"Hm!"
"If I had a wife I should be like the Mago Africano when he was shut up
in the box."
"And I?" Maurice said, suddenly sitting up. "What about me?"
For the first time it seemed to occur to Gaspare that he was speaking to
a married man. He sat up, too.
"Oh, but you--you are a signore and rich. It is different. I am poor. I
shall have many loves, first one and then another, but I shall never take
a wife. My father wishes me to when I have finished the military service,
but"--and he laughed at his own ingenious comparison--"I am like the Mago
Africano when he was let out of the casket. I am free, and I will never
let myself be stoppered-up as he did. Per Dio!"
Suddenly Maurice frowned.
"It isn't like--" he began.
Then he stopped. The lines in his forehead disappeared, and he laughed.
"I am pretty free here, too," he said. "At least, I feel so."
The dreariness that had come upon him inside the cottage had disappeared
now that he was in the open air. As he looked down over the sloping
mountain flank--dotted with trees near him, but farther away bare and
sunbaked--to the sea with its magic coast-line, that seemed to promise
enchantments to wilful travellers passing by upon the purple waters, as
he turned his eyes to the distant plain with its lemon groves, its
winding river, its little vague towns of narrow houses from which thin
trails of smoke went up, and let them journey on to the great, smoking
mountain lifting its snows into the blue, and its grave, not insolent,
panache, he felt an immense sense of happy-go-lucky freedom with the
empty days before him. His intellect was loose like a colt on a prairie.
There was no one near to catch it, to lead it to any special object, to
harness it and drive it onward in any fixed direction. He need no longer
feel respect for a cleverness greater than his own, or try to understand
subtleties of thought and sensation that were really outside of his
capacities. He did not say this to himself, but whence sprang this new
and dancing feeling of emancipation that was coming upon him? Why did he
remember the story he had just been reading, and think of himself for a
moment as a Genie emerging cloudily into the light of day from a narrow
prison which had been sunk beneath the sea? Why? For, till now, he had
never had any consciousness of imprisonment. One only becomes conscious
of some things when one is freed from them. Maurice's happy efforts to
walk on the heights with the enthusiasms of Hermione had surely never
tired him, but rather braced him. Yet, left alone with peasants, with
Lucrezia and Gaspare, there was something in him, some part of his
nature, which began to frolic like a child let out of school. He felt
more utterly at his ease than he had ever felt before. With these
peasants he could let his mind be perfectly lazy. To them he seemed
instructed, almost a god of knowledge.