‘Eh, signor, I forgot,’ he said; ‘there are none in the house. I will run over to Capri; the shops are still open. Two minutes only;’ and he vaulted over the wall into the road.
‘Are you coming in?’ he said to me over his shoulder.
‘Yes, in ten minutes,’ I answered, and he disappeared.
Seraphina rose also, resting her weight for a moment on her arm.
‘It is good beneath the stars in the evening, is it not?’ she said. ‘I must go in. Happy dreams, signor!’
‘No; tell me one more story about Tiberius,’ I said.
‘Surely the signor is like a child,’ she said: ‘he is so fond of stories. Will he not tell me an English story for a change?’
‘About yourself or your friends--about your customs in England. I like the ways of English folk;’ and she sat down again close to me, eager-eyed, with smiling mouth.
Suddenly it seemed to me that the whole spirit of all I saw and felt was changed. The soft, innocent Southern night was alive with voices. No longer did a child sit by me, but a woman--dark-eyed like a stag, intoxicating to the sense. Passion and desire, those headlong twins, rushed down on me, with arms intertwined and purple-stained mouth, chanting with a meaning that was new to me, ‘All is beauty, and knowing this is love; and love----’ There she sat, exquisite, trembling between girlhood and womanhood, the eternal riddle of life, to solve which men have gladly died, and lightly dismissed honour, like a stale piece of unlikely gossip. But----
‘It is mail-day to-morrow,’ I said, and I heard how unsteady was my voice; ‘I also have letters to write.’
‘Good-night, signor,’ she said, and turned to go to the house.
As she got further on her way, I think I would have given all I had for her to turn back again, so that I might say--well, nothing particular, but just let her guess, no more, that---- But she did not turn.
So, then, what of my gospel about beauty? It remains exactly where it was, true, I believe, in every respect. Only in me, at any rate, there lurks the beast. To-night he growled and pulled at his chain.
I am come back again to the level uneventfulness of these pleasant days with a great sense of having ‘come home’ continually with me. This little stuccoed house with its little garden has become to me my _angulus terræ_; the deep vibration of ‘home,’ incommunicable, and to many unmeaning, is here; I can no longer imagine myself permanently anywhere else. All day long I continually find, as it were, intimate glances: the line of the downs, a group of trees, or a corner of my own room catches my eye as one catches the eye of a friend across a roomful of acquaintances. That glance says nothing in particular--it only means ‘I am I, you are you’--but it is only between friends that such a glance can ever pass; soul beckons to soul with gesture invisible to others, and a smile answers it, for it is friends who are our anchor in this swift-rushing stream of days and years: secure there, though time eddies in froth and flying spray about our bows, it does not whirl us away, straw and flotsam, down the racing flood. And above us, when we look up from our anchorage through the flying wrack of storm-cloud and torn fringes of wind-swept vapour, there glimmer the steadfast and immutable stars.