CHAPTER VI

THE GOLDEN SHELL

“_Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blüh’n?_”

WHEN Ulysses Grant had ended the Civil War in America and was made

President, he turned from uttering his solemn oath of office before the

cheering multitudes and said under his breath to his wife who stood

beside him, in that tone of half-resentful, half-weary patience the

American husband usually adopts in speaking to his mate, “Well, now,

Julia, I hope you’re satisfied!”

There was the same exasperated patience in Jane’s voice as she climbed

into the railway carriage for Palermo and, throwing herself back upon

the cushions, exclaimed:

“Well, now, Peripatetica, I hope you’ve had enough of the Greeks! For my

part I go on to the next course; something a little more modern. Tombs

and goddesses and columns and myths cloy as a steady diet for months,

and even the ridiculous pompous old Eighteenth Century would seem rather

home-like and comfy as a change. I could find it in my heart to relish a

bit of the odious decadence of _l’art nouveau_ simply by way of

contrast.”

Peripatetica treated this shameful outburst with all the stern contempt

it so truly merited, as she was engaged in making the acquaintance of a

descendant of that great race of Northmen who had made history all over

Sicily and the rest of Europe. He too was a conqueror, though his weapon

was a paint-brush and a modelling tool instead of a sword, and kings

received him with all the honours due an acknowledged ruler of a realm.

He dwelt by a great lake far to the north in that “nursery of kings” in

a home built five hundred years ago of huge fir-trees; logs so sound and

clean-fibred that the centuries had left the wood still as firm as

stone. Making his play of resurrection of the old wild melodies of the

North, of the old costumes and industries of the people from whose loins

had sprung half the rulers of the continent. The Sea Rover’s blood was

strong in him too, driving him to wander in a boat no bigger than those

of his Viking ancestors along the stormy fjords and fierce coasts to the

still more distant north.

For the adornment of the log-built home Sicily had yielded to his wise

searching various relics of antiquity, Greek, Norman, Saracen, and

Spanish, and in the ensuing days in which Jane and Peripatetica were

permitted to tread the same path with the Northman and his beautiful

wife, these treasures came out of pockets to be fitted with dates and

history, and even, in the delightful instance of one small ghostly

grotesque, to change owners.

While the two seekers of Persephone were gathering and savouring this

refreshing tang of the cold salt of the northern seas, this large vista

of the gay, poised strength of a mighty race—their train was looping and

coiling through summer hills to the seat of summer—cherry and apple,

peach and pear trees tossed wreaths of rose and white from amid the grey

of olives and the green of citron, for this was the land of Mignon’s

homesick dream—“das Land, wo die Citronen blüh’n.”

Miles and miles and miles of orange and lemon groves ran beside their

path; climbing the hills and creeping down to the edge of the tideless

sea. Trees that were nurtured like babies; each orchard gathered about

old grey or rose-washed tanks holding the precious water which is the

life-blood of all this golden culture during the rainless summer. Tanks

moist and dripping and fringed with ferns, mirroring the overhanging

yellow fruit, or the pink geraniums that peeped over the shoulders of

the broad-bladed cacti to blush happily at their own reflections in the

water.

An exquisite form of orcharding, this, as delicate and perfect as a

hot-house, with every inch of the soil utilized for the vegetables set

about the trees’ roots, and the trees themselves growing in unbelievable

numbers to the acre. For not one superfluous leaf or branch was

there—just the requisite number to carry and nourish the greatest

possible quantity of fruit. In consequence of which the whole land was

as if touched by some vegetable Midas and turned all to gold. Millions

and millions of the yellow globes hung still unpicked, though already

the trees were swelling the buds which within ten days were to break

forth into a far-flung bridal wreath, and intoxicate all the land with

honeyed perfumes.

And, mark you, how nations are influenced by their trees! In the bad old

days of constant war and turmoil the isolated family was never secure,

and the people clung to the towns, but modern careful culture of the

orange has forced orchardists to live close by their charges, and the

population is being slowly pushed back into rural life, with the result

of better health, better morals, and a great decrease of homicides. One

has really no convenient time for sticking knives into one’s friends

when one is showing lemon-trees how to earn $400 an acre and

orange-trees half as much....

“It is the most beautiful town in the whole world,” said Peripatetica in

that tiresomely dogmatic way she has of expressing the most obvious

fact.

They had wandered out of their hotel, and through a pair of stately iron

gates crowned with armorial beasts. Beyond the gates lay a garden. But a

garden! Acres of garden, laced by sweeping avenues, shadowed by cypress

and stone pines, by ilex and laurel. From the avenues dipped paths which

wound through _boscoes_, looped under bridges veiled with curtains of

wisteria and yellow banksias, climbed again to pass through pleached

walks; paths that tied themselves about shadowy pools where swans

floated in the gloom of palm groves, or debouched across emerald lawns

where clumps of forget-me-nots and cinerarias made splashes of bold

colour in the grass.

“They do these things so well in Europe,” remarked Peripatetica

approvingly, as a splendid functionary, in a long blue coat and carrying

a silver-headed staff, lifted his cockaded hat to them as they entered

the gates. “Now where at home would one find one of our park guardians

with such a manner, and looking so like a nobleman’s servant? This,” she

went on, in an instructive tone, being newly arisen from a guide-book,

“is the Giardino Inglese; one of the public parks, and it has exactly

the air of loved and carefully tended private possession.”

They lounged over the parapets of the carved bridges, with their elbows

set among roses, to look down into the little ravines where small

runnels flowed among the soft pink-purple clouds of Judas-trees. They

were tempted into allées bordered their whole length with the white

fountains of blossoming spireas, or hedged on both sides by pink

hermosas. They strolled past clumps of feathery bamboos to gaze along

the shadowy vistas of four broad avenues meeting at a bright circle

where a sculptured fountain tossed its waters in the sun. They lingered

in paths where tea-roses were garlanded from tree to tree, or by walls

curtained by Maréchale Niels. They inspected the nurseries and admired

the greenhouse. They came with delight upon a double ring of giant

cypresses lifting dark spires into the dazzling blue of the sky, and sat

to rest happily upon a great curved marble seat whose back had lettered

upon it a reminder to the “Shadowed Soul” that wisdom comes only in

shade and peace.

“E La Sagezza Vieni Solo

Nel’ Ombra E Pace.”

And finally they mounted the little tiled and columned belvedere hanging

at the corner of the garden’s lofty wall to gaze upon a view unrivalled

of this most beautifully placed city.

Palermo lay stretched before them in its plain of the Conca d’Oro—the

golden shell. Round it as a garland rose a semicircle of vapoury

mountains like rosy-purple clouds, bending on beyond the plain on either

side to clasp a bay of dazzling violet whose waters glowed at the city’s

feet; the city itself warmly cream-tinted and roofed with dull red

tiles. A city towered, columned, arched; with here the ruddy bubbles of

San Giovanni degli Eremiti’s domes, there the tall spires and fretted

crest of the Cathedral; and flowing through it all, or resting here and

there in pools, the green of orange groves, the flushing mist of

Judas-trees, the long stream of verdant parks and gardens.

“Not only is this the loveliest city in the whole world,” said Jane,

“but this is also the sweetest of all gardens, and a curious thing is

that we seem to have it quite to ourselves. You’d suppose all Palermo

would want to come here for at least half of every day, but not a soul

have we met except those two dear, queer old gardeners sitting on the

tank’s edge playing a game with orange seeds.”

“Well, if the Palermians haven’t intelligence enough to use such a

garden, we have,” announced Peripatetica. “And we will come here every

day.”

Which they did for a while; bringing their fountain pens to write

letters in the bosco, or resting after sight-seeing in the cool shade of

the cypress ring. And it might have served them to the end as their

intimate joy had it not been for Peripatetica’s insane passion for

gardening.

[Illustration: “SICILY’S PICTURE-BOOK, THE PAINTED CART”]

All about the edge of the long _tapis vert_ which lay before the

handsome building at the end of the garden—a building which they

supposed housed some lucky park official—stood at intervals fine

standard roses. Now one unlucky day Peripatetica descried aphides upon

the delicate shoots and young buds of these standards. That was

sufficient. An aphis, to her rose-growing mind, is a noxious wild beast,

and promptly stripping off her gloves she ravened among them.

“Perhaps you’d better leave them alone,” warned Jane in a whisper. “The

gardeners look so surprised.”

“By no means!” objected Peripatetica in lofty obstinacy, with a backward

glance of contempt at the visibly astonished attendants. “The city no

doubt pays them well to grow roses, and I mean to shame them for this

indecent neglect of their duties. Besides, I am enjoying it immensely;

I’ve been hungering and thirsting for a little gardening.”

That very day it was conveyed to their intelligence—or their lack of

it—that they had not been enjoying the Giardino Inglese, a dull park

which lay almost opposite, but had been calmly annexing the private

grounds of Prince Travia. He, however, being a model of princely

courtesy, was glad to have the foreign ladies amuse themselves there as

much as they liked. Only once more did they see it; on the day of

departure, when they blushingly left a tip in the hands of the handsome

old silver-staffed portiere, who had truly looked like a nobleman’s

servant, and behaved like one as he saluted them with unprotesting

dignity each time they had passed in and out of that beauteous spot in

which they had no right to be.

There were many other gardens in Palermo, but none so fair. The green

world was so enchanting in this glowing spring that a day of

_villegiatura_ was necessary between every two days of sight-seeing, and

having been banished from the Travia garden by their own innate sense of

decency, they took lunch in their pockets and set out for the famous

Villa Giulia which had aroused such enthusiasm in Goethe.

The Villa Giulia, as they might have foreseen, was just the sort of

thing Goethe would have liked—and they had been violently disagreeing

with Goethe all over Sicily. An untouched example of the most tiresome

form of Eighteenth Century gardening—a cross between a wedding cake and

a German Noah’s Ark. All rigid, glaring, gravelly little allées, with

trees as denuded of natural luxuriance as a picked chicken; sugar-icing

grottoes; baroque fountains; gaudy music kiosks; cages of frowzy birds

and mangy monkeys; and posé busts in self-conscious bowers. Not here

could these Eden-exiled Eves lunch, nor yet in the untidy, uninteresting

Botanic Gardens next door—a wilderness of potted specimens and obtrusive

labels—but wandering melancholily around a vast egregious gas tank, they

came upon a long, neglected avenue of great trees; all that was left of

some once lovely villa swept out of existence by the gas works. And here

upon a stone bench in the glimmering shade they fed at the feet of a

feeble little knock-kneed marble King. One of the Spanish monarchs of

Sicily it was, thus commemorated in marble Roman armour and a curled

marble wig, and his rickety, anæmic majesty moved them to smiling pity,

so feeble and miserable he looked, forgotten and overshadowed by modern

gas tanks, his boneless legs ready to give under him, and his peevish

face smeared with creeping lichens. The green tunnel of the trees framed

a blazing sapphire at the other end—a glimpse of the bay—and ragged pink

roses, and neglected purple iris bloomed together along the path. Ere

another year the blight of the gas works will have swept away the airy

avenue, the wilding flowers, the poor spineless little King, and the two

bid it all a wistfully smiling farewell, knowing they should never again

eat an April day’s bread and cheese under those sweet auspices.

... Will travellers from the roaring cities of Central Africa come a

couple of centuries hence and mark with regret the last bit of some now

flourishing boscage being eaten away by Twenty-Second Century progress,

and smile indulgently at one of our foolishly feeble statues, in granite

frock coats, tottering to lichened oblivion? No doubt. Palermo has seen

so many changes since the Phœnicians used to trade and build along this

coast. For this was the Carthagenian “sphere of influence” from the

first, and the Greeks were here but little, and have left no traces in

Palermo, though in the long wars between Carthagenian and Greek it was

captured by the latter from time to time, and held for a space. The

Greeks called it Panormous—meaning all harbour, for in their day deep

water curved well up into the town, where are now streets and palaces

and hotels. Of course Rome held it for a while, as she held pretty

nearly everything. Held it for close upon a thousand years—with the

Goths for its masters at one interval—but there are few traces of Rome

either, and then the Arabs took it and set their seal so deep, in less

than two centuries, that after the lapse of nearly another thousand

years their occupation is still visible at every turn. For under the

Saracens it was a capital, and after their destruction of Syracuse,

which ended Greek domination in the Island, it gained a pre-eminence

among Sicilian cities never afterwards lost.

That garrulous old traveller from Bagdad, Ibn Haukal, writing in 943,

says that Palermo then had a most formidable nine-gated wall, a

population of close upon half a million, and many mosques. He also says

that near where the Cathedral now stands was a great swamp full of

papyrus plants, serving not only for paper but for the manufacture of

rope.

Already Sicily was beginning to suffer from the scarcity of water, and

the merchant from Bagdad, accustomed to the abundant pools and conduits

of his own city, makes severe comments upon the lack of these in

Palermo. It could only have been by contrast, however, that the

Palermians could have seemed to Haukal dirty, because Jane and

Peripatetica, going to see a part of the old Moorish quarter, in process

of demolition, found multitudinous water-pipes in the houses, entering

almost every chamber. Haukal says that the Greek philosopher Aristotle

was buried in one of the mosques of Palermo, and he opines that the most

serious defect of the citizens was their universal consumption of

onions. Peripatetica—to whom that repulsive vegetable is a hissing and

an astonishment—read aloud in clamant sympathy this outburst of

Haukal’s:

“There is not a person among them, high or low, who does not eat them in

his house daily, both in the morning and at evening. This is what has

ruined their intelligence and affected their brains and degraded their

senses and distracted their faculties and crushed their spirits and

spoiled their complexions, and so altogether changed their temperaments

that everything, or almost everything, appears to them quite different

from what it is.”

“That gentleman from Bagdad is a man after my own heart,” she declared

triumphantly. “I have always been sure that people who eat onions must

be those to whom ‘almost everything appears quite different from what it

is,’ for if they had the slightest idea of ‘what it is’ for other people

to be near them after they have indulged that meretricious appetite they

would certainly never do it!”

This Arab impress, though visible everywhere, is more a general

atmosphere than definite remains; for with but few exceptions their

creations are so overlaid and modified by subsequent Occidental work

that it glows through this overlay rather than defines itself. It was

while searching for Moorish fragments that Jane and Peripatetica came

upon La Ziza. The guide-books unanimously asserted that Al Aziz—La

Ziza—was the work of the Norman King, William I., but the guide-books,

they had long since discerned, were as prone to jump to unwarranted

conclusions, and, having jumped, to be as aggravatingly cocksure in

sticking to their mistakes as was Peripatetica herself. So they took

leave to doubt this assertion, and concluded that William probably

seized the lovely country-house of some Moorish magnate, adding to it

sufficiently to make of it a “lordly pleasure dome” for himself in the

wide orange gardens, but the core of the place was wholly Moorish in

character; well worth the annexing, well worth its name Al Aziz—The

Beloved.

They came through the hot, white sunshine up wide, low steps, through a

huge grille in an enormous archway, to find a windowless room where the

glaring day paled to glaucous shadow against the green tiles of a lofty

chamber, as cool and glistening as a sea cave. And the sound of rippling

water echoed from the lucent sides and honeycomb vaultings, for a

shining fountain gushed from the wall into a tiled channel of irregular

levels, artfully planned to chafe the sliding water into music before it

slept for awhile in a pool, and then slipped again through another

channel to another pool, and so passed from the chamber—having glinted

over its shining path of gold and green and blue, and having filled the

place with cool moisture and clear song.

“With fierce noons beaming,

Moons of glory gleaming,

Full conduits streaming

Where fair bathers lie—”

Quoted Peripatetica—who might be safely counted on to have a tag of

verse concealed about her person for every possible occasion.

“Did you ever see anything that so adequately embodied the Arab

conception of pleasure? Coolness, moisture, the singing of water, noble

proportions, and clean colour wrought into grave and continent devices?

Was there ever anything,” she went on, “so curious as the contradictions

of racial instincts? Who could suppose that this would be the home-ideal

of those wild desert dwellers who always loved and fought like demons;

who were the most voluptuous, the most cruel, the most poetic and the

‘so fightingest’ race the world has probably ever seen!”

“Oh, contradictions!” laughed Jane. “Here’s a flat contradiction, if you

like. Please contemplate the delicious, the exquisite absurdities of

these frescoes.”

For, needless to say, the Eighteenth Century had not allowed to escape

so exquisite an opportunity to make an ass of itself, and had spread

over the clean, composed patterns of the tiled walls a layer of

lime-wash on which it had proceeded to paint in coarse, bright colours

indecently unclad goddesses, all flushed blowzy and beribboned; all

lolloping amourously about on clouds or in chariots, or falling into the

arms of be-wigged deities of war or of love. Fortunately the greater

part of these gross conceptions had been diligently scrubbed away, but

enough remained to make Peripatetica splutter indignantly:

“Well, of all the hideous barbarians! The Eighteenth Century was really

the darkest of dark ages.”

“My dear,” Jane explained contemptuously, “the Eighteenth Century wasn’t

a period of time. It was merely a deplorable state of mind. And the mind

seems to have been slightly tipsy, it was so fantastic and ridiculous,

and yet so gravely self-satisfied.”

La Cuba, another Saracenic relic, was so obliterated into the mere

military barrack to which it had been transformed that there was nothing

for it but to pass on to the Normans, and to great Roger de Hauteville,

a fit companion of the Paladins, so heavy a “Hammer of the Moors” was

he—so knightly, so romantic, so beautiful.

Not until twelve years after that bold attempt at Messina to conquer a

kingdom with only sixty companions was Roger able to enter Palermo, and

he and his nephews chose for themselves “delectable gardens abounding

with fruit and water, and the knights were royally lodged in an earthly

paradise.”

No hideous massacre or sack followed the taking of Palermo, for though

Roger had conquered the island for himself he was a true mirror of

chivalry, and was never cruel. He was chivalrous not only to the

defeated, but to those other helpless creatures, women, who in his day

were mere pawns in the great military and political games played by the

men; married whether they would or no, and unmarried without heed of any

protest from them; thrust into convents against their wishes, and haled

out of convents if they were needed. And swept ruthlessly from the board

when they had served their purpose, or when they got in the way of those

fierce pieces passaging back and forth across the chequered squares of

the field of life. Roger loved the Norman maid Eremberga from his early

boyhood, it appears, and as soon as his hazardous fortunes would permit

she was had out from Normandy, and the history of the great soldier is

full of his devotion, and of her fidelity and courage. As at the siege

of Troina, when the two were reduced by hunger and cold to the greatest

extremities, sharing one cloak between them, so that finally Roger,

rendered desperate by his wife’s sufferings, burst through the ring of

Saracens, leaving her to defend the fortress with unshaken valour until

he returned with a force adequate to save her, and raise the siege.

There is an amusing story of Roger and his eldest brother, that ruthless

old fox, Robert Guiscard. They were fighting one another at the time,

and Roger’s soldiers captured Robert, who was disguised and spying. He

with difficulty rescued Robert from the angry captors, took him to a

private room, kissed him, helped him to escape, and promptly next day

fell upon his forces with such fury that Robert was glad to make peace

and fulfil the broken promises which had caused the dispute....

It was not Roger, the great Count—he had little time in his busy life

for building—but his son Roger the King, who raised the great pile at

Monreale which Jane and Peripatetica were on their way to see. Not by

way of the winding rocky road which for centuries the pious pilgrims had

climbed, but whisked up the heights by an electric tram which pretended

it was a moving-picture machine, displaying from its windows an ever

widening panorama of burning blue sea, of pink and purple mountains, of

valleys down which flowed rivers of orange groves, of a domed and spired

city in the plain, and a foreground freaked with an astonishing carpet

of flowers.

“If you were to see that in a picture you wouldn’t believe it,” quoted

Jane from the famous Book of Bromides, writhing her neck like an uneasy

serpent in an endeavour to see it all at once.

“No, of course, you wouldn’t,” said Peripatetica resentfully. “And when

we try to tell it to people at home they’ll simply say our style is

‘plushy.’ There’s nothing so resented as an attempt to carry back in

words to a pale-coloured country the incredible splendours of the south.

The critics always call it ‘orchid and cockatoo writing,’ and sulkily

declare, whenever they do have a fairly nice colourful day, that they

are sure the tropics have nothing finer, whereas, if they only knew, it

is but an echo of an echo of the real thing, and—” but words failed even

Peripatetica.

On the breezy height, dominating all the deep-toned landscape, stood the

Abbey church of Monreale—truly a royal mount, crowned by one of the

finest shrines in Europe. The famous bronze doors of the main entrance

had been oxidised by time and weather with a patine of greens and blues

that lent subtle values to the bold delicate modelling of the metal,

framed in a toothed doorway of warm, cream-tinted stone, whose magic

harmony of colour was a fitting preliminary to the lofty glories of the

interior. An unbelievable interior! faced throughout its three hundred

and thirty-three feet of length with millions upon millions of tiny

stones, gold and red and blue—stones of every colour. For all the

interior they found, up to the very roof, was of this dim, glowing,

gold-mosaic set with pictures of the Christian faith—the creation of

Adam and Eve, the temptation by the Serpent, the casting out from Eden,

the wrestling of Jacob, the whole Bible history, culminating above the

altar in a gigantic Christ. More than 700,000 square feet of pictures

made of bits of stone; and around and about pulpit, ambo, and altar,

across steps and pavement, and enclosing every window and door, lovely

mosaic patterns and devices, no two alike....

Brown-faced old peasants pushed aside the leathern curtain at the

entrance and knelt, crossing themselves, in the shadow of enormous

pillars, as their forebears had knelt and crossed themselves there for a

thousand years. A mass droned from a side altar. Groups of young

priests-in-the-making sauntered gossipping in whispers, or coming and

going on ecclesiastic errands. Knots of tourists stared and wandered

about the great spaces, and from behind the high altar rose boys’ voices

at choir practice, echoing thin and pure from the painted roof.

Of all the Norman print upon Sicily nothing gave like this great church

a sense of the potency of Tancred de Hauteville and his mighty brood.

For no defacing hand has been laid upon this monument to their piety and

power. It stands as they wrought, tremendous, glorious; commemorating

the winning of the kingship of the Land of the Gods. A story as strange

as any of the myths of the mythic world. And perhaps thousands of years

hence the historians will relegate the Norman story, too, to the

catalogue of the incredible—to the list of the sun-myths; and Tancred

will be thought of as a principle of life and fecundity—his twelve

strong sons be held to be merely signs of months and seasons.

Of the great Benedictine Abbey founded by William in connection with the

Cathedral almost nothing remains unaltered except the delicious

cloistered court with its fountain, and its two hundred and sixteen

delicate, paired columns, no two alike, and with endless variations of

freakish capitals.

All this freshness and richness of invention resulted from the mingling

of the Saracen with the Norman, all this early work being wrought by

Moslem hands under Norman direction, since King Roger and King William

were no bigots, and, giving respect and security to their Saracen

subjects, could command in return their skilled service and fine taste.

So that this bold, springing, early Norman architecture, Gothic in

outward form, is adorned by the chaste, delicate minuteness of the grave

Arab ornament.

... It is Palm Sunday, and Jane and Peripatetica are at a

reception—otherwise a Sicilian high mass. They have come, still on the

trail of their beloved Normans, who have almost ousted the Greeks in

their affections, to the Cappella Palatina in the Royal Palace. The

chapel is less than a third as large as Monreale but is even more

golden, more dimly splendid, more richly beautiful than the Abbey

Church. It is crowded to the doors. Everywhere candles wink and drip in

the blue clouds of incense. The voices of boys soar in a poignant

treble, and the organ tones of men answer antiphonally. The priests

mutter and drone, and occasionally take snuff. Mass goes on at a dozen

side altars, oblivious of the more stately ceremonies conducted in the

chancel. The congregation comes and goes. A family with all the

children, including baby and _nounou_, enter and pray and later go out.

Aristocrats and their servants kneel side by side. The crowd thickens

and melts again, and companions separate to choose different altars and

different masses, according to taste. All are familiar, friendly, at

ease. The divine powers are holding a reception, and worshippers, having

paid their respects, feel free to leave when they like. Long palm

branches are carried to the altar from time to time by arriving

visitors, each branch more splendid than the last. Palms braided and

knotted, fluttering with ribbons, tied with rosettes of scarlet and

blue, wrought with elaborate intricacies—hundreds of branches, which are

solemnly sanctified, asperged, censed, with many genuflections. Priests

in gold, in white, in scarlet, accompanied by candles, swinging censors

and chanting, take up the palms and make a circuit of all the altars

among the kneeling worshippers, and finally distribute the branches to

their owners who bear their treasures away proudly.

With them go Jane and Peripatetica, joining a group, who, having paid

their respects to heaven, are now ambitious to inspect the state

chambers in the palace of their earthly sovereign. These prove to be the

usual dull, uninviting apartments—flaring with gilt, and with the satins

of _criard_ colours which modern royalty always affect. There are the

usual waxed floors, the usual uncomfortable _fauteuils_ ranged stiffly

against walls hung with inferior pictures, that are so tediously

characteristic of palaces, and it is with relief and delight that Jane

and Peripatetica find sandwiched amid these vulgar rooms two small

chambers that by some miracle have escaped the ravages of the

upholsterer. Two chambers, left intact from Norman days, that are like

jewel caskets. Walls panelled with long smooth slabs of marble, grown

straw-coloured with age, the delicate graining of the stone being

matched like the graining of fine wood; panels set about with rich

mosaics of fantastic birds and imaginary beasts framed in graceful

arabesques. These are the Stanza Ruggiero; the rooms occupied by King

Roger, the furnishings, such scant bits as there are, being also of his

time.

“In Roger’s day,” commented Jane, “kings were not content with housings

and plenishings of the ‘Early Pullman, or Late Hamburg-American School’;

they knew how to be kingly in their surroundings.”

“It’s a curious fact,” agreed Peripatetica, “that there isn’t a modern

palace in Europe that a self-respecting American millionaire wouldn’t

blush to live in. No one ever hears of great artists being called upon

to design or beautify a modern royal residence. Bad taste in furnishing

seems universal among latter-day kings, who appear to form their ideas

of domestic decoration from second-rate German hotels. Fancy any one

seeing the high purity and beauty of Roger’s chambers and then ordering

such ruthless splashings of gilt and cotton satin! Why, even ‘the best

families’ of Podunk or Kalamazoo would gibe at the contrast, and as for

the Wheat and Pork Kings of Denver or Chicago—they would have the whole

place made _époque_ in a week, if they had to corner the lard market, or

form a breakfast-food trust to be able to afford it!”

* * * * *

“God made the day to be followed by the night. The moon and stars are at

His command. Has He not created all things? Is He not Lord of all?

Blessed be the Everlasting God!”

Jane was reading aloud from her guide-book.

They had been to Cefalu, looking for Count Roger in the great Cathedral

built by his son, but found that he had vanished long ago, and his

sarcophagus was in Naples. They had found instead traces of Sikel,

Greek, and Roman; had lingered long before the splendid church, so noble

even in decay, and now they were back again in Palermo, still on the

track of their Normans. What Jane read from her book was also inscribed

over the portal of Palermo’s Cathedral before which they stood, but

being carved in Cufic script, and Jane’s Cufic being—to put it

politely—not fluent enough to be idiomatic, she preferred to use the

guide-book’s translation rather than deal with the original.

[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL AT PALERMO—“THE LAST RESTING PLACE OF QUEEN

CONSTANCE”] They had been skirting about the Duomo for days, for it

dominated all Palermo with its bigness. Seated in a wide Piazza that was

dotted about with mussy-looking marble saints and bishops, and a great

statue of Santa Rosalia, the city’s patron, the Cathedral was flanked by

the huge Archepiscopal Palace, by enormous convents and public

buildings, so that one couldn’t hope to ignore or escape it. Yet they

had deferred the Duomo from day to day because they knew their pet

abomination, the Eighteenth Century, had been there before them, and

that they would find it but an extremely mitigated joy in consequence.

They knew that the swamp full of pxapyrus plants of Haukal’s time had

given way to the “Friday Mosque” which the two Rogers and William the

Bad had left undisturbed, but which had been pulled down by William the

Good—being somewhat ruinous, and also seeing that William was “the Good”

in the eyes of his ecclesiastic historians because he reversed the old

Norman liberality to his Moslem subjects. Then Walter of the Mill, an

Englishman, built the Cathedral, making it glorious within and without,

and time and additions only made it more lovely until the modern

tinkering began. A foolish, unsuitable dome was thrust among its

delicate towers, and the whole interior ravaged and vulgarised.

Still, if one were hunting Normans, the Cathedral must be seen, and most

of all they wished to find the last resting-place of Constance, around

whose memory hung a drama and a mystery, and drama and mystery were as

the very breath of their nostrils to Jane and Peripatetica.

The interior was impressive for size despite all the scrolled and

writhed and gilded mud pies with which Ferdinand Fuga, the Neapolitan,

had plastered it by way of decoration, and here and there still lingered

things worth seeing. Such as the delicious bas reliefs of Gagini,

Sicily’s greatest native sculptor; his statues of the Apostles and the

fine old choir stalls, only making clearer by their ancient beauty how

much that was beautiful had been swept away. Also there was the splendid

silver sarcophagus of Santa Rosalia, weighing more than a thousand

pounds, and other such matters, but the real attraction of the Cathedral

was the great porphyry tombs of the Kings—huge coffers of ensanguined

stone, as massive and tremendous as the mummy cases of the Pharaohs.

Here lay Roger the King in the sternest and plainest of them, under a

fretted Gothic canopy. In one more ornate, his daughter Constance, and

near at hand her husband Henry VI. of Germany, and their son, the

Emperor Frederick the Second.

Jane and Peripatetica longed that Constance, like Hamlet’s Father might

“ope those ponderous and marble jaws”

and come forth to tell them the real story of her strange life. For she

too had been one of those hapless feminine pawns used so recklessly in

the game of kingdoms played by the men about her; yet a whisper still

lingered that this pawn had not been always passive, but had reached out

her white hand and lifted the king from the board, and thus altered the

whole course of the game!

Constance, King Roger’s daughter, had early made her choice for peace

and safety by retiring into the veiled seclusion of the convent. But

even the coif of the religieuse was no sure guard if the woman who wore

it was an heiress, or of royal blood, and, the German alliance being

needed after her father’s death, she was plucked forth by her brother,

and in spite of her vows wedded to Henry of Hohenstaufen, son of

Frederick Barbarossa, a man of such nature she must have hated him from

the first. She bore him one son, and when her brother and her

nephew—William the Bad and William the Good—were both dead without

heirs, Henry Hohenstaufen immediately laid claim to the Sicilian crown

in the name of his son. The Sicilians, however, had no mind to be ruled

by the Germans, and chose instead Tancred, son of the House of de

Hauteville, though with a bar sinister upon his shield. Tancred—a good

and able sovereign—fought off Henry for five years, but then he too was

dead, and only his widow and infant son stood between Henry, now Emperor

of Germany, and the much-lusted-after throne of Sicily. Against the wish

of Constance, who would have gladly abjured her rights, the German

invaded the island and after incredible cruelties and ravagings reduced

the widow and baby King to such straits that they negotiated an

honourable surrender. But no sooner were they in Henry’s hands than the

child was murdered, and there ensued a reign of abominable oppressions

and furious revolts, stamped out each time with blood and fire, and

followed by still bitterer injustice and plunderings. When matters had

reached a stage of desperation Henry died suddenly while besieging a

rebellious town.

Now in the Middle Ages no charge was so frequently and lightly made as

that of poisoning. Nearly all sudden deaths not wrought by cold steel

were attributed to some secret malfeasance by drugs. The fear of it

fairly obsessed the mediæval mind, and gave rise to legends of poisoned

gloves and rings, deadly smelling-balls and pounce boxes, and fatal

chalices. A whole series of myths grew around it. Modern bacteriological

discoveries, and a knowledge of ptomaines, incline the modern mind to

believe that many a poor wretch brutally done to death for the crime of

poisoning really died an innocent martyr to medical ignorance. Yet

Henry’s taking off was so welcome and so opportune, and that Constance

had struggled to protect her fellow countrymen and kinspeople from his

cruelties was so well known, it began to be breathed about that she was

a second Judith who had reached out in agony to protect her people, even

though the blow fell upon the father of her child. At all events,

whatever the truth may have been, she, when she buried Henry with

imperial pomp, cut off her magnificent hair and laid it in his tomb.

Then, sending away the Germans, she ruled “in peace with great honour”

until the son she had trained to mercy and virtue was ready to take her

place.

Now they all lie here together under their pompous canopies, and

whatever may be the real dramas of those fierce and turbulent lives, the

great porphyry sarcophagi combine to turn a face of cynical and haughty

silence to the importunate questioning of peeping tourists.

In 1781 the tombs were opened by the Spanish King Ferdinand I., who

found Constance’s son Frederick robed and crowned, with sword and orb

beside his pillow, and almost lifelike in preservation. Henry too was

almost unchanged by the six hundred years that had passed in such change

and turmoil beyond the walls of his silent tomb, and he lay wrapped from

head to heel in yellow silk with the heavy blond tresses of his wife

laid upon his breast, still golden despite the lapse of long centuries,

but “nulle ne peut dire si c’est le dernier sacrifice d’une femme

dévouée, ou l’homage ironique d’une reine contrainte à choisir entre

deux devoirs; placée entre son époux et son peuple, entre sa famille et

sa patrie.”

* * * * *

Gaspero was a gift—a priceless parting gift from the Northman, who had

gone farther south to the Punic shores from whence had come the first

settlers of the Palermian Coast. And to console Jane and Peripatetica

for the loss of his charming boyish gaiety he had made over to them that

treasure. For Gaspero not only drove the smartest and most comfortable

of all the victorias on hire to the public, but he was an artist in the

matter of sight-seeing. A true gastronome, mingling flavours with

delicate wisdom; keeping delicious surprises up his sleeve lest one’s

spirit might pall, and mingling tombs and sunshine, crypts and “molto

bella vistas,” history and the colourful daily life of the people, with

a masterhand. And all so fused in the warm atmosphere of his own

sympathetic and indulgent spirit that “touristing” became a feast of the

soul unknown to those not guided by his discreet and skilful judgment.

He knew where one might purchase honey which bees had brewed from orange

flowers into a sublimated perfume; and he introduced them to certain

patisseries at Cafleisch’s that gave afternoon tea a new meaning.

It was Gaspero who took them to the lofty shrine of Santa Rosalia on

Monte Pellegrino; that grotto where lived the royal maiden hermit, and

where lie her bones within the tomb on which Gregorio Tedeschi has made

an image of her in marble with a golden robe, glowing dimly in the light

of a hundred lamps. On that rosy height, dominating the beautiful

landscape, Gaspero told them the story of the niece of William the Good,

whose asceticism and devotion set so deep a seal of reverence upon the

people of Palermo that they enshrined her as the city’s patron saint,

and still celebrate her memory every year with a great festival. All the

population climb the hill in July to say a prayer in her windy eyrie,

and the enormous car bearing her image is dragged through the city’s

streets, so towering in its gilded glories that one of the city gates

has been unroofed to permit of its entrance. At that time the Marina—the

wide sea-front street—instead of being merely a solemn Corso for the

staid afternoon drive of the upper classes, becomes the scene of a sort

of Pagan Saturnalia. The Galoppo takes place then—races of unmounted

free horses—delicious races, Gaspero says, in which there can be no

jockeying, and in which the generous-blooded animals strive madly to

distance each other from sheer love of the sport and the rivalry. A gay

people’s revel, this, of flying hoofs and tossing manes; of dancing

feet; of cries and songs; mandolins, pipes, and guitars fluting and

twittering. The water-sellers with their glittering carts and delicate

bubble-like bottles crying _acqua fredda_, offering golden orange juice,

and the beloved pink anisette. The Polichinello booths, the open-air

puppet shows, the toy-sellers with their tall poles hung with sparkling

trifles, the tables spread with dainties of rosy sugar, with melting

pastries, with straw-covered flasks of wine. All perspiring, talking,

laughing, guzzling, gormandising in honour of the anæmic, ascetic girl

who passed long, lonely, silent days and nights in passionate ecstasies

and visions in those high, voiceless solitudes. Gaspero made it all very

vivid, with hands, lips, eyes. He was possessed with the drama and

strange irony of it.

* * * * *

“Have the Signorine ever seen a Sicilian puppet show?” Gaspero demanded,

à propos of nothing in particular, turning from a brown study on the box

to inquire.

He plainly intended that this should be a memorable day.

No; the Signorine had not seen a puppet show. If they properly should

see one then they would see one. It was for Gaspero to judge. Very well,

then. He would come for them at half past eight that evening—at least,

he added with proud modesty, if the Signorine would not object to his

wearing his best clothes. His festa garments, and not the uniform of his

calling.

Object! On the contrary, they would be flattered. Gaspero settled back

to his duties with the triumphant expression of the artist who by sudden

inspiration has added the crowning touch to his picture. He composed the

days for them on his mental palette, and this one he plainly considered

one of his masterpieces.

Yesterday had been a failure. Jane and Peripatetica had waked full of

plans, but before the breakfast trays had departed they were aware of a

heavy sense of languor and ennui which made the pleasantest plans a

prospect of weariness and disgust.

“If you sit around in a dressing-gown all day we’ll never get anything

done,” suggested Peripatetica crossly, as Jane lounged in unsympathetic

silence at the window.

“Considering that you’ve been half an hour dawdling over your hair and

have got it up crooked at last, I wouldn’t talk about others,” snapped

Jane over her shoulder without changing her attitude.

A strained silence ensued. Peripatetica slammed down a hand mirror and

spilled a whole paper of hairpins, which she contemplated stonily, with

no movement to recover them.

A hot wind whirled up a spiral of dust in the street.

“My arms are so tired I can’t make a coiffure,” wailed Peripatetica.

Jane merely laid her head on the window sill and rolled a feeble,

melancholy eye at the disregarded hairpins.

The wind sent up another curtain of hot dust.

“I don’t know what’s the matter,” complained Jane, “but I don’t feel as

if I wanted to see another sight—ever—as long as I live.”

“Perhaps this is the sirocco one hears of,” piped Peripatetica weakly.

“The guide-book says ‘the effect of it is to occasion a difficulty in

breathing, and a lassitude which unfits one for work, especially of a

mental nature.’”

By this time there could be no doubt of the sirocco. A hot, dry tempest

raged, whipping the rattling palms, driving clouds of dust before it, so

that Jane could only dimly discern an occasional scurrying cab, or an

overtaken pedestrian pursuing an invisible hat through the roaring fog

of flying sand. The day had turned to a brown and tempestuous dusk, and

the voice of a hoarse Saharan wind shouted around the corners.

But that was yesterday. To-day was golden and gracious. Rain in the

night had cooled and effaced all memory of the sirocco, and Gaspero was

outdoing himself in astonishing and piquant contrasts.

He drove them to the Cappucini Convent by the devious route of the

Street of the Washerwomen. This roundabout way of reaching the Convent

was one of Gaspero’s artful devices.

Down each side of the broad tree-shadowed way, bordered on either hand

by the little stone-built cubicles washed pink or white or blue, in

which lived the multitudinous laundresses, ran a clear rushing brook.

These brooks flowed through a sort of shallow tunnel with a wide orifice

before each dwelling, and in every one of these openings was standing a

bare-legged blanchisseuse, dealing strenuously with Palermian linen,

with skirts tucked up above sturdy knees that were pink and fresh from

the rush of the bright water. Vigorous girls trotted back and forth with

large baskets heaped with wet garments, and bent, but still energetic,

granddams spread the garments to dry. Hung them from the tree branches,

swung them from the low eaves of the little dwellings, threaded them on

lines that laced and crossed like spiderwebs, so that the whole vista

was a flutter of fabrics—rose and white and green—dancing in the breeze.

A human and homely scene, with play of brown arms and bright eyes amid

the flying linen and laces; with sounds of rippling leaves, of calls and

laughter, and the gurgling of quick water—drudgery that was half a

frolic in the cheerful sunshine.

Now behold Gaspero’s sense of dramatic contrast!

A plain, frigid façade, guarded by a bearded and rather grubby monk in a

brown robe. The eye does not linger upon the grubby monk, being led away

instantly by the vista through the arched doorway behind him of a

cloistered court; a court solemn with the dark spires of towering

cypresses, and brilliant with roses—roses wine-coloured, golden, pink.

Behind this screen of flowers and trees lies the bit of ground

possessing the peculiar property of quickly desiccating and mummifying

the human bodies buried in it. Many hundreds have been laid in this

earth for awhile, and then removed to the convent crypts to make room

for others. It is to these crypts another monk leads the way. A

saturnine person this, handing his charges over to another, still more

gloomy, who sits at the foot of the stairs and watches at the crypt’s

entrance. A perfectly comprehensible depression, his, when one reflects

that all the sunshiny hours of these golden Sicilian days he sits at the

shadowed door of a great tomb, mounting guard over surely the most

grisly charge the mind can conceive; over Death’s bitterest jest at

Life.

The walls of the high, clean corridors are lined with glass cases like a

library, but instead of printed books the shelves are crammed with

ghastly phantoms of humanity, all grinning in horrible, silent amusement

as at a mordant, unutterable joke.

Jane and Peripatetica gasp and clutch one another’s hand at the grey

disorder of this soundless merriment—breathless, fixed, perpetual.

Here and there a monk, crowded for lack of space from the shelves, hangs

from a hook in limp, dishevelled leanness, his head drooped mockingly

sidewise, his shrunken lips twisted in a dusty fatuous leer, a lid

drooped over a withered eye in a hideous wink. Others huddle in

fantastic postures within their contracted receptacles, as if convulsed

by some obscenely wicked jest which forces them to throw back their

heads, to fling out their hands, to writhe their limbs into unseemly

attitudes of amusement. One lies flat, with rigid patience in every line

of the meagre body, a rictus of speechless agony pinching back the

mouldy cheeks.

Coffins are heaped about the floor everywhere. Through the glass tops

the occupants grin in weary scorn from amid the brown and crumbling

flowers that have dried around their faces.

The ghastliest section of this ghastly place is that where the women

crouch in their cases, clad in the fripperies of old fashions. Earrings

swing from dusty ears; necklaces clasp lean grey throats; faded hair is

tortured into elaborate coiffures; laces, silks, and ribbons swathe the

tragic ruins of beauty. And these women, too, all simper horribly,

voicelessly, remembering perhaps how dear these faded gauds once were

before they passed beyond thought of “tires and crisping pins.”

“Why do they do it?” demanded Peripatetica in whispered disgust. “What

strange passion for publicity prompts them thus to flout and outrage the

decent privacies of death”—for they noted that each case bore a name and

the date of decease, and that some of these dates were but of a few

years back. “Didn’t they _know_, from having seen others, how they

themselves would look in their turn? Why would any woman be willing to

come here in laces and jewels to be a disgusting nightmare of femininity

for other women to stare at?”

“Vanity of vanities—all is vanity!” murmured Jane. “Now they all lie

here laughing at the strange vanity that brought them to this place—at

the vanity that will bring others in their turn to this incredible

hypogeum.”

Then they turned a corner and came suddenly upon the little horribly

smiling babies, and instantly fled in simultaneous nausea and

disgust—flinging themselves at Gaspero, who with a tenderly sympathetic

manner suggested an expedition to La Favorita as a corrective of

gruesome impressions. Carrying them swiftly to it by way of the long

double boulevards of the newer Palermo, between the smiling villas of

creamy stone that were wreathed with yellow banksias and purple

wisteria, their feet set among gay beds of blossoms and facing the

cheerful street life of the town.

“How odd these Sicilians are!” reflected Jane, as they drove. “An

incomprehensible mixture to an Anglo-Saxon. For example one finds almost

universal open-hearted gentleness and courtesy, and yet the Mafia holds

the whole land in a grip of iron—a dangerous, murderous, secret society

as widespread as the population, yet never betrayed, and uncontrollable

by any power, even so popular and so democratic a one as the present

government.”

“Yes; their attitude to life is as puzzling as the face they turn toward

death,” agreed Peripatetica, remembering that almost every other

building in Taormina and many in Palermo wore nailed to the door a broad

strip of mourning—often old and tattered—on which was printed “Per mio

Frate,” or “Per mia Madre”—that even a newspaper kiosk had worn

weeds—“Per mio Padre.”

At that very moment there passed a cheerful hearse, all glass and

gilding, wreathed with fresh flowers into a gay dancing nosegay, and

hung with fluttering mauve streamers which announced in golden letters

that the white coffin within enclosed all that was mortal of some one’s

beloved sister Giuseppina. It might have been a catafalque of some

Spirit of Spring, so many, so sweet, so daintily gracious were the

blooming boughs that accompanied Giuseppina to her last

resting-place.... And yet they had but just come from the grim horrors

of that crypt of the Cappuccini!...

La Favorita, curiously, is one of the few monuments of beauty or charm

left by that long reign of the Spanish monarchs of Sicily, which, with

some mutations, lasted for about six hundred years. They loaded the land

with a weight of many churches and convents, yet what one goes to see is

what was done by the Greeks, the Moslems, and the Normans. La Favorita

is not old, as one counts age in that immemorial land of the High Gods.

A slight century or so of age it has, being built for the villegiatura

of Ferdinando IV. at the period when the Eighteenth Century affected a

taste in Chinoiseries, bought blue hawthorn jars, ate from old Pekin

plates, set up lacquered cabinets, and built Pagoda-esque pleasure

houses. The Château is but a flimsy and rather vulgar example of the

taste of the day, but the Eighteenth Century often planted delicious

gardens, and the pleached allées, the ilex avenues, the fountains and

plaisances of La Favorita, make an adorable park for modern Palermo,

having by time and the years grown into a majestic richness of

triumphant verdure.

But Gaspero is not content with La Favorita. He has things even better

in store for Jane and Peripatetica—explaining that by giving the most

minute gratuity to the guardian of the park’s nether portal they may be

allowed to slip through into a private path that leads to the sea. They

do give the gratuity, and do slip through, winding along a rough country

road leading under the beetling red cliffs of Pellegrino; by way of

olive orchards, mistily grey as smoke, through which burn the rosy

spring fires of the Judas-trees, whose drifting pink clouds are so much

more beautiful than the over-praised almond blossoms. They skirt flowery

meadows all broad washes of gold and mauve, past a landscape as fair as

a dream of Paradise, and Gaspero draws up at last upon a beach of

shining silver upon which a sea of heaving sapphire lips softly and

without speech. A sea that strews those argent sands with shells like

rose petals, like flakes of gold, like little, curled, green leaves. And

dismounting they rest there in the sunset, forgetting “dusty death,” and

glad to be alive; glad of Gaspero’s tender indulgent joy in their

pleasure as he gathers for them the strewn sea-flowers, tells them

little Sicilian stories of the people, and makes them entirely forget

they haven’t had their tea.

It was in returning from this place of peace that he had that crowning

inspiration about the puppet show, which is why in the darkness of that

very evening they are threading a black and greasy alleyway which smells

of garlic and raw fish. But they go cheerfully and confidently in the

dimly seen wake of Gaspero’s festa richness of attire.

An oil torch flares and reeks before a calico curtain. This curtain,

brushed aside, shows a pigeon-hole room, nine feet high, very narrow,

and not long. On either wall hangs a frail balcony, into one of which

the three wriggle carefully and deposit themselves on a board hardly a

palm’s breadth wide. From the vantage point of these choice and

expensive seats—for which they have magnificently squandered six cents

apiece—they are enabled to look down about four inches on the heads of

the commonality standing closely packed into the narrow alley leading to

the stage. A strictly masculine commonality, for Gaspero explains in a

whisper that the gentler sex of Palermo are not expected to frequent

puppet shows, lest their delicate sensibilities may suffer shock from

the broad behaviour of the wooden dolls. Of course, he hurries to add,

handsomely, all things are permitted to forestieri, whose bold

fantasticalities are taken for granted.

The groundlings appear to be such folk as fishpeddlers, longshoremen,

ragpickers—what you will—who smoke persistent tiny cigarettes, and

refresh themselves frequently with orange juice, or anisette and water.

These have plunged to the extent of two cents for their evening’s

amusement, and have an air of really not considering expense. The

gallery folk are of a higher class. On Peripatetica’s right hand sits

one who has the air of an unsuccessful author or artist; immediately

upon the entrance of the forestieri he carefully assumes an attitude of

sarcastic detachment, as of one who lends himself to the pleasures of

the people merely in search of material. Opposite is an unmistakable

valet who also, after a quick glance at the newcomers, buttons his

waistcoat and takes on an appearance of indulgent condescension to the

situation.

A gay drop curtain, the size of a dinner napkin, rolls up after a

preliminary twitter from concealed mandolins. The little scene is set in

a wood. From the left enters a splendid miniature figure glittering in

armour, crowned, plumed, and robed, stepping with a high melodramatic

stride. It is King Charlemagne, the inevitable _deus ex machina_ of

every Sicilian puppet play. Taking the centre of the stage and the

spotlight, he strikes his tin-clad bosom a resounding blow with his good

right wooden hand, and bursts into passionate recitative.

“The cursèd Moslem dogs have seized his subjects upon the high seas, and

cast them into cruellest slavery. Baptised Christians bend their backs

above the galley oars of Saracen pirate ships, and worse—oh, worst of

all!”—both hands here play an enraged tattoo upon his resounding

bosom-pan—“they have seized noble Christian maidens and haled them to

their infernal harems.

“S’death! shall such things be? No! by his halidome, _no_! Rinaldo shall

wipe this stain from his ‘scutcheon. What ho—without there!”

Enter hastily from right Orlando.

“His Majesty called?”

“Called? well rather! Go find me that good Knight Rinaldo, the great

Paladin, and get the very swiftest of moves on, or something will happen

which is likely to be distinctly unpleasant.”

Orlando vanishes, and in a twinkling appears Rinaldo, more shining, more

resplendent, more befeathered even than the King; with an appalling

stride (varied by a robin-like hop), calculated to daunt the boldest

worm of a Moslem.

He awaits his sovereign’s commands with ligneous dignity, but as the

King pours out the tale his legs rattle with strained attention, and

when the Christian maids come into the story his falchion flashes

uncontrollably from its sheath.

“_Will_ he go? Will a bird fly? Will a fish swim?”

Charlemagne retires, leaving Rinaldo to plan the campaign with Orlando.

Enter now another person in armour, but wearing half an inch more of

length of blue petticoat, and with luxuriant locks streaming from

beneath the plumed helmet. ’Tis Bramante, the warrior maiden, who in

shrill soprano declines to be left out of any chivalric ruction. Three

six-inch swords flash in the candlelight; three vows to conquer or die

bring down the dinner napkin to tumultuous applause.

The pit has been absorbed to the point of letting its cigarettes go out,

and the author and the valet hastily resume their forgotten

condescension.

Every one cracks and eats melon seeds until the second act reveals the

court of a Saracen palace.

The thumps of the three adventurers’ striding feet bring out hasty

swarms of black slaves, who fall like grain before the Christian swords.

Better metal than this must meet a Paladin!

Turbaned warriors fling themselves into the fray, and the clash of steel

on steel rings through the palace. Orlando is down, Rinaldo and Bramante

fight side by side, though Rinaldo staggers with wounds. The crescented

turbans one by one roll in the dust, and as the two panting conquerors

lean exhausted upon their bloody swords—enter the Soldan himself!

Now Turk meets Paladin, and comes the tug of war.

Bramante squeaks like a mouse; hops like a sparrow.

_Ding, dong!_ Rinaldo is beaten to his knee and the Soldan shortens his

blade for a final thrust, but—Bramante rushes in, and with one terrific

sweep of her sword shears his head so clean from his shoulders that it

rolls to the footlights and puts out one of the candles.

_Ha! ha!_ He trusted in his false god, Mahound!

Bramante hops violently.

Enter suddenly, rescued Christian Maid. Also in armour; also possessing

piercing falsetto.

Saved! saved! She falls clattering upon Rinaldo’s breast, and Bramante,

after an instant’s hesitation, falls there on top of her, with

peculiarly vicious intensity.

More dinner napkin. More frenzied applause. Gaspero draws a long breath.

His eyes are full of tears of feeling.

Scene in the wood again. Charlemagne has thanked Rinaldo. Has thanked

Bramante. Has blessed the Christian Maid, and has retired exhausted to

his afternoon nap!

Christian Maid insists upon expressing _her_ gratitude to the Paladin

with her arms round his neck.

Bramante drags her off by her back hair, a dialogue ensuing which bears

striking likeness to the interview of cats on a back fence.

Christian Maid opines that Bramante is _no lady_, and swords are out

instantly.

_One, two, three!—clash, slash, bang!_

Rinaldo hops passionately and futilely around the two contestants.

Ladies! Ladies! he protests in agony, but blood is beginning to flow,

when, suddenly, a clap of thunder—a glitter of lightning!

The cover of an ancient tomb in the wood rolls away, and from the black

pit rises a grisly skeleton. Six legs clatter and rattle like pie-pans;

swords fall. It is the ghost of Rinaldo’s father. Christian Maid is

really Rinaldo’s sister, he explains, carried off by Saracens in her

childhood.

Skeleton pulls down the cover of the tomb and retires to innocuous

desuetude.

Opportune entry of Orlando miraculously cured of his wounds. Rinaldo has

an inspiration, and bestows upon Orlando the hand of the Christian Maid.

All the tins of the kitchen tumble at once—everybody has fallen on every

one else’s mail-clad bosom!...

Dear Gaspero! It has been a _wonderful_ day.

* * * * *

A slow, fine rain falls. Vapours roll among the vapoury hills.

It is just the day for the museum, and such a museum! Not one of those

cold and formal mausoleums built by the modern world for the beauties of

the dead past, but a fine old monastery of the Philippines with two

cloistered cortile; with a long, closed gallery for the hanging of the

pictures; with big refectories, ambulatories, and chapels for housing

the sculpture, and with its little cells crammed with gold and silver

work, with enamels, with embroideries, with jewels. A gracious casket

for the treasures of old time.

The rain is dripping softly into the open cloister, where the wet

garlands of wisteria and heavy-clustered gold of the banksias are

distilling their mingled fragrance in the damp air. The rain makes sweet

tinklings in the old fountains and in the sculptured wellheads gathered

in the court; on the cloister walls are grouped bas-reliefs—tinted

Madonnas by Gagini; Greek fragments, stone vases standing on the floor,

twisted columns, broken but lovely torsos.

Indeed, it is not like a museum at all. No ticketed rigidity, no

historical sequence—just treasures set about where the setting will best

accord with and display their beauties. There is not even a catalogue to

be had, which gives a delightful sense of freedom at first, but this has

its drawbacks when Jane and Peripatetica come to the tomb of Aprilis in

a side chamber, and wish to know something more of this sad little maid

sculptured into the marble of the tomb’s sunken lid—wrapped in a

straitly folded wimple, with slim crossed feet, and small head turned

half aside; smiling innocently in the sleep which has lasted so long.

Aprilis, whose April had never blossomed into May, and whose epitaph has

for five hundred years called Sicily to witness the grief of those who

lost her:

“Sicilia, Hic Jacet Aprilis. Miseranda Puella

Unicce Quælugens Occultipa Diem 18 Otobre

XIII 1495.”

Of course, the guide-books ignore her. Trust the guide-books to preserve

a stony silence about anything of real human interest!...

Another court; a great basin where papyrus grows, where bananas wave

silken banners amid the delicate plumes of tall bamboo, where are more

purple wreaths of wistaria and snow-drifts of roses, and where the

treasures are mostly Greek. Very notable among these a marble tripod

draped with the supple folds of a python; the lax power of the great

snake subtly contrasted with, and emphasized by, the rigid lines of the

seat of the soothsayer. More notable still, in the Sala del Fauna, is an

archaic statue of Athene from Selinunto—like some splendid sharded

insect in her helmet and lion skin—rescued from that vast wreck of a

city. They had travelled from Palermo a few days before to see that

city, drawn by Crawford’s fine passages of description, and there they,

too, had wondered at the astonishing remains of those astonishing

Greeks.

... “There is nothing in Europe like the ruins of Selinunto. Side by

side, not one stone upon another, as they fell at the earthquake shock,

the remains of four temples lie in the dust within the city, and still

more gigantic fragments of three others lie without the ruined walls. At

first sight the confusion looks so terrific that the whole seems as if

it might have fallen from the sky, from a destruction of the home of the

gods—as if Zeus might have hurled a city at mankind, to fall upon Sicily

in a wild wreck of senseless stone. Blocks that are Cyclopean lie like

jackstraws one upon another; sections of columns twenty-eight feet round

are tossed together upon the ground like leaves from a basket, and

fragments of cornice fifteen feet long lie across them, or stand half

upright, or lean against the enormous steps. No words can explain to the

mind the involuntary shock which the senses feel at first sight of it

all. One touches the stones in wonder, comparing one’s small human

stature with their mass, and the intellect strains hopelessly to recall

their original position; one climbs in and out among them, sometimes

mounting, sometimes descending, as one might pick one’s way through an

enormous quarry, scarcely understanding that the blocks one touches have

all been hewn into shape by human hands, and that the hills from which

men brought them are but an outline in the distance.”...

All that quiet falling day Jane and Peripatetica wandered in the

transformed monastery, staring at the great metopes; lingering among the

Saracenic carvings and jewelled windows, poring over Phœnician seals;

over the amazing ecclesiastic needlework, the gold monstrances, the

carved gems, and last and best of all some delicious reliefs at sight of

which they forgave at once and forever their old enemy, the Eighteenth

Century, for all its disgusting crimes against beauty. They sought madly

through the books for some mention of these tall, adorable nymphs in

adorably impossible attitudes, these curled and winged and dimpled

babies, fluttering like fat little wrens sweetly ignorant of the laws of

gravitation; but as always on any subject of interest Baedeker and the

rest frigidly refused to tell the name of the man out of whose head and

hands had grown these enchanting figures.

“Oh, dear Unknown!” cries Jane regretfully, “why is your noble name

buried in silence! I wish to make a pilgrimage to your tomb, to cover it

with Sicilian roses, and breathe a prayer for the repose of your sweet

and gracious soul.”

“Me too!” echoes Peripatetica, in tender scorn of the stodgy rules of

English grammar.

* * * * *

The Paschal season is near.

Always, in all lands of all faiths, the coming of Spring, the yearly

resurrection of life and nature, has been welcomed with gladness. The

occultation of Osiris, of Baldur, of Persephone, of the Christ, is

mourned; their coming again hailed with flowers and feasting.

Palermo is filling with visitors; with a glory of flowers and verdure in

which the loveliest city in the world grows daily lovelier. The Conca

d’Oro—the Shell of Gold—swims in a golden sea of sunshine.

On the Wednesday before Easter the whole population exchanges cakes.

Cakes apotheosized by surprising splendours of icing; icing, gilded,

silvered, snowily sculptured into Loves and angels and figures of

national heroes. Icing wrought into elaborate garlands tinted rose,

purple, and green; built into towers and ornate architectural devices.

Structures of confectionery three feet high are borne on big platters

between two men. Every child carries gay little cakes to be presented to

grandparents and godparents, to cousins and playmates.

All Maundy Thursday the population moves from church to church. Masses

moan incessant in every chapel. Before the Virgins on every

street-shrine, draped in black, candles blaze and drip. Priests and

monks hurry to and fro, bent upon preparations for the great spectacle

of the morrow.

Friday morning early all Palermo is in the streets in its best attire.

Small children dressed as little cardinals, as nuns, as priests,

bishops, angels with gilded wings, as Virgins, as John the Baptist, are

on their way to the churches from which the processions are to flow.

Monks and friars gather from outlying country convents.

At ten o’clock a throbbing dirge begins. The first of the processions is

under way. A band plays a funeral march, and is followed by acolytes

swinging censers. Pious elderly citizens, perspiring in frock coats,

carry tall, flaming candles that drop wax upon their clothes. A few

priests, in black and purple, follow, bearing holy vessels. Behind these

a row of men in mediæval armour and carrying halberds, surround a heavy,

hand-borne bier hung with black velvet, on which rests a glass and gilt

case containing an image of the Crucified—a life-sized image, brown with

age. Presumably it has been taken from some ancient and revered Spanish

crucifix, for it is crowned with thorns, is emaciated, is writhed with

pain, painted with the dark, faded red of streaming wounds—one of those

agonised figures conceived by the pious realism of the older Spanish

sculptors.

Immediately follows another hand-borne litter upon which is standing a

tall Virgin clothed in black hood and mantle—a pallid, narrow-faced

Virgin—also Spanish and realistic. The delicate clasped hands hold a

lace handkerchief, her breast is hung with votive silver hearts. The

features are distorted with grief, the lids, reddened with tears, are

drooped over sunken, deep-shadowed eyes, and her countenance seamed and

withered—a poignant figure of unutterable maternal woe! Burning candles

alternate with mounds of roses about the edge of the platform on which

she stands.

As the dead Son and the mourning Mother pass, hats come off and heads

are bowed, signs of the cross are made. A few of the older peasant women

fall to their knees upon the sidewalk and mutter an Agnus Dei, a Hail

Mary, with streaming tears. A priest walks last of all, rattling a

contribution box at the end of a long stick, looking anxiously at the

balconies and windows from which the well-to-do spectators lean. For his

is but a poor church; the velvet palls and cloaks are cotton, and frayed

and faded, the bier and platform old, and so massive that the stalwart

bearers must set them down often to wipe away the sweat, which is why it

takes advantage of the unpre-empted morning hours and is early in the

field.

Later in the day, in Gaspero’s cab and under his guidance, Jane and

Peripatetica take up a coign of vantage in a square debouching upon the

Corso Vittorio Emanuele, along which the Jesuits are to parade at four

o’clock. Here the crowd is solidly packed, the balconies and windows

crowded with the aristocracy of Palermo. The Guarda Mobili in their

splendid uniforms keep open the way for the marching fraternities and

sodalities with their crucifixes and Virgin-embroidered banners, open a

lane for the monks, for the crowds of tiny angels and cardinals who must

patter for hours in the slow-moving procession. Priests and acolytes

swarm; censers steam, hundreds of candles of all weights and heights

flare and flame, and then slowly, slowly, to the wailing music, moves

forward a splendid catafalque of crystal in which lies stretched upon a

bed of white velvet, richly wrought with gold, a fair youth. A youth

with white, naked limbs, relaxed and pure; not soiled by the grimy,

bloody agonies of martyrdom, but poetised to a picture of Love too early

dead—a charming image. And the beautiful tall Virgin is not the simple

Mother of the Carpenter convulsed with despair. She is a stately,

sorrowful Queen, crowned, hung with jewels, robed in superb royal weeds;

proudly refusing to show the full depth of her bereavement, as she

follows her dead Son amid the wax torches shining palely in the sunshine

through the white and green of the sheaves of lilies that grow about her

knees.

The emotional effect upon the crowd is intense; one can hear like an

undertone the sound of indrawn, gulping breath. Gaspero passes his

sleeve across the tears in his dark eyes.

This version of the tragedy is lifted above the realism of pain into a

penetrating and lovely symbolism that swells the heart with poignant and

tender emotions as the divine funeral train winds slowly away, with

perfume, with lights, and with the slow sobbing of the muffled drums.

So had Sicilians two thousand years ago crowded every spring to see a

similar spectacle of a weeping Queen of Love following an image of a

lovely dead youth....

“Ah! and himself—Adonis—how beautiful to behold he lies on his silver

couch, with the first down on his cheeks, the thrice beloved

Adonis—Adonis beloved even among the dead.... O Queen, O Aphrodite, that

playest with gold, lo, from the stream eternal of Acheron they have

brought back to thee Adonis—even in the twelfth month they have brought

him, the dainty-footed Hours.... Before him lie all that the tall

tree-branches bear, and the delicate gardens, arrayed in baskets of

silver; and the golden vessels are full of the incense of Syria. And all

the dainty cakes that women fashion in the kneading-tray, mingling

blossoms manifold with the white wheaten flour, all that is wrought of

honey sweet, and in soft olive-oil, all cakes fashioned in semblance of

things that fly, and of things that creep, lo, here they are set before

him.

“Here are built for him shadowy bowers of green, all laden with tender

anise, and children flit overhead—the little Loves—as the young

nightingales perched upon the trees fly forth and try their wings from

bough to bough....

“But lo, in the morning we will all of us gather with the dew, and carry

him forth among the waves that break upon the beach, and with locks

unloosed, and ungirt raiment falling to the ankles, and bosoms bare we

will begin our shrill sweet song.

“Thou only, dear Adonis, so men tell, thou only of the demigods, dost

visit both this world and the stream of Acheron.... Dear has thine

advent been, Adonis, and dear shall it be when thou comest again.”

* * * * *

Gaspero never permitted Jane and Peripatetica to lose anything. Doubling

through narrow, black streets where lofty buildings nearly met above

their heads and where they snatched hurried, delighted glimpses of

intricate old grilles, of arched and wheeled windows, of splendid

hatchments and fine carved portals—he brought them out at admirable view

points for all the many similar parades in widely separated parts of the

city.

As the purple dusk came down they found themselves in the Marina,

watching the last of the processions moving slowly down the broad avenue

to the sea-street. The crowd had thinned. The small angels and John the

Baptists went wearily upon dusty little feet, their crowns of now wilted

roses canted at dissipated angles over their flushed and tearful faces,

the heavy, half-burned wax torches wabbling dangerously near the

draggled veils and drooping gilt wings.

The bearers of the images paused often to set down their heavy burdens.

The balconies began to blossom with tinted lights. Here and there the

Virgin with her twinkling candles was turned toward a balcony filled

with some specially faithful children of the church, and stood facing

them a moment, tall, ghostly, tragical, in the gathering darkness,

before passing onward in her long pilgrimage of mourning that was to end

within the church doors as night came down.

“It is enough, Gaspero,” they cried, as the flickering train passed away

down the water avenue into the blue blackness of the shadowy evening,

and then they went homewards full of that strange mingled sense of

languor and refreshment—that “cleansing of the soul with pity and

terror” which is the gift of the heroic tragedies....

Every hour of that night the bells rang and masses sang throughout the

city. All day Saturday the churches swarmed, and the purple veils, hung

before the altar pictures throughout Lent, were rent from top to bottom

to the sound of the wailing De Profundis. Sunday the religious world

seemed to exhale itself in music and flowers and triumphant masses.

Easter Monday morning the populace hurried through the necessary

domestic duties at the earliest possible moment, for the Pasqua Flora is

the day of villegiatura for all Palermo. Every one wears new clothes.

Even the humble asinelli are, for once in the year at least, brushed and

combed, and decorated with fresh red tassels if the master is too poor

to afford more elaboration of the always elaborate harness. Those asses

who have the luck to be the property of rich contadini appear

resplendent in new caparison; with towering brass collars heavy with

scarlet chenille, flashing with mirrors and inlays of mother-of-pearl,

glittering from head to tail with brass buckles, with bells and red tags

innumerable, drawing new carts carved and painted with all the myths and

legends and history of Sicily in crude chromatic vivacity.

Whole families stream countrywards in these carts to-day; babies clean

and starched for once, grandmothers in purple kerchiefs tied under the

chin and yellow kerchiefs crossed upon the breast, with gold hoops in

their ears; daughters in flowered cottons, their uncovered heads wrought

with fearful and wonderful pompadours, sleek and jet black.

Along the seashore, up the sides of Pellegrino, in all the open country

about Palermo, they spread and sun themselves, eat, sleep, make love,

gossip, dance, and sing in the golden air.

Gaspero drives slowly through the wide-spread picnic, pausing wherever a

characteristic group attracts.

Here lies a whole family asleep; gorged with endless coils of macaroni,

saturated with sun—a mere heap of crude-coloured clothes, of brown

open-mouthed faces, of lax limbs that to-morrow must be gathered up

again for a hand-to-hand struggle for bread for another twelve-month.

Under this tree a long table is spread with loaves, with meats, with

iced cakes, and straw-covered flasks. A rich confrère of Gaspero

celebrates the betrothal of his only daughter, a plump and solid

heiress, who beneath an inky and mighty pompadour simpers at the broad

jokes of her pursey, elderly fiancé. A solid fiancé, financially and

physically. Altogether a solid match, says Gaspero. A dashing guest

thrums his guitar and sings throatily of the joys of love and of money

in the stocking.

Here a group of very old men watch about a boiling pot hung above a

little fire, and twitter reminiscences of youth, catching one last pale

gleam of the fast sinking sun of their meagre, toilsome lives.

Everywhere music and laughter and the smell of flowers and food and

wine.

A big piano-organ is playing a rouladed waltz to a ring of young

spectators, crowding to watch the elaborate steps of dancers swinging

about singly with grace-steps, with high prancings, with tarantella

flourishes. Male dancers, all. Gaspero explains that no respectable girl

would be allowed to join them, the Sicilian girl’s diversions being

distressingly limited.

One of the boyish dancers, with the keen, bold face and square head of a

mediæval Condottiere, flourishes his light cane in fencing passes as he

swings, which challenge inspires a spectator to leap into the ring with

his own cane drawn. The newcomer, an obvious dandy in pointed

patent-leather shoes, blue-ribboned hat, and light suit of cheap

smartness, crosses canes dashingly with the would-be fencer, and the

rest of the dancers drop back to see the fun.

The Condottiere finds in a few passes that he has met his master and

craftily begins a waiting game. Lithe and quick as a cat, he circles and

gives way, his opponent driving him round and round the ring, lunging

daringly and playing to the gallery. He flourishes unnecessarily,

pursues recklessly, assumes a contemptuous carelessness of the boy,

always circling, always on guard, always coolly thrifty of breath and

strength.

The dandy grows tired and angry, rushes furiously to make an end of his

nimble evasive antagonist, who at last turns with cold courage and by a

twist of his weapon sends the dandy’s cane flying clean over the ring of

spectators, who scream with delight. But the Condottiere is a generous

as well as a wily foe. He offers an embrace. The dandy reluctantly

allows himself to be kissed on both cheeks, but the victor catches him

about the waist and waltzes him around madly amid the laughter and

bravas of the crowd.

* * * * *

It is Jane’s and Peripatetica’s last day in Sicily. Gaspero has taken

them to Santa Maria di Gesu, the Minorite Monastery, but has paused by

the way for a look at San Giovanni degli Eremiti, whose little red domes

float clear against the burning azure sky like coral-tinted bubbles, so

airily do they rise from the green of the high hill-garden with its tiny

cloisters of miniature columns and miniscule grey arches heavy with

yellow roses. And yet from this rosy, arch little fane rang the Sicilian

Vespers which gave the signal for one of the bloodiest butcheries in

history. It was Pasqua Flora, and all Palermo, as it did yesterday, was

feasting and dancing out of doors. One of the French soldiers—then in

occupation, upholding the hated House of Anjou—insulted a Sicilian girl

and was stabbed. Just then the Vesper bells rang from San Giovanni degli

Eremiti, and at the signal the conspiracy, long festering, broke into

open flame, and Palermo rose and massacred the French till the streets

ran with blood.

The Gesu Monastery has no such sanguinary associations. The plain little

building, high on the hillside, stands buried among enormous cypresses

and clouds of roses, and surrounded by the massive marble tombs and

mortuary chapels of Palermo’s nobility and Sicily’s magnates. It is a

place of great peace and silence. A place of unutterable beauty of

outlook upon gorges feathered with pines, upon stern violet mountains

melting into more distant heights of amethyst, into outlines of

hyacinth, into silhouettes of mauve, into high ghostly shadows that

vanish into floods of aerial blue. A place which looks on sea and shore

and city, and where the chemistry of sun and air transmutes the

multitudinous tones of the landscape to an incredible witchery of tint,

to living hues like those of the colours of jewels, of flowers, of the

little burning feathers of the butterflies’ wings.

“Doubtless God might have made a more beautiful view than this from the

Gesu, but doubtless God never did,” sighed Jane.

But still Gaspero is not satisfied. He can never rest content with

anything less than perfection. Yes; he admits the Gesu is admirable, but

he knows a still more “molto bella vista.”

“There is nothing better than the best,” says Jane sententiously. “I am

drenched and satiated with all the loveliness that I can bear. Any other

‘vista’ would be an anticlimax.”

“Dear Jane,” remonstrated Peripatetica, “haven’t you yet guessed that

Gaspero is a wizard? I suspected it the very first day. Of course, you

can see that he’s no ordinary guide and cab-driver, and, as a matter of

fact, I don’t believe there _are_ any such sights as the ones we think

he has showed us. You’ve been on Broadway? Well, can you lay your hand

on your heart, and honestly affirm that when you are there again you

won’t at once realize that there never were such beauties as these we’ve

been seeing? Won’t you know then that this is all a glamour—a hypnotic

suggestion of Gaspero’s mind upon ours?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” snapped Jane. “What is all this rhodomontade

leading to?”

“To a desire to follow the wizard,” answered Peripatetica recklessly.

“Whither Gaspero goeth I go! I am fully prepared to wallow in glamours,

and besides we’ve luncheon in our basket, so don’t be tiresome, Jane.

Let’s abandon the commonplace and ‘follow the Gleam.’”

“Very well,” laughed Jane, climbing into the carriage. “Gaspero and

‘gleam’ if you like.”

Whether the molto bella vista ever existed remains still a subject of

dispute. Peripatetica insists that it was only a pretext for leading

them to a place where Gaspero intended they should lunch, but Jane, who

always kicks against the philosophic pricks of the determinists,

contends that she exercised a certain measure of free will in the

matter. However that may be, they wound among mountain roads, by caves

Gaspero said were once the dwellings of giants, by little outlying

villages where old women span and wove in the doorways and young women

made lace; where copper-workers sat in the street and with musical clang

of little hammers beat out glittering vessels of rosy metal. They

scattered flocks of goats from their path, the shaggy white bucks

leaping nimbly upon the wall and staring at them with curious ironic,

satyr-like glances; and far, very far up, they came upon a mountain

meadow mistily shadowed by enormous gnarled olive trees—a meadow

knee-deep in flowers. A meadow that was a sea of flowers, orange, golden

and lemon, rippling and dimpling in the light and shade, breathed upon

by the faint flying airs of those high spaces:

“In Arcady, in Arcady!

Where all the leaves are merry—”

cried Peripatetica joyously.

“Of course it’s Arcady,” said Jane, with conviction. “And we have come

upon it in the Age—or perhaps the moment—of Gold. Gaspero,” she

announced firmly, “we will lunch right here.”

“But Signorina—the Vista!” protested the Wizard with a quizzical smile.

It was really (Peripatetica is convinced) Gaspero’s subtle understanding

of Jane’s character which led him to offer just sufficient opposition to

fix her determination to stay at the very spot where he could best work

his magic, for a flowing world of shadowy purple swam about them in a

thousand suave folds down to a shining sea, and he could not have showed

them any vista more beautiful. But why attempt to shake Jane’s pleased

conviction it was really owing to her that for a few hours she and

Peripatetica could truly say, “I too have lived in Arcadia.” That it was

owing to her they cheerfully fed there, and lay cradled for long warm

hours in that perfumed flood of flowers in happy thoughtless silence,

wrapped in a fold of the Earth Mother’s—the great Demeter’s—mantle; a

fold embroidered by the fine fingers of her daughter Persephone, the

Opener of Flowers.

* * * * *

That night, when the full moon rose over the silky sea, far down the

horizon behind them slowly faded into the distance the ghostly silver

peaks of the enchanted Land of the Older Gods.

THE END

------------------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF

WILLIAM J. LOCKE

“LIFE IS A GLORIOUS THING.”—_W. J. Locke_

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The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne

At the Gate of Samaria

A Study in Shadows

Where Love Is

Derelicts

The Demagogue and Lady Phayre

The Beloved Vagabond

The White Dove

The Usurper

Septimus

Idols

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=VERNON LEE=

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Limbo and Other Essays: “Ariadne in Mantua”

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Hauntings

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=ANATOLE FRANCE=

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charm is not to be lightly achieved, but the translators have done

their work with care, distinction, and a very happy sense of the

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of French.—_Daily Chronicle._”

_Complete Limited Edition in English_

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Ospovat. _$2.00 per volume_ (except Joan of Arc), _postpaid_.

=The Red Lily=. Translated by WINIFRED STEPHENS.

=The Well of Saint Clare=. Translated by ALFRED ALLINSON.

=Mother of Pearl=. Translated by FREDERIC CHAPMAN,

Containing:

The Procurator of Judea

Our Lady’s Juggler

Amycus and Celestine

Madam de Luzy, etc.

=The Garden of Epicurus=. Translated by ALFRED R. ALLINSON,

Containing:

In the Elysian Fields

Card Houses

Careers for Women

The Priory, etc.

=The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard=. Translated by LAFCADIO HEARN.

This novel was “crowned” by the French Academy in 1881, the author

being received into membership in 1896.

“The highest presentation of France’s many qualities and gifts is to

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=Joan of Arc=. Translated by WINIFRED STEPHENS. 2 volumes. _$8.00 net

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Novelists of Today_.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcriber’s note:

○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.

○ Unbalanced quotation marks were left as the author intended.

○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.

○ Inconsistent spelling was made consistent when a predominant form

was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.