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

lang="it" xml:lang="it">Su Preideru, as they called the chaplain between themselves, and what he had said to him.

The ex-marshal was leaning against the damp and dingy wall, softly cursing some individual unknown, in the Sardinian dialect.

“Balla chi trapasset sa busacca, brasciai!”7 he murmured, as Costantino approached. “What is it? Who?”

“Oh! nothing.”

“You want to know if I have seen the priest? Yes, and he scolded me like a child. What a child it is! A little pig, really and truly, a little pig! But the lard is yellow and rancid. Do you know, I read somewhere that in Russia they think very highly of rancid lard?”

“But tell me what he said.”

“What he said? Let me see, what did he say? I don’t remember; oh! yes, he told me that I had imagined all that⁠—what we have been talking about. Yes, that was it, my dear fellow; I have, it seems, a vivid imagination, and your wife will never wrong you in the world! Never, as surely as we are standing here!”

Costantino looked at him eagerly. No, the man was not chaffing; he was perfectly serious, and evidently meant what he said.

“Ah, ha! he scolded you, did he? Good enough!” he cried.

“This wall,” said the King of Spades, straightening himself, and regarding his hands, which were red and scarred from contact with the rough stones, “this wall looks as though it were made of chocolate; it is warm and damp. Ah! if it only were, there would be two advantages: we could eat it, and then escape! Have you ever eaten any chocolate?”

“Why, of course, and Giovanna too; she is very fond of it, but it is fearfully dear. Well, and what then?”

“What then?” exclaimed the other impatiently. “My dear fellow, you drive me crazy. Oh! she will wait for you twenty-three years⁠—never fear!”

“No, not that long; I shall be out of here long before that,” replied Costantino confidently. “Then too,” he added with a gleam of humour, “there is the pardon; you were to see the King, you know, about a pardon for me.”

“Precisely,” said the other. “I was to see the King. You don’t believe me? I shall, however, go to him at once; he receives every official, and what am I if not an official? He is fond of the army; he is young; I hear he is getting fat. Ah! not as fat as I, though”⁠—and he laughed.

From then on, whenever Costantino tried to bring the conversation around to the old subject, the other contrived to head him off; but at all events he was no longer tormented.

One day about this time, Costantino was informed that five francs had been paid in to his account. “He did it!” he exclaimed. “I am sure it was the priest. What a kind man he is! But I don’t need it; no, indeed, I don’t need the money at all.”

“You stupid,” said the King of Spades. “Take it; if you don’t he will be offended. ‘I don’t want it!’ A pretty way that to acknowledge a present!”

“But I should be ashamed to take it. And what could I do with it, anyhow?”

“Why, eat, drink⁠—you have need to, I can assure you. You would like to send it home, I suppose? The devil take you! If you do such an idiotic thing as that I will spit in your face! Why, see here, she doesn’t even write to you any more; she⁠—”

“What is there for her to write about?” said Costantino, trying vainly to think of some excuse. “Besides,” he added, “she will be working now, the winter is nearly over.”

“Yes, it is nearly over, and then the spring will come,” said the other in a tone that had almost a menace in it. “It will come.”

“Why, of course, it will come!”

“When does the warm weather begin with you? We have it in March.”

“Oh, with us, not till June. But then it is so beautiful. The grass grows⁠—oh! as tall as that, and they clip the sheep, and the bees are making honey!”

“An idyl, truly! You don’t know what an idyl is? Well, I’ll tell you. It is⁠—sometimes it is⁠—infidelity. Wait till June. How long is it since you’ve been to confession?”

“Oh, I’ve not been for a fortnight.”

“A long time, I declare! What a good Christian you are, my friend. For my own part, I’ve never been at all. My conscience is as clear and unsullied as a mirror. Now there,” said he, pointing to the pasty-faced student, whose hair was so white that it looked as though it had been powdered, “there is one who had better confess without delay; he is knocking now at the door of eternity.”

Sure enough, only a few days later the student was removed to the infirmary, and at the end of March he died.

Bellini, the man whose mistress was dying of the same disease, asked after him anxiously every day, and when he died cried for hours in a weak, childish fashion. It was not from any grief he felt at parting from the sick man, but at the thought of what might happen to his mistress. His grief subsided at length, and then, as he no longer had the reminder of the student before his eyes, he gradually came to think less and less about his own sorrow.

The death of the student had a totally different effect upon the King of Spades; he became quite melancholy, took to philosophising about life and death, and would engage in lengthy discussions with the Delegate, who rolled his eyes about and expounded his views in a deep bass voice.

When talking with Costantino, the ex-marshal was apt to drop into rather homesick reminiscences about the distant land of their birth.

“Yes,” said he one day, “I was once quite close to your home, or its neighbourhood. I can’t tell you precisely, but I know there was a wood, all arbute, and cork-trees, and rock-roses; it looked as though there had been a rain