Lucrezia was accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea.
Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and
played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its
gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental
song--she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare,
brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride
beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well. And she
had many a time danced to the tarantella that the shepherd-boy was
fluting, clapping her strong hands and swinging her broad hips, while the
great rings in her ears shook to and fro, and her whole healthy body
quivered to the spirit of the tune. She knew it all. It was and had
always been part of her life.
Hermione's garden of paradise generally seemed homely enough to Lucrezia.
Yet to-day, perhaps because she was dressed in her best on a day that was
not a festa, and wore a silver chain with a coral charm on it, and had
shoes on her feet, there seemed to her a newness, almost a strangeness in
the wideness and the silence, in the sunshine and the music, something
that made her breathe out a sigh, and stare with almost wondering eyes on
Etna and the sea. She soon lost her vague sensation that her life lay,
perhaps, in a home of magic, however, when she looked again at the mule
track which wound upward from the distant town, in which the train from
Messina must by this time have deposited her forestieri, and began to
think more naturally of the days that lay before her, of her novel and
important duties, and of the unusual sums of money that her activities
were to earn her.
Gaspare, who, as major-domo, had chosen her imperiously for his assistant
and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was
to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and
lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such
wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of
them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved and
excited her.
She was to live in a splendidly furnished house with wealthy and
distinguished people; she was to sleep in a room all to herself, in a bed
that no one had a right to except herself. This was an experience that in
her most sanguine moments she had never anticipated. All her life had
been passed en famille in the village of Marechiaro, which lay on a
table-land at the foot of Monte Amato, half-way down to the sea. The
Gabbis were numerous, and they all lived in one room, to which cats,
hens, and turkeys resorted with much freedom and in considerable numbers.
Lucrezia had never known, perhaps had never desired, a moment of privacy,
but now she began to awake to the fact that privacy and daintiness and
pretty furniture were very interesting, and even touching, as well as
very phenomenal additions to a young woman's existence. What could the
people who had the power to provide them be like? She scanned the
mule-track with growing eagerness, but the procession did not appear. She
saw only an old contadino in a long woollen cap riding slowly into the
recesses of the hills on a donkey, and a small boy leading his goats to
pasture. The train must have been late. She turned round from the view
and examined her new home once more. Already she knew it by heart, yet
the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.