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.