This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a
handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that
set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In
Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he
arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and
he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each
other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously
absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this
son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of
satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering
upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her
orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing
seas.
"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one
morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the
world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the
shining that came in answer to the words--"Let there be light!"
In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the
wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be
busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had
realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that
there was nothing remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not
cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily
she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because
they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more
closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that
was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing,
playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to
know that she would be a little saddened were her husband to change, to
grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had spoken to Artois of
possible development in Maurice, of what she might do for him, and at
first, just at first, she had instinctively exerted her influence over
him to bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And he had eagerly
striven to respond, stirred by his love for her, and his reverence--not a
very clever, but certainly a very affectionate reverence--for her
brilliant qualities of brain. In those very first days together, isolated
in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go--as she
herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind
was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious,
love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land
stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours
forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of
love but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love prompts thought,
not stifles it. In their long mountain walks, in their rides on muleback
to distant villages, hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests
of the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when the noon
wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on the terrace when the stars
came out, and the shepherds led their flocks down to the valleys with
little happy tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts,
desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that beauty and
solitude and nearness to nature in this isle of the south woke in her.
She did not fear to be subtle, she did not fear to be trivial. Everything
she noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she noticed
suggested to her, she related. The sound of the morning breeze in the
olive-trees seemed to her different from the sound of the breeze of
evening. She tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of the
music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every sound, not only with
the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon
the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy
against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring
as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked
Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with
her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the
sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over
rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away
towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line
immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came,
like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then
fading until taken softly by eternity--that was Hermione's feeling--that
sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can
imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys
elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight,
when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the
little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the
bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail
came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she
was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring
of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and
laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her passionate
imagination now threw gossamers before, now drew gossamers away from a
holy of holies that no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that
holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was a tender, glorious
attempt to compass the impossible.