The Call of the Blood

"Hm!"

"If I had a wife I should be like the Mago Africano when he was shut up

in the box."

"And I?" Maurice said, suddenly sitting up. "What about me?"

For the first time it seemed to occur to Gaspare that he was speaking to

a married man. He sat up, too.

"Oh, but you--you are a signore and rich. It is different. I am poor. I

shall have many loves, first one and then another, but I shall never take

a wife. My father wishes me to when I have finished the military service,

but"--and he laughed at his own ingenious comparison--"I am like the Mago

Africano when he was let out of the casket. I am free, and I will never

let myself be stoppered-up as he did. Per Dio!"

Suddenly Maurice frowned.

"It isn't like--" he began.

Then he stopped. The lines in his forehead disappeared, and he laughed.

"I am pretty free here, too," he said. "At least, I feel so."

The dreariness that had come upon him inside the cottage had disappeared

now that he was in the open air. As he looked down over the sloping

mountain flank--dotted with trees near him, but farther away bare and

sunbaked--to the sea with its magic coast-line, that seemed to promise

enchantments to wilful travellers passing by upon the purple waters, as

he turned his eyes to the distant plain with its lemon groves, its

winding river, its little vague towns of narrow houses from which thin

trails of smoke went up, and let them journey on to the great, smoking

mountain lifting its snows into the blue, and its grave, not insolent,

panache, he felt an immense sense of happy-go-lucky freedom with the

empty days before him. His intellect was loose like a colt on a prairie.

There was no one near to catch it, to lead it to any special object, to

harness it and drive it onward in any fixed direction. He need no longer

feel respect for a cleverness greater than his own, or try to understand

subtleties of thought and sensation that were really outside of his

capacities. He did not say this to himself, but whence sprang this new

and dancing feeling of emancipation that was coming upon him? Why did he

remember the story he had just been reading, and think of himself for a

moment as a Genie emerging cloudily into the light of day from a narrow

prison which had been sunk beneath the sea? Why? For, till now, he had

never had any consciousness of imprisonment. One only becomes conscious

of some things when one is freed from them. Maurice's happy efforts to

walk on the heights with the enthusiasms of Hermione had surely never

tired him, but rather braced him. Yet, left alone with peasants, with

Lucrezia and Gaspare, there was something in him, some part of his

nature, which began to frolic like a child let out of school. He felt

more utterly at his ease than he had ever felt before. With these

peasants he could let his mind be perfectly lazy. To them he seemed

instructed, almost a god of knowledge.