"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione,
and you must be sure to--'"
"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard--Yes, it is, it is! Hush!
Maurice--listen!"
Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little
procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath,
looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny
by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa
del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and
Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished,
with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great
rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on
her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and
listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.
"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"
Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a
woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows
of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare
and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm
wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian shore in the shadow of an
orange grove, murmuring peace. In that old tune of the "Pastorale" all
her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her
imaginations, and her deep and passionately tender and even ecstatic
love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She
could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with
its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely
breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus.
Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And
Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white
hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into
a fountain, hushed her music to let it have its way. And Hermione heard
in it the voice of the Bambino, the Christ-child, to whose manger-cradle
the shepherds followed the star, and the voice of the Madonna, Maria
stella del mare, whom the peasants love in Sicily as the child loves its
mother. And those peasants were in it, too, people of the lava wastes and
the lava terraces where the vines are green against the black, people of
the hazel and the beech forests, where the little owl cries at eve,
people of the plains where, beneath the yellow lemons, spring the yellow
flowers that are like their joyous reflection in the grasses, people of
the sea, that wonderful purple sea in whose depth of color eternity seems
caught. The altars of the pagan world were in it, and the wayside shrines
before which the little lamps are lit by night upon the lonely
mountain-sides, the old faith and the new, and the love of a land that
lives on from generation to generation in the pulsing breasts of men.