Only when Hermione was gone, when the train from which she waved her hand
had vanished along the line that skirted the sea, and he saw Gaspare
winking away two tears that were about to fall on his brown cheeks, did
Maurice begin to realize the largeness of the change that fate had
wrought in his Sicilian life. He realized it more sharply when he had
climbed the mountain and stood once more upon the terrace before the
house of the priest. Hermione's personality was so strong, so aboundingly
vital, that its withdrawal made an impression such as that made by an
intense silence suddenly succeeding a powerful burst of music. Just at
first Maurice felt startled, almost puzzled like a child, inclined to
knit his brows and stare with wide eyes and wonder what could be going to
happen to him in a world that was altered. Now he was conscious of being
far away from the land where he had been born and brought up, conscious
of it as he had not been before, even on his first day in Sicily. He did
not feel an alien. He had no sensation of exile. But he felt, as he had
not felt when with Hermione, the glory of this world of sea and
mountains, of olive-trees and vineyards, the strangeness of its great
welcome to him, the magic of his readiness to give himself to it.
He had been like a dancing faun in the sunshine and the moonlight of
Sicily. Now, for a moment, he stood still, very still, and watched and
listened, and was grave, and was aware of himself, the figure in the
foreground of a picture that was marvellous.
The enthusiasm of Hermione for Sicily, the flood of understanding of it,
and feeling for it that she had poured out in the past days of spring,
instead of teaching Maurice to see and to feel, seemed to have kept him
back from the comprehension to which they had been meant to lead him.
With Hermione, the watcher, he had been but as a Sicilian, another
Gaspare in a different rank of life. Without Hermione he was Gaspare and
something more. It was as if he still danced in the tarantella, but had
now for the moment the power to stand and watch his performance and see
that it was wonderful.
This was just at first, in the silence that followed the music.
He gazed at Etna, and thought: "How extraordinary that I'm living up here
on a mountain and looking at the smoke from Etna, and that there's no
English-speaking person here but me!" He looked at Gaspare and at
Lucrezia, and thought: "What a queer trio of companions we are! How
strange and picturesque those two would look in England, how different
they are from the English, and yet how at home with them I feel! By Jove,
it's wonderful!" And then he was thrilled by a sense of romance, of
adventure, that had never been his when his English wife was there beside
him, calling his mind to walk with hers, his heart to beat with hers,
calling with the great sincerity of a very perfect love.