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

before I had even married her, and⁠—that you irritate me beyond measure. Here is your wife in an altogether different situation; she is young and poor, and has blood in her veins⁠—she has blood in her veins, I suppose, hasn’t she? Well, if this Dejas fellow wants her to marry him, I say she would be a great goose not to do it.”

“Dejas! Why⁠—what⁠—who told you?” stammered Costantino in amazement.

“Oh! didn’t you tell me yourself?”

Costantino thought he most certainly had not, but then his mind had been in such a confused state for some time back⁠—but merciful God! Dear San Costantino! How had he ever come to do such a thing? What had made him utter that man’s name?

“Well, then,” he burst out; “yes, I am afraid of him! He courted her before we were married; he wanted her himself. Ugh! he’s a drunkard, and as weak as mud. No, no; she could never do anything so horrible! For pity’s sake, let’s talk of something else.”

So they did talk of something else, still in the Sardinian dialect, so as not to be understood by the other prisoners. They talked of the consumptive student, who was drawing visibly nearer to the door of the other world; of Arnolfo Bellini, who began to sob whenever his eye fell on the dying man; of the Delegate, whom they could see pacing back and forth by the fountain; of the magpie, who was growing feeble, and losing all his feathers, from old age.

Gossip, envy, hatred, identical interests, cowardice, raillery, fear⁠—such were the bonds which united or kept apart the different members of the little community⁠—prisoners, guards, and officials alike. To Costantino they were all equally objects of indifference; he, the Delegate, and the student seeming to live apart in a little world of their own, with the ex-marshal⁠—the pivot about which every detail in the prisoners’ lives seemed to revolve; he, meanwhile, appearing to be as superior as he was necessary to them all.

Many envied the friendly intercourse existing between Costantino and him, and frequently the former would be implored to use his influence with the King of Spades to procure some favour. He merely shrugged his shoulders on such occasions, though, when they offered him money, as sometimes happened, he was sorely tempted to take it, so intense was his longing to be able to support Giovanna; he had no other idea. The King of Spades, with his eternal insinuations that cut like knives, was becoming more and more hateful to him. One day they actually quarrelled, and for some time did not speak to one another. But Costantino could not stand it; he felt as though he should suffocate, as though he had been shut up in a cell, and cut off from all communication with the outer world. He soon apologised and begged for a reconciliation.

The autumn drew on; the air grew cool, and the sky became a delicate, velvety blue, distant, unreal, dreamlike. Sometimes the breeze would waft a perfume of ripening fruit into the prison enclosure.

Costantino was less acutely miserable, but he had sunk into a state of settled melancholy; he grew thinner and thinner, and deprived himself continually of things which he stood in need of in order to have more money to send to Giovanna. The other prisoners all received presents of some sort from their friends and relatives; he alone denied himself even the little pittance he was able to earn.

“I don’t understand it,” said the ex-marshal to him one day. “Your complexion is pink and you look younger than you did when you came, and yet you are almost transparent.”

Sometimes Costantino would flush violently, and the blood would rush to his head; then he would be utterly prostrated, and in his weakness he would suffer more from homesickness than he had done even in the first year of his imprisonment. He would see before him the boundless sweep of the uplands, sleeping in the autumnal haze, glowing and yellow beneath the crystal sky; he would get the breath of the vineyards, the scent of such late-maturing fruits as flourish in that land of flocks and beehives; images would rise before him of the foxes and hares, the wild birds and cattle, the hedges thick with blackberries, all the hundred and one natural objects which had constituted the sole element of enjoyment in his otherwise miserable and barren childhood. Then his thoughts would turn to his uncle, the cruel old Vulture who, having tormented him in his lifetime, seemed able to torment him still. An impulse of bitter hatred would rise up in his heart, only to be repressed, on remembering that he was dead, and succeeded by a prayer for the murdered man’s soul.

There was no one else whom he was even tempted to hate, no one at all; not even the real murderer, or Brontu Dejas⁠—who, in fact, had as yet given him no cause for complaint⁠—or the King of Spades, though he subjected him to this continual martyrdom. Indeed, it hardly seemed as though he had sufficient strength effectually to hate anyone. A feeling of gentle melancholy pervaded him, a sort of numbness like that of a person about to fall asleep; his only sensation was one of tender, pitiful, passionless love; as tranquil, as mild and all-embracing as an autumnal sky, and having for its one object⁠—Giovanna. She was a part of the love itself, and waking or sleeping, he thought only of her, only of her, only of her.

As time went on this love became more and more engrossing; she came to represent the far-off home, family, liberty⁠—life itself. All, all, was comprehended in her: hope, faith, endurance, peace, the very love of life! She became his soul.

When the inexorable King of Spades threatened him with that horrible thing, he did not know it, but it was the death of his soul that he was holding over him. For the certainty of not losing Giovanna, Costantino would gladly have agreed to