After the Divorce, Grazia Deledda [the giving tree read aloud .txt] 📗

with light, drifting clouds, and the thickets, bushes, stubble, every spear of grass, sparkled with dew in the slanting rays of the sun. Once more the birds bustled in and out among the bushes, burst into song, rushed together in little groups, or poised gracefully in the misty air. Now and then the chorus of chirps and twitters would swell into something so acute and piercing that it was almost like the patter of metal raindrops: sometimes a shrill whistle, or the strident note of a crow, would break into this silvery harmony; then all would die away, swallowed up in the vast silence of the uplands.

Giacobbe came out of the hut yawning and stretching. He yawned so violently that his jaws cracked, and his smooth-shaven face folded into innumerable tiny wrinkles about the round, open mouth; and his little, oblique eyes, yellow in the sunlight, watered like those of a dog. “Well,” he thought, pressing both hands to his stomach, “I have cramps here. What did I do last evening?”

He threw open the folds; a ram with curved horns came out, snuffing the ground, closely followed by a yellowish bunch of sheep, all trying to tread in his tracks, and all likewise snuffing the ground; others came, and still others; the folds were empty; still Giacobbe stood close to the enclosure⁠—motionless⁠—buried in thought.

“Yes, last evening I had nothing to eat. I drank the little master’s brandy, and then I had dreams. Yes, yes, that was it⁠—Costantino⁠—and the dog⁠—and my sister Anna-Rosa. Well, damn him! Why didn’t he come back, the little toad? I got drunk, just like a beast. Yes,”⁠—he moralised, walking towards the hut⁠—“a drunken man is like a beast; he does not know what he is doing, and brays out everything in his mind. A dangerous thing that, Giacobbe Dejas, you bald-pate! Get that well into your head; it’s dangerous. No, no, I’ll never get drunk again; may the Lord punish me if I do.”

A little later the young master returned. Giacobbe, intent and smiling, watched him closely. “Ah!” said he, stepping forward solicitously, “you look like a man who has had a whipping; what has happened?”

“Nothing. Get away.”

But nothing was further from the other’s intention. He began to circle around his master, fawning upon him and making little bounds towards him like a dog, teasing persistently to be told what had occurred. At last Brontu, who really longed to unburden himself, yielded.

Well then, yes; Giovanna had, in fact, driven him away like an importunate beggar. She had asked him if he had forgotten that she had a son who would one day spit at her, and demand to know how it was that she had two husbands.

“My soul, I knew it!” cried Giacobbe, leaping in the air for joy.

“What did you know?”

“Why, that she had a son.”

“Well, I knew that myself. She chased me out of the house; that’s the whole of it. I could hear the two⁠—the mother and daughter⁠—from the road, quarrelling furiously together.” And then Brontu went to look for his brandy-flask.

Giacobbe was so overjoyed that he could have laughed aloud for glee.

“Look here!” he called. “The spirits came last night and drank your brandy. Ha! ha! ha! but there must be some left; I am sure there is still some left.”

Brontu drank eagerly without making any reply. Then he flung the flask angrily at the herdsman, who caught it in the air; and Brontu, having drunk for sorrow, Giacobbe proceeded to drink for joy.

VIII

One morning, about three years after his conviction, Costantino awoke in a bad humour. The heat was oppressive, and the air of the cell was heavy and sickening. One of the prisoners was snoring and puffing like a kettle letting off steam.

Costantino had slept with Giovanna’s last letter beneath his head, and a sad little letter it was; short, and depressing in the extreme. She told of her and her mother’s dire poverty, and of the boy’s serious illness. It never occurred to Costantino to reflect how cruel it was to write to him in this strain; he wanted to know the truth about them, however bad it might be, and he felt that to share all Giovanna’s sorrows and to agonise over his inability to help her was a part of his duty. A barren duty⁠—alas!⁠—merely an increase of his misery.

He had become quite deft at his trade of shoemaking, and worked rapidly, but he could make very little money; all that was left, however, after the King of Spades had been paid for his supposed good offices he sent to Giovanna.

“Upon my word,” said the ex-marshal, “you are a goose. Spend it on yourself. They ought to be sending you money.”

“But they are so poor.”

“Poor! Not they; haven’t they got the sun? What more do they want?” said the other. “If you would only eat and drink more it would be a real charity. You are nothing but a stick, my dear fellow. Look at me! I’m getting fat. My bacon may be all rind, but, all the same, I’m getting fat.”

He was, in fact, as round as a ball, but his flesh hung down in yellow, flabby rolls. Costantino, on the other hand, had fallen away, his eyes were big and cavernous, and his hands transparent.

The sun! he thought to himself bitterly. Yes, they have indeed got that; but what good is the sun even, when one has nothing to eat, and is suffering every kind of privation? He was, no doubt, a great simpleton, but as he thought of these things, he sometimes cried like a child. Yet all the time he never gave up hope. The years passed by; day followed day slowly, regularly, uneventfully, like drops of water in a grotto, dripping from stone to stone. Almost every convict in the prison, especially those whose terms were not very long, hoped for a remission, and kept close count of the days already elapsed and of those yet to come.