The Call of the Blood - Page 30/317

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.