Once she had spoken of this last imagination to Gaspare, and had seen
his face suddenly change and look excited, vivid, and then sad. She
had asked him why he looked like that, and, after a moment of
hesitation, he had told her how, long ago, before she was born, his
Padrone had read to him such a tale as they lay together upon a
mountain side in Sicily. Vere had eagerly questioned him, and he,
speaking with vehemence in the heat of his recollection, had brought
before her a picture of that scene in his simple life; had shown her
how he lay, and how the Padrone lay, he listening, the Padrone, book
in hand, reading about the "mago africano." He had even told Vere of
their conversation afterwards, and how he had said that he would
always be free, that he would never be "stoppered up," like the "mago
africano." And when she had wondered at his memory growing still more
excited he had told her many other things of which his Padrone and he
had talked together, and had made her feel the life of the past on
Monte Amato as no cultured person, she believed, could ever have made
her feel it.
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