The Call of the Blood - Page 52/317

That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such

as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world--a world that

never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to

hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the

dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see

it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to

enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked

up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of

worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of

when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or

a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past

years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a

youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt

when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased,

instead of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this sometimes

surprised her. For she had thought till now that the dead sculptors of

Greece and Rome had in their works succeeded in transcending humanity,

had shown what God might have created instead of what He had created, and

had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living

being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material.

Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty

something strange, something ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if

he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence

in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks

in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the

trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again

in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green

glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like

Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she

imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing,

light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent

spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a

"fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did

not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her

by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had

been struck by in a London restaurant.