She broke off. A tear had fallen down upon her cheek.
"Avanti Gaspare!" she said.
Gaspare lifted his switch and gave Tito a tap, calling out "Ah!" in a
loud, manly voice. The donkey moved on, tripping carefully among the
stones. They mounted slowly up towards the "Pastorale." Presently
Hermione said to Maurice, who kept beside her in spite of the narrowness
of the path: "Everything seems very strange to me to-day. Can you guess why?"
"I don't know. Tell me," he answered.
"It's this. I never expected to be perfectly happy. We all have our
dreams, I suppose. We all think now and then, 'If only I could have this
with that, this person in that place, I could be happy.' And perhaps we
have sometimes a part of our dream turned into reality, though even that
comes seldom. But to have the two, to have the two halves of our dream
fitted together and made reality--isn't that rare? Long ago, when I was a
girl, I always used to think--'If I could ever be with the one I loved in
the south--alone, quite alone, quite away from the world, I could be
perfectly happy.' Well, years after I thought that I came here. I knew at
once I had found my ideal place. One-half of my dream was made real and
was mine. That was much, wasn't it? But getting this part of what I
longed for sometimes made me feel unutterably sad. I had never seen you
then, but often when I sat on that little terrace up there I felt a
passionate desire to have a human being whom I loved beside me. I loved
no one then, but I wanted, I needed to love. Do men ever feel that? Women
do, often, nearly always I think. The beauty made me want to love.
Sometimes, as I leaned over the wall, I heard a shepherd-boy below in the
ravine play on his pipe, or I heard the goat-bells ringing under the
olives. Sometimes at night I saw distant lights, like fire-flies, lamps
carried by peasants going to their homes in the mountains from a festa in
honor of some saint, stealing upward through the darkness, or I saw the
fishermen's lights burning in the boats far off upon the sea. Then--then
I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I
almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize
what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation,
the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now--now
I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know
then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I
never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should
he? What have I ever done to be worthy of such a gift?"