All this was at first. But Hermione was generally too clear-brained to be
long tricked even by her own enthusiasms. She soon began to understand
that though Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she saw and
felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant attempt of love in a man
who thought he had married his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and
the spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She watched in a
rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion of gratitude. But Gaspare was
in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of
the phenomenon, a dancer in the exquisite tarantella. And Maurice, too,
on that first day had he not obeyed Sebastiano's call? Soon she knew that
when she had sat alone on the terrace seat, and seen the dancers losing
all thought of time and the hour in the joy of their moving bodies, while
hers was still, the scene had been prophetic. In that moment Maurice had
instinctively taken his place in the mask of the spring and she hers.
Their bodies had uttered their minds. She was the passionate watcher, but
he was the passionate performer. Therefore she was his audience. She had
travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it, had travelled
out to be Sicily.
There was a great difference between them, but, having realized it
thoroughly, Hermione was able not to regret but to delight in it. She did
not wish to change her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice
to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand with her heart,
he would be completely changed, and into something not natural, like a
performing dog or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps
amazement, combined too often with a faint disgust. And ceasing to desire
she ceased to endeavor.
"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering her
conversation with Artois. "And, thank God, I don't want to now."
And then she set herself to watch her Sicilian, as she loved to call him,
enjoying the spring in Sicily in his own way, dancing the tarantella with
surely the spirit of eternal youth. He had, she thought, heard the call
of the blood and responded to it fully and openly, fearless and
unashamed. Day by day, seeing his boyish happiness in this life of the
mountains and the sea, she laughed at the creeping, momentary sense of
apprehension that had been roused in her during her conversation with
Artois upon the Thames Embankment. Artois had said that he distrusted
what he loved. That was the flaw in an over-intellectual man. The mind
was too alert, too restless, dogging the steps of the heart like a spy,
troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness. But she could trust where
she loved. Maurice was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of
paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched him, then threw
himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.