Lucrezia Gabbi came out onto the terrace of the Casa del Prete on Monte
Amato, shaded her eyes with her brown hands, and gazed down across the
ravine over the olive-trees and the vines to the mountain-side opposite,
along which, among rocks and Barbary figs, wound a tiny track trodden by
the few contadini whose stone cottages, some of them scarcely more than
huts, were scattered here and there upon the surrounding heights that
looked towards Etna and the sea. Lucrezia was dressed in her best. She
wore a dark-stuff gown covered in the front by a long blue-and-white
apron. Although really happiest in her mind when her feet were bare, she
had donned a pair of white stockings and low slippers, and over her
thick, dark hair was tied a handkerchief gay with a pattern of brilliant
yellow flowers on a white ground. This was a present from Gaspare bought
at the town of Cattaro at the foot of the mountains, and worn now for the
first time in honor of a great occasion.
To-day Lucrezia was in the service of distinguished forestieri, and she
was gazing now across the ravine straining her eyes to see a procession
winding up from the sea: donkeys laden with luggage, and her new padrone
and padrona pioneered by the radiant Gaspare towards their mountain home.
It was a good day for their arrival. Nobody could deny that. Even
Lucrezia, who was accustomed to fine weather, having lived all her life
in Sicily, was struck to a certain blinking admiration as she stepped out
on to the terrace, and murmured to herself and a cat which was basking
on the stone seat that faced the cottage between broken columns, round
which roses twined: "Che tempo fa oggi! Santa Madonna, che bel tempo!"
On this morning of February the clearness of the atmosphere was in truth
almost African. Under the cloudless sky every detail of the great view
from the terrace stood out with a magical distinctness. The lines of the
mountains were sharply defined against the profound blue. The forms of
the gray rocks scattered upon their slopes, of the peasants' houses, of
the olive and oak trees which grew thickly on the left flank of Monte
Amato below the priest's house, showed themselves in the sunshine with
the bold frankness which is part of the glory of all things in the south.
The figures of stationary or moving goatherds and laborers, watching
their flocks or toiling among the vineyards and the orchards, were
relieved against the face of nature in the shimmer of the glad gold in
this Eden, with a mingling of delicacy and significance which had in it
something ethereal and mysterious, a hint of fairy-land. Far off, rising
calmly in an immense slope, a slope that was classical in its dignity,
profound in its sobriety, remote, yet neither cold nor sad, Etna soared
towards the heaven, sending from its summit, on which the snows still
lingered, a steady plume of ivory smoke. In the nearer foreground, upon a
jagged crest of beetling rock, the ruins of a Saracenic castle dominated
a huddled village, whose houses seemed to cling frantically to the cliff,
as if each one were in fear of being separated from its brethren and
tossed into the sea. And far below that sea spread forth its waveless,
silent wonder to a horizon-line so distant that the eyes which looked
upon it could scarcely distinguish sea from sky--a line which surely
united not divided two shades of flawless blue, linking them in a
brotherhood which should be everlasting. Few sounds, and these but
slight ones, stirred in the breast of the ardent silence; some little
notes of birds, fragmentary and wandering, wayward as pilgrims who had
forgotten to what shrine they bent their steps, some little notes of
bells swinging beneath the tufted chins of goats, the wail of a woman's
song, old in its quiet melancholy, Oriental in its strange irregularity
of rhythm, and the careless twitter of a tarantella, played upon a
reed-flute by a secluded shepherd-boy beneath the bending silver green of
tressy olives beside a tiny stream.