Suddenly she moved, took her hands from her hips, settled her yellow
handkerchief, and smiled. The silence had been broken by a sound all true
Sicilians love, the buzz and the drowsy wail of the ceramella, the
bagpipes which the shepherds play as they come down from the hills to the
villages when the festival of the Natale is approaching. It was as yet
very faint and distant, coming from the mountain-side behind the cottage,
but Lucrezia knew the tune. It was part of her existence, part of Etna,
the olive groves, the vineyards, and the sea, part of that old, old
Sicily which dwells in the blood and shines in the eyes, and is alive in
the songs and the dances of these children of the sun, and of legends and
of mingled races from many lands. It was the "Pastorale," and she knew
who was playing it--Sebastiano, the shepherd, who had lived with the
brigands in the forests that look down upon the Isles of Lipari, who now
kept his father's goats among the rocks, and knew every stone and every
cave on Etna, and who had a chest and arms of iron, and legs that no
climbing could fatigue, and whose great, brown fingers, that could break
a man's wrist, drew such delicate tones from the reed pipe that, when he
played it, even the old man's thoughts were turned to dancing and the
old woman's to love. But now he was being important, he was playing the
ceramella, into which no shepherd could pour such a volume of breath as
he, from which none could bring such a volume of warm and lusty music. It
was Sebastiano coming down from the top of Monte Amato to welcome the
forestieri.
The music grew louder, and presently a dog barked outside on the terrace.
Lucrezia ran to the window. A great white-and-yellow, blunt-faced,
pale-eyed dog, his neck surrounded by a spiked collar, stood there
sniffing and looking savage, his feathery tail cocked up pugnaciously
over his back.
"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the window under the
awning--"Sebastiano!"
Then she drew back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by
the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone
seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and
its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia called out once more: "Sebastiano!"
Abruptly the tune ceased and the silence returned, emphasized by the
vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she
was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered
her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's
foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above
her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and
looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and
very masculine face, roughened by wind and toughened by sun, with keen,
steady, almost insolent eyes, black and shining, stiff, black hair, that
looked as if it had been crimped, a mustache sprouting above a wide,
slightly animal mouth full of splendid teeth, and a square, brutal, but
very manly chin. On the head was a Sicilian cap, long and hanging down
at the left side. There were ear-rings in the man's large, well-shaped
ears, and over the window-ledge protruded the swollen bladder, like a
dead, bloated monster, from which he had been drawing his antique tune.