"Crack! Crack!"
She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly the sound of the firing
was distressing to her, almost sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music
better. For it suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith,
and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian. But the
reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death, ugly things.
"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing up towards the
mountain-top. "Maurice!"
The pistol made reply. They had not heard her. They were too far or were
too intent upon their sport to hear.
"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost as a person calls
for help. Another pistol-shot answered her, mocking at her in the sun.
Then she heard a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be
either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the laughter of
something she could not personify, of some jeering spirit of the
mountain. It died away at last, and she stood there, shivering in the
sunshine.
"Signora! Signora!"
Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below. She turned and saw him
standing with Lucrezia on the terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's
waist. He took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm round
Lucrezia.
Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the mountain-top. But
something within her held her back from climbing up to the distant
laughter, a feeling, an idiotic feeling she called it to herself
afterwards. She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling of
fear.
"Am I wanted up there?"
That was what something within her said. And the answer was made by her
body. She turned and began to descend towards the terrace.
And at that moment, for the first time in her life, she was conscious of
a little stab of pain such as she had never known before. It was pain of
the mind and of the heart, and yet it was like bodily pain, too. It made
her angry with herself. It was like a betrayal, a betrayal of herself by
her own intellect, she thought.
She stopped once more on the mountain-side.
"Am I going to be ridiculous?" she said to herself. "Am I going to be one
of the women I despise?"
Just then she realized that love may become a tyrant, ministering to the
soul with persecutions.