Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/171

 the eyes of those who see what is not upon the earth—the neighbours would steal away alarmed and yet entranced, and Joconda would cross herself and think: 'All the dead that her father slew seem to cry out to her.'

It was not very often that she could be induced to take up the mandoline, or show this power to others; but song and narrative flavour the daily bread of all households of the south, like the onion, or the melon; and even in these languid, naked, fever-haunted shores there was always some knot of tired seamen, of weary women, to gather in the shade of a wall, or under the hulk of a stranded boat, and beguile the time with rispetti and recitative.

Such as these would coax her, or bribe her with some carnation flower, or some nautilus shell, to come amongst them, and conjure up, to thrill their sluggish veins, some tragedy of sea or land, some vision of love or death. So she sang of things she knew not, and in the sultry evenings, when the skies were livid and seemed hard as metal, and the sea swayed heavily under the heat like a flood of molten lead, the drought and the drouth and the shivering sickness and the parched poisonous land were all