The Call of the Blood

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The dance grew wilder, swifter. Sebastiano quickened the time till he was
playing it prestissimo. One of the boys, Giulio, dropped out exhausted.
Then another, Alfio, fell against the terrace wall, laughing and wiping
his streaming face. Finally Giuseppe gave in, too, obviously against his
will. But Gaspare and Maurice still kept on. The game was certainly a
duel now--a duel which would not cease till Sebastiano put an end to it
by laying down his flute. But he, too, was on his mettle and would not
own fatigue. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could not bear the dance any
more. It was, perhaps, absurd of her. Her brain, fatigued by travel, was
perhaps playing her tricks. But she felt as if Maurice were escaping from
her in this wild tarantella, like a man escaping through a fantastic
grotto from some one who called to him near its entrance. A faint
sensation of something that was surely jealousy, the first she had ever
known, stirred in her heart--jealousy of a tarantella.

"Maurice!" she said.

He did not hear her.

"Maurice!" she called. "Sebastiano--Gaspare--stop! You'll kill
yourselves!"

Sebastiano caught her eye, finished the tune, and took the flute from his
lips. In truth he was not sorry to be commanded to do the thing his pride
of music forbade him to do of his own will. Gaspare gave a wild, boyish
shout, and flung himself down on Giuseppe's knees, clasping him round the
neck jokingly. And Maurice--he stood still on the terrace for a moment
looking dazed. Then the hot blood surged up to his head, making it tingle
under his hair, and he came over slowly, almost shamefacedly, and sat
down by Hermione.

"This sun's made me mad, I think," he said, looking at her. "Why, how
pale you are, Hermione!"

"Am I? No, it must be the shadow of the awning makes me look so. Oh,
Maurice, you are indeed a southerner! Do you know, I feel--I feel as if I
had never really seen you till now, here on this terrace, as if I had
never known you as you are till now, now that I've watched you dance the
tarantella."

"I can't dance it, of course. It was absurd of me to try."

"Ask Gaspare! No, I'll ask him. Gaspare, can the padrone dance the
tarantella?"

"Eh--altro!" said Gaspare, with admiring conviction.

He got off Giuseppe's knee, where he had been curled up almost like a big
kitten, came and stood by Hermione, and added:

"Per Dio, signora, but the padrone is like one of us!"

Hermione laughed. Now that the dance was over and the twittering flute
was silent, her sense of loneliness and melancholy was departing. Soon,
no doubt, she would be able to look back upon it and laugh at it as one
laughs at moods that have passed away.

"This is his first day in Sicily, Gaspare."

"There are forestieri who come here every year, and who stay for months,
and who can talk our language--yes, and can even swear in dialetto as we
can--but they are not like the padrone. Not one of them could dance the
tarantella like that. Per Dio!"

A radiant look of pleasure came into Maurice's face.

"I'm glad you've brought me here," he said. "Ah, when you chose this
place for our honeymoon you understood me better than I understand
myself, Hermione."

"Did I?" she said, slowly. "But no, Maurice, I think I chose a little
selfishly. I was thinking of what I wanted. Oh, the boys are going, and
Sebastiano."

That evening, when they had finished supper--they did not wish to test
Lucrezia's powers too severely by dining the first day--they came out
onto the terrace. Lucrezia and Gaspare were busily talking in the
kitchen. Tito, the donkey, was munching his hay under the low-pitched
roof of the out-house. Now and then they could faintly hear the sound of
his moving jaws, Lucrezia's laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These
fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence that lay about
them, the night hush of the mountains and the sea. Hermione sat down on
the seat in the terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless
night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars. There was a cool
breeze blowing from Etna. Here and there upon the mountains shone
solitary lights, and one was moving slowly through the darkness along the
crest of a hill opposite to them, a torch carried by some peasant going
to his hidden cottage among the olive-trees.

Maurice lit his cigar and stood by Hermione, who was sitting sideways and
leaning her arms on the wall, and looking out into the wide dimness in
which, somewhere, lay the ravine. He did not want to talk just then, and
she kept silence. This was really their wedding night, and both of them
were unusually conscious, but in different ways, of the mystery that lay
about them, and that lay, too, within them. It was strange to be together
up here, far up in the mountains, isolated in their love. Below the wall,
on the side of the ravine, the leaves of the olives rustled faintly as
the wind passed by. And this whisper of the leaves seemed to be meant for
them, to be addressed to them. They were surely being told something by
the little voices of the night.

"Maurice," Hermione said, at last, "does this silence of the mountains
make you wish for anything?"

"Wish?" he said. "I don't know--no, I think not. I have got what I
wanted. I have got you. Why should I wish for anything more? And I feel
at home here. It's extraordinary how I feel at home."

"You! No, it isn't extraordinary at all."

She looked up at him, still keeping her arms on the terrace wall. His
physical beauty, which had always fascinated her, moved her more than
ever in the south, seemed to her to become greater, to have more meaning
in this setting of beauty and romance. She thought of the old pagan gods.
He was, indeed, suited to be their happy messenger. At that moment
something within her more than loved him, worshipped him, felt for him an
idolatry that had something in it of pain. A number of thoughts ran
through her mind swiftly. One was this: "Can it be possible that he will
die some day, that he will be dead?" And the awfulness, the unspeakable
horror of the death of the body gripped her and shook her in the dark.

"Oh, Maurice!" she said. "Maurice!"

"What is it?"

She held out her hands to him. He took them and sat down by her.

"What is it, Hermione?" he said again.

"If beauty were only deathless!"

"But--but all this is, for us. It was here for the old Greeks to see, and
I suppose it will be here--"

"I didn't mean that."

"I've been stupid," he said, humbly.

"No, my dearest--my dearest one. Oh, how did you ever love me?"

She had forgotten the warning of Artois. The dirty little beggar was
staring at the angel and wanted the angel to know it.

"Hermione! What do you mean?"

He looked at her, and there was genuine surprise in his face and in his
voice.

"How can you love me? I'm so ugly. Oh, I feel it here, I feel it horribly
in the midst of--of all this loveliness, with you."

She hid her face against his shoulder almost like one afraid.

"But you are not ugly! What nonsense! Hermione!"

He put his hand under her face and raised it, and the touch of his hand
against her cheek made her tremble. To-night she more than loved, she
worshipped him. Her intellect did not speak any more. Its voice was
silenced by the voice of the heart, by the voices of the senses. She felt
as if she would like to go down on her knees to him and thank him for
having loved her, for loving her. Abasement would have been a joy to her
just then, was almost a necessity, and yet there was pride in her, the
decent pride of a pure-natured woman who has never let herself be soiled.

"Hermione," he said, looking into her face. "Don't speak to me like that.
It's all wrong. It puts me in the wrong place, I a fool and you--what you
are. If that friend of yours could hear you--by Jove!"

There was something so boyish, so simple in his voice that Hermione
suddenly threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, as she might have
kissed a delightful child. She began to laugh through tears.

"Thank God you're not conceited!" she exclaimed.

"What about?" he asked.

But she did not answer. Presently they heard Gaspare's step on the
terrace. He came to them bareheaded, with shining eyes, to ask if they
were satisfied with Lucrezia. About himself he did not ask. He felt that
he had done all things for his padrona as he alone could have done them,
knowing her so well.

"Gaspare," Hermione said, "everything is perfect. Tell Lucrezia."

"Better not, signora. I will say you are fairly satisfied, as it is only
the first day. Then she will try to do better to-morrow. I know
Lucrezia."

And he gazed at them calmly with his enormous liquid eyes.

"Do not say too much, signora. It makes people proud."

[Illustration: "HE ... LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN THE HOUSE OF
THE SIRENS"]

She thought that she heard an odd Sicilian echo of Artois. The peasant
lad's mind reflected the mind of the subtle novelist for a moment.

"Very well, Gaspare," she said, submissively.

He smiled at her with satisfaction.

"I understand girls," he said. "You must keep them down or they will keep
you down. Every girl in Marechiaro is like that. We keep them down
therefore."

He spoke calmly, evidently quite without thought that he was speaking to
a woman.

"May I go to bed, signora?" he added. "I got up at four this morning."

"At four!"

"To be sure all was ready for you and the signore."

"Gaspare! Go at once. We will go to bed, too. Shall we, Maurice?"

"Yes. I'm ready."

Just as they were going up the steps into the house, he turned to take a
last look at the night. Far down below him over the terrace wall he saw a
bright, steady light.

"Is that on the sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing to it. "Do they fish
there at night?"

"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."

Gaspare shook his head.

"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.

"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."

"But no one lives there."

"Oh, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista lives there with
Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora. Buon riposo, signore."

"Buon riposo, Gaspare."

And Maurice echoed it:

"Buon riposo."

As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near
Tito's stable, Maurice added:

"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying good-night. I feel as if
I'd said it before, somehow."

"Your blood has said it without your knowing it, perhaps many times. Are
you coming, Maurice?"

He turned once more, looked down at the light shining in the house of the
sirens, then followed Hermione in through the open door.

V

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.

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.

All this was at first. But Hermione was generally too clear-brained to be
long tricked even by her own enthusiasms. She soon began to understand
that though Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she saw and
felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant attempt of love in a man
who thought he had married his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and
the spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She watched in a
rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion of gratitude. But Gaspare was
in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of
the phenomenon, a dancer in the exquisite tarantella. And Maurice, too,
on that first day had he not obeyed Sebastiano's call? Soon she knew that
when she had sat alone on the terrace seat, and seen the dancers losing
all thought of time and the hour in the joy of their moving bodies, while
hers was still, the scene had been prophetic. In that moment Maurice had
instinctively taken his place in the mask of the spring and she hers.
Their bodies had uttered their minds. She was the passionate watcher, but
he was the passionate performer. Therefore she was his audience. She had
travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it, had travelled
out to be Sicily.

There was a great difference between them, but, having realized it
thoroughly, Hermione was able not to regret but to delight in it. She did
not wish to change her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice
to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand with her heart,
he would be completely changed, and into something not natural, like a
performing dog or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps
amazement, combined too often with a faint disgust. And ceasing to desire
she ceased to endeavor.

"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering her
conversation with Artois. "And, thank God, I don't want to now."

And then she set herself to watch her Sicilian, as she loved to call him,
enjoying the spring in Sicily in his own way, dancing the tarantella with
surely the spirit of eternal youth. He had, she thought, heard the call
of the blood and responded to it fully and openly, fearless and
unashamed. Day by day, seeing his boyish happiness in this life of the
mountains and the sea, she laughed at the creeping, momentary sense of
apprehension that had been roused in her during her conversation with
Artois upon the Thames Embankment. Artois had said that he distrusted
what he loved. That was the flaw in an over-intellectual man. The mind
was too alert, too restless, dogging the steps of the heart like a spy,
troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness. But she could trust where
she loved. Maurice was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of
paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched him, then threw
himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.

The strain of Sicilian blood that was in him worked in him curiously,
making her sometimes marvel at the mysterious power of race, at the
stubborn and almost tyrannical domination some dead have over some
living, those who are dust over those who are quick with animation and
passion. Everything that was connected with Sicily and with Sicilian life
not only reached his senses and sank easily into his heart, but seemed
also to rouse his mind to an activity that astonished her. In connection
with Sicily he showed a swiftness, almost a cleverness, she never noted
in him when things Sicilian were not in question.

For instance, like most Englishmen, Maurice had no great talent for
languages. He spoke French fairly well, having had a French nurse when he
was a child, and his mother had taught him a little Italian. But till now
he had never had any desire to be proficient in any language except his
own. Hermione, on the other hand, was gifted as a linguist, loving
languages and learning them easily. Yet Maurice picked up--in his case
the expression, usually ridiculous, was absolutely applicable--Sicilian
with a readiness that seemed to Hermione almost miraculous. He showed no
delight in the musical beauty of Italian. What he wanted, and what his
mind--or was it rather what his ears and his tongue and his lips?--took,
and held and revelled in, was the Sicilian dialect spoken by Lucrezia and
Gaspare when they were together, spoken by the peasants of Marechiaro and
of the mountains. To Hermione Gaspare had always talked Italian,
incorrect, but still Italian, and she spoke no dialect, although she
could often guess at what the Sicilians meant when they addressed her in
their vigorous but uncouth jargon, different from Italian almost as
Gaelic is from English. But Maurice very soon began to speak a few words
of Sicilian. Hermione laughed at him and discouraged him jokingly,
telling him that he must learn Italian thoroughly, the language of love,
the most melodious language in the world.

"Italian!" he said. "What's the use of it? I want to talk to the people.
A grammar! I won't open it. Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Gaspare came rushing bareheaded to them in the sun.

"The signora says I'm to learn Italian, but I say that I've Sicilian
blood in my veins and must talk as you do."

"But I, signore, can speak Italian!" said Gaspare, with twinkling pride.

"As a bear dances. No, professor, you and I, we'll be good patriots.
We'll speak in our mother-tongue. You rascal, you know we've begun
already."

And looking mischievously at Hermione, he began to sing in a loud, warm
voice:

"Cu Gabbi e Jochi e Parti e Mascarati,
Si fa lu giubileu universali.
Tiripi-tumpiti, tumpiti, tumpiti,
Milli cardubuli 'n culu ti puncinu!"

Gaspare burst into a roar of delighted laughter.

"It's the tarantella over again," Hermione said. "You're a hopeless
Sicilian. I give you up."

That same day she said to him:

"You love the peasants, don't you, Maurice?"

"Yes. Are you surprised?"

"No; at least I'm not surprised at your loving them."

"Well, then, Hermione?"

"Perhaps a little at the way you love them."

"What way's that?"

"Almost as they love each other--that's to say, when they love each other
at all. Gaspare now! I believe you feel more as if he were a young
brother of yours than as if he were your servant."

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