The Call of the Blood Part 15

"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."

"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna[1] of a boy in spite of all his mischief and fun. You should hear him talk of you. He'd die for his padrona."

[Footnote: 1. The Sicilians use the word "donna" to express the meaning we convey by the word "trump."]

"I believe he would. In love, the love that means being in love, I think Sicilians, though tremendously jealous, are very fickle, but if they take a devotion to any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a splendid quality."

"If they've got faults, I love their faults," he said. "They're a lovable race."

"Praising yourself!" she said, laughing at him, but with tender eyes.

"Myself?"

"Never mind. What is it, Gaspare?"

Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes s.h.i.+ning with happiness and a box under his arm.

"The signore knows."

"Revolver practice," said Maurice. "I promised him he should have a try to-day. We're going to a place close by on the mountain. He's warned off Ciccio and his goats. Got the paper, Gaspare?"

Gaspare pointed to a bulging pocket.

"Enough to write a novel on. Well--will you come, Hermione?"

"It's too hot in the sun, and I know you're going into the eye of the sun."

"You see, it's the best place up at the top. There's that stone wall, and--"

"I'll stay here and listen to your music."

They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into the heart of the gold, and singing as they went:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao, Morettina bella, ciao--"

Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise of stones falling downward from their feet on the sunbaked mountain-side. Hermione sat still on the seat by the ravine.

"Ciao, ciao, ciao!"

She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met many Sicilians of the n.o.bility in Palermo--princes, senators, young men of fas.h.i.+on, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese.

Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead.

Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive!

Things that had doubtless stirred in them--instincts, desires, repugnances, joys--were stirring in him, dominating his English inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was a.s.sisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat, socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman--and she was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high traditions--she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, that all men and women are just human beings, brothers and sisters of a great family. In judging of individuals she could never be influenced by anything except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart and mind, qualities that might belong to any man. She was affected by habits, manners--what woman of breeding is not?--but even these could scarcely warp her judgment if they covered anything fine. She could find gold beneath mud and forget the mud.

Maurice was like the peasants, not like the Palermitan aristocracy. He was near to the breast of Sicily, of that mother of many nations, who had come to conquer, and had fought, and bled, and died, or been expelled, but had left indefaceable traces behind them, traces of Norman of Greek of Arab. He was no cosmopolitan with characteristics blurred; he was of the soil. Well, she loved the soil dearly. The almond blossomed from it.

The olive gave its fruit, and the vine its generous blood, and the orange its gold, at the word of the soil, the dear, warm earth of Sicily. She thought of Maurice's warm hands, brown now as Gaspare's. How she loved his hands, and his eyes that shone with the l.u.s.tre of the south! Had not this soil, in very truth, given those hands and those eyes to her? She felt that it had. She loved it more for the gift. She had reaped and garnered in her blessed Sicilian harvest.

Lucrezia came to her round the angle of the cottage, knowing she was alone. Lucrezia was mending a hole in a sock for Gaspare. Now she sat down on the seat under the window, divided from Hermione by the terrace, but able to see her, to feel companions.h.i.+p. Had the padrone been there Lucrezia would not have ventured to come. Gaspare had often explained to her her very humble position in the household. But Gaspare and the padrone were away on the mountain-top, and she could not resist being near to her padrona, for whom she already felt a very real affection and admiration.

"Is it a big hole, Lucrezia?" said Hermione, smiling at her.

"Si, signora."

Lucrezia put her thumb through it, holding it up on her fist.

"Gaspare's holes are always big."

She spoke as if in praise.

"Gaspare is strong," she added. "But Sebastiano is stronger."

As she said the last words a dreamy look came into her round face, and she dropped the hand that held the stocking into her lap.

"Sebastiano is hard like the rocks, signora."

"Hard-hearted, Lucrezia."

Lucrezia said nothing.

"You like Sebastiano, Lucrezia?"

Lucrezia reddened under her brown skin.

"Si, signora."

"So do I. He's always been a good friend of mine."