"Gaspare! What is it?"
"Signorino, signorino, I must speak to you!"
Startled, Maurice looked into the boy's flushed face. The great eyes
searched him fiercely.
"Put the donkeys in the stable," Maurice said. "I'll come."
"Come behind the house, signorino. Ah, Madonna!"
The last exclamation was breathed out with an intensity that was like the
intensity of despair. The boy's look and manner were tragic.
"Gaspare," Maurice said, "what----?"
He saw Hermione turning towards him.
"I'll come in a minute, Gaspare."
"Madonna!" repeated the boy. "Madonna!"
He held up his hands and let them drop to his sides. Then he muttered
something--a long sentence--in dialect. His voice sounded like a
miserable old man's.
"Ah--ah!"
He called to the donkeys and drove them forward to the out-house. Maurice
followed.
What had happened? Gaspare had the manner, the look, of one confronted by
a terror from which there was no escape. His eyes had surely at the same
time rebuked and furiously pitied his master. What did they mean?
"This is our Garden of Paradise!" Hermione was saying as Maurice came up
to her and Artois. "Do you wonder that we love it?"
"I wonder that you left it." Artois replied.
He was sunk in a deep straw chair, a chaise longue piled up with
cushions, facing the great and radiant view. After he had spoken he
sighed.
"I don't think," he said, "that either of you really know that this is
Eden. That knowledge has been reserved for the interloper, for me."
Hermione sat down close to him. Maurice was standing by the wall,
listening furtively to the noises from the out-house, where Gaspare was
unsaddling the donkeys. Artois glanced at him, and was more sharply
conscious of change in him. To Artois this place, after the long journey,
which had sorely tried his feeble body, seemed an enchanted place of
peace, a veritable Elysian Field in which the saddest, the most driven
man must surely forget his pain and learn how to rest and to be joyful in
repose. But he felt that his host, the man who had been living in
paradise, who ought surely to have been learning its blessed lessons
through sunlit days and starry nights, was restless like a man in a city,
was anxious, was intensely ill at ease. Once, watching this man, Artois
had thought of the messenger, poised on winged feet, radiantly ready for
movement that would be exquisite because it would be obedient. This man
still looked ready for flight, but for a flight how different! As Artois
was thinking this Maurice moved.