Seekers in Sicily by Elizabeth Bisland

Author:Elizabeth Bisland [Bisland, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature, Religious, Romance, Historical
ISBN: 1230002283494
Google: C9HntAEACAAJ
Publisher: ANEB Publishing
Published: 2018-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

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From the temple of Diana the Spider led Jane and Peripatetica through more narrow, crooked streets thronged with rough, fierce Syracusan children, to see the Sixteenth Century palace of the Montaltos, now fallen on grimy days. The windows with their ogives and delicate twisted columns were crumbling, and the noble court—through which silken guests and mailed retainers had passed to mount the great stairs and throng the long balconies—was now full of squalid, squalling populace, and flocks of evil-savoured brown goats being milked for the evening meal.

For some unexplained reason the mere presence of the Spider was an offence to the lowering boys who laired in this court. His grown-up air of being capably in charge of two female forestieri stank in their resentful nostrils, but Spider was an insect of his hands, landing those hands resoundingly upon the cheeks of his buffeters and hustlers until an enraged mother took the part of one of her discomfited offspring, and under her fierce cuffings the Spider melted into outraged tears.

Peripatetica had already discovered that angry English had a demoralizing effect upon the natives. Its crisp consonants seemed as daunting as blows to the vowelled Sicilian; armed with which, and a parasol, the Spider was rescued and borne half way to the fountain of Arethusa before he could control his sniffles and his protesting fingers, upon which he offered passionate illustration that even Hercules could not overcome the odds of ten to one, and that tears under the circumstances left no smirch upon nascent manhood.

Jane, with her usual large grasp of financial questions, applied a lire to the wounded heart with the happiest results, and it was a once more united and cheerful trio which leaned over Arethusa’s inadequate little fount with its green scum and its frowzy papyrus plants. Poor Nymph! She of the rainbow, and the “couch of snows”—she whose “footsteps were paved with green.” Flying from the gross wooing of Alpheus she comes all the way from Elis under the sea to take refuge with moon-crowned Artemis—Artemis “the protectress”—and for safety is turned into a sparkling pool which feeds all Syracuse with its sweet waters. Now Artemis is dead. Her cool groves have given way to acres of arid stone convents; earthquakes have cracked Arethusa’s basin, letting the sea in and the sweet water out; modern bad taste has walled her vulgarly about, and the poor old nymph can only gurgle reiterantly, “I was once a beauty; long ago, long ago!” with not the smallest hope that any tourist will believe it.

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