The Call of the Blood

"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione,

and you must be sure to--'"

"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard--Yes, it is, it is! Hush!

Maurice--listen!"

Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little

procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath,

looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny

by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa

del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and

Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished,

with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great

rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on

her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and

listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.

"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"

Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a

woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows

of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare

and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm

wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian shore in the shadow of an

orange grove, murmuring peace. In that old tune of the "Pastorale" all

her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her

imaginations, and her deep and passionately tender and even ecstatic

love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She

could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with

its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely

breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus.

Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And

Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white

hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into

a fountain, hushed her music to let it have its way. And Hermione heard

in it the voice of the Bambino, the Christ-child, to whose manger-cradle

the shepherds followed the star, and the voice of the Madonna, Maria

stella del mare, whom the peasants love in Sicily as the child loves its

mother. And those peasants were in it, too, people of the lava wastes and

the lava terraces where the vines are green against the black, people of

the hazel and the beech forests, where the little owl cries at eve,

people of the plains where, beneath the yellow lemons, spring the yellow

flowers that are like their joyous reflection in the grasses, people of

the sea, that wonderful purple sea in whose depth of color eternity seems

caught. The altars of the pagan world were in it, and the wayside shrines

before which the little lamps are lit by night upon the lonely

mountain-sides, the old faith and the new, and the love of a land that

lives on from generation to generation in the pulsing breasts of men.