go--I suppose," she said reluctantly, without moving.
Wilbraham was silent. Unseen by her, he was fingering a fold of her
dress which lay on the grass close to him. Teresa laughed lightly the
next minute.
"It is a pity, isn't it, that one never can enjoy an exquisite moment
without thinking what has to be done in the next? At least I can't."
"Why should one think?" he said. His voice sounded so queerly in his
own ears that he half hoped, half feared, she must detect something,
"No; as I say, it's a pity, it's stupid. I suppose it's the penalty one
has to pay for the drive of life."
"Tell me--" he began and suddenly stopped. She looked round, surprised.
"Tell you what?"
"No, I won't say it."
She thought he might be going to ask something about Sylvia, and
wondered how she could help him.
"As we are here," she said, "we may as well see the sunset."
For already there was a throb of pink in the clear western sky, pink, of
which the almond blossom seemed the reflection. Teresa's face was
turned from him to watch it grow, and for a long time neither spoke. It
was a dangerous silence, had she but known it. At last she drew a deep
breath.
"There must be a golden sea on the other side of Etna," she said, "and I
wish I was there. Don't you?"
"No. I'm content."
She laughed, and sprang up.
"No? Well this ought to content one, certainly. But to punish you for
not fretting after the unattainable, I am going back."
He followed silently, and they said very little as they went down the
uneven street, past the Palazzo Corvaij, where slender columns support
Gothic arches, and bands of black lava contrast with yellow stone, past
the vast dark holes in which the people live and die and have shops and
make merry, and so out of the little hillside town by the Messina gate.
But just as they reached a great sumach-tree in a bend of the road,
Teresa, who had been thinking, put an imprudent question--
"Do you really never want the unattainable?"
Wilbraham's hands were clenched, his face turned away.
"Oh, my God!" he cried, under his breath, "do I not!"