The Call of the Blood - Page 61/317

"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.