Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise of stones falling

downward from their feet on the sunbaked mountain-side. Hermione sat

still on the seat by the ravine.

"Ciao, ciao, ciao!"

She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing

that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have

to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang

that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even

the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet

plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard

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coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always

comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met

many Sicilians of the nobility in Palermo--princes, senators, young men

of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese.

Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian

peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered

what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead.

Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of

hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive!

Things that had doubtless stirred in them--instincts, desires,

repugnances, joys--were stirring in him, dominating his English

inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was

assisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to

be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the

greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man

and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things

in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had

once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their

faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long

cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if

there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And

she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a

good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat,

socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe

her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman--and she

was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high

traditions--she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its

pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, that

all men and women are just human beings, brothers and sisters of a great

family. In judging of individuals she could never be influenced by

anything except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart and mind,

qualities that might belong to any man. She was affected by habits,

manners--what woman of breeding is not?--but even these could scarcely

warp her judgment if they covered anything fine. She could find gold

beneath mud and forget the mud.




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