This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a

handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that

set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In

Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he

arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and

he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each

other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously

absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this

son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of

satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering

upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her

orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing

seas.

"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one

morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the

world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the

shining that came in answer to the words--"Let there be light!"

In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the

wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be

busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had

realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that

there was nothing remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not

cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily

she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because

they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more

closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that

was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing,

playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to

know that she would be a little saddened were her husband to change, to

grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had spoken to Artois of

possible development in Maurice, of what she might do for him, and at

first, just at first, she had instinctively exerted her influence over

him to bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And he had eagerly

striven to respond, stirred by his love for her, and his reverence--not a

very clever, but certainly a very affectionate reverence--for her

brilliant qualities of brain. In those very first days together, isolated

in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go--as she

herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind

was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious,

love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land

stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours

forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of

love but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love prompts thought,

not stifles it. In their long mountain walks, in their rides on muleback

to distant villages, hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests

of the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when the noon

wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on the terrace when the stars

came out, and the shepherds led their flocks down to the valleys with

little happy tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts,

desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that beauty and

solitude and nearness to nature in this isle of the south woke in her.

She did not fear to be subtle, she did not fear to be trivial. Everything

she noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she noticed

suggested to her, she related. The sound of the morning breeze in the

olive-trees seemed to her different from the sound of the breeze of

evening. She tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of the

music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every sound, not only with

the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon

the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy

against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring

as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked

Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with

her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the

sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over

rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away

towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line

immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came,

like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then

fading until taken softly by eternity--that was Hermione's feeling--that

sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can

imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys

elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight,

when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the

little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the

bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail

came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she

was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring

of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and

laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her passionate

imagination now threw gossamers before, now drew gossamers away from a

holy of holies that no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that

holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was a tender, glorious

attempt to compass the impossible.




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