Daphne: An Autumn Pastoral Part 10

CHAPTER XII

If Bertuccio had but shown any signs of having seen her companion of yesterday, Daphne's bewilderment would have been less; but to keep meeting a being who claimed to belong to another world, who came and went, invisible, it would seem, when he chose, to other eyes except her own, might well rouse strange thoughts in the mind of a girl cut off from her old life in the world of commonplace events. To be sure, the shepherd Antoli had seen him, but had spoken of him voluntarily as a mysterious creature, one of the blessed saints come down to aid the sick. The beggar woman had seen him, but had fallen prostrate at his feet as in awe of supernatural presence. When the wandering G.o.d had talked across the hedge the eyes of Giacomo and a.s.sunta had apparently been holden; and now Bertuccio, whose ears were keen, and whose eyes, in their lazy Italian fas.h.i.+on, saw more then they ever seemed to, Bertuccio had been all the afternoon within a stone's throw of the place where the G.o.d had played to her, and Bertuccio gave no sign of having seen a man. She eyed him questioningly as they started out the next morning on their way to the ruins of some famous baths on the mountain facing them.

There was keenness in the autumn air that morning, but the green slopes far and near bore no trace of flaming color or of decay, as in fall at home; it was rather like a glimpse of some cool, eternal spring. A stream of water trickled down under thick gra.s.s at the side of the road, and violets grew there.

"San Pietro!" said Daphne, with a little tug at the bridle. The long ears were jerked hastily back to hear what was to come. "I know you disapprove of me, for you saw it all."

The ears kept that position in which any one who has ever loved a donkey recognizes scathing criticism. Daphne fingered one of them with her free hand.

"It is only on your back that I feel any strength of mind," she added.

"When I am by myself something seems sweeping me away, as the tides sweep driftwood out to sea; but here, resolution crawls up through my body. We must be a new kind of centaur, San Pietro."

Suddenly her face went down between his ears.

"But if you and I united do drive him away, what shall we do,--afterwards?"

"Signorina!" called Bertuccio, running up behind them. "Look! The olives pick themselves."

At a turn in the road the view had opened. There, in a great orchard on the side of the hill, the peasants were gathering olives before the coming of the frost. There were scores of pickers wearing great gay-colored ap.r.o.ns in which they placed the olives as they gathered them from the trees. Ladders leaned against knotty tree trunks; baskets filled with the green fruit stood on the ground. Ladder and basket suggested the apple orchards of her native land, but the motley colors of kerchief and ap.r.o.n, yellow, magenta, turquoise, and green, and the gray of the eternal olive trees with the deep blue of the sky behind them, recalled her to the enchanted country where she was fast losing the landmarks of home.

"Signorina Daphne," said Bertuccio, speaking slowly as to a child, "did you ever hear them tell of the maiden on the hills up here who was carried away by a G.o.d?"

Daphne turned swiftly and tried to read his face. It was no less expressionless than usual.

"No," she answered. "Tell me. I am fond of stories."

They were climbing the winding road again, leaving the olive pickers behind. Bertuccio walked near, holding the donkey's tail to steady his steps.

"It was long ago, ages and ages. Her father had the care of an olive orchard that was old, older than our Lord," said Bertuccio, devoutly crossing himself. "There was one tree in it that was enormously big, as large as this,--see the measure of my arms! It was open and hollow, but growing as olives will when there is every reason why they should be dead. One night the family were eating their polenta--has the Signorina tasted our polenta? It makes itself from chestnuts, and it is very good. I must speak to my mother to offer some to the Signorina. Well, the door opened without any knocking, and a stranger stood there: he was young, and beyond humanity, beautiful."

Bertuccio paused; the girl felt slow red climbing to her cheek. She dared not look behind, yet she would have given half her possessions to see the expression of his face. Leaning forward, she played with the red ta.s.sels at San Pietro's ears.

"Go on! go on!" she commanded. "Avanti!"

San Pietro thought that the words were meant for him, and indeed they were more appropriate here for donkey than for man.

"He sat with them and shared their polenta," continued Bertuccio, walking more rapidly to keep up with San Pietro's quickened step. "And he made them all afraid. It was not that he had any terrible look, or that he did anything strange, only, each glance, each motion told that he was more than merely man. And he looked at the maiden with eyes of love, and she at him," said Bertuccio, lacking art to keep his hearer in suspense. "She too was beautiful, as beautiful, perhaps, as the Signorina," continued the story-teller.

Daphne looked at him sharply: did he mean any further comparison?

There were hot waves now on neck and face, and her heart was beating furiously.

"He came often, and he always met the maiden by the hollow tree: it was large enough for them to stand inside. And her father and mother were troubled, for they knew he was a G.o.d, not one of our faith, Signorina, but one of the older G.o.ds who lived here before the coming of our Lord.

One day as he stood there by the tree and was kissing the maiden on her mouth, her father came, very angry, and scolded her, and defied the G.o.d, telling him to go away and never show his face there again. And then, he never knew how it happened, for the stranger did not touch him, but he fell stunned to the ground, with a queer flash of light in his eyes. When he woke, the stars were s.h.i.+ning over him, and he crawled home. But the maiden was gone, and they never saw her any more, Signorina. Whether it was for good or for ill, she had been carried away by the G.o.d. People think that they disappeared inside the tree, for it closed up that night, and it never opened again.

Sometimes they thought they heard voices coming from it, and once or twice, cries and sobs of a woman. Maybe she is imprisoned there and cannot get out: it would be a terrible fate, would it not, Signorina?

Me, I think it is better to fight shy of the heathen G.o.ds."

Bertuccio's white teeth showed in a broad smile, but no scrutiny on Daphne's part could tell her whether he had told his story for pleasure merely, or for warning. She rode on in silence, realizing, as she had not realized before, how far this peasant stock reached back into the elder days of the ancient world.

"Do you think that your story is true, Bertuccio?" she asked, as they came in sight of the gra.s.s-grown mounds of the buried watering-place toward which their steps were bent.

"Ma che!" answered Bertuccio, shrugging his shoulders, and snapping his fingers meaningly. "So much is true that one does not see, and one cannot believe all that one does see."

Daphne started. What HAD he seen?

"Besides," added Bertuccio, "there is proof of this. My father's father saw the olive tree, and it was quite closed."

CHAPTER XIII

Over the shallow tufa basin of the great fountain on the hill Daphne stood gazing into the water. She had sought the deep shadow of the ilex trees, for the afternoon was warm, an almost angry summer heat having followed yesterday's coolness. Her yellow gown gleamed like light against the dull brown of the stone and the dark moss-touched trunks of the trees. Whether she was looking at the tufts of fern and of gra.s.s that grew in the wet basin, or whether she was studying her own beauty reflected there, no one could tell, not even Apollo, who had been watching her for some time.

Into his eyes as he looked leaped a light like the flame of the suns.h.i.+ne beyond the shadows on the hill; swiftly he stepped forward and kissed the girl's shoulder where the thin yellow stuff of her dress showed the outward curve to the arm. She turned and faced him, without a word. There was no need of speech: anger battled with unconfessed joy in her changing face.

"How dare you?" she said presently, when she had won her lips to curves of scorn. "The manners of the G.o.ds seem strange to mortals."

"I love you," he answered simply.

Then there was no sound save that of the water, dropping over the edge of the great basin to the soft gra.s.s beneath.

"Can't you forgive me?" he asked humbly. "I am profoundly sorry; only, my temptation was superhuman."

"I had thought that you were that, too," said the girl in a whisper.

"There is no excuse, I know; there is only a reason. I love you, little girl. I love your questioning eyes, and your firm mouth, and your smooth brown hair"--

"Stop!" begged Daphne, putting out her hands. "You must not say such things to me, for I am not free to hear them. I must go away," and she turned toward home. But he grasped one of the outstretched hands and drew her to the stone bench near the fountain, and then seated himself near her side.

"Now tell me what you mean," he said quietly.

"I mean," she answered, with her eyes cast down, "that two years ago I promised to love some one else. I must not even hear what you are trying to say to me."

"I think, Miss Willis," he said gently, "that you should have told me this before."

"How could I?" begged the girl. "When could I have done it? Why should I?"

"I do not know," he answered wearily; "only, perhaps it might have spared me some shade of human anguish."

"Human?" asked Daphne, almost smiling.

"No, no, no," he interrupted, not hearing her. "It would not have done any good, for I have loved you from the first minute when I saw your blue drapery flutter in your flight from me. Some deeper sense than mortals have told me that every footstep was falling on my sleeping heart and waking it to life. You were not running away; in some divine sense you were coming toward me. Daphne, Daphne, I cannot let you go!"

The look in the girl's startled eyes was his only answer. By the side of this sun-browned face, in its beauty and its power, rose before her a vision of Eustace Denton, pale, full-lipped, with an ardor for nothingness in his remote blue eyes. How could she have known, in those old days before her revelation came, that faces like this were on the earth: how could she have dreamed that glory of life like this was possible?

In the great strain of the moment they both grew calm and Daphne told him her story, as much of it as she thought it wise for him to know.

Her later sense of misgiving, the breaking of the engagement, the penitence that had led to a renewal of the bonds, she concealed from him; but he learned of the days of study and of quiet work in the shaded corners of her father's library, and of those gayer days and evenings when the figure of the young ascetic had seemed to the girl to have a peculiar saving grace, standing in stern contrast to the social background of her life.

He thanked her, when she had finished, and he watched her, with her background of misty blue distance, sitting where the shadow of the ilexes brought out the color of her scarlet lips and deep gray eyes.