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

Giovanna got up, lighted a candle, and went into the adjoining room, Brontu’s ardent gaze following her. Aunt Martina sat waiting for her present. Several moments passed and Giovanna did not return.

“What is she doing in there?” asked Brontu.

“Who knows?”

Another minute elapsed.

“I am going to see,” he said, jumping up and walking towards the door.

“No, no; what are you thinking of?” said Aunt Bachissia, but so faint-heartedly that Aunt Martina⁠—scandalised⁠—called to her son to come back with energetic: “Zss⁠—zss⁠—”

Brontu, however, paying no attention, tiptoed to the door. Giovanna was standing before an open drawer, rereading a letter which she had found slipped underneath the door when they got home that day. It was a heartbroken appeal from Costantino. In his round, unformed characters he implored her for the last time not to do this thing that she was about to do. He reminded her of the far-away time of their early love; he promised to come back; he assured her solemnly of his innocence. “If you have no pity for me,” the letter concluded, “at least have some for yourself, for your own soul. Remember the mortal sin: remember eternity!”

Ah, the same words that Aunt Porredda had used; the very same, the very same! Uncle Isidoro must have slipped the letter in while they were away. How long it had been since they had had any direct news of the prisoner! The tears rushed to her eyes, but what moved her were probably more the memories of the past than any thoughts of that eternal future.

Suddenly she heard the door being pushed softly open, and someone stealing in behind her. Leaning quickly over, she began to rummage in the drawer, with trembling hands and misty eyes.

Brontu stood directly behind her with outstretched arms, he clasped her around the shoulders, and she, pretending to be frightened, began to tremble.

“What is it? What are you doing?” he asked in a low, broken voice.

“Oh! I am looking⁠—looking⁠—the apron we got for your mother⁠—I don’t know what I have done with it. Let me go, let me go,” she said, trying to free herself from his embrace. Close to her face she saw his white teeth gleaming between the full, smiling lips, as red and lustrous as two ripe cherries; then, suddenly, she felt his hand behind her head, and those two burning lips were pressed close to her own in a kiss that was like the blast from a fiery furnace.

“Ah!” she panted. “We have forgotten eternity!”

A little later she was seated once more in her place by the fire, laughing with all the abandonment of a happy child; while Brontu regarded her with the same look in his eyes that he had when he had been drinking.

The winter passed by. Costantino’s friends never abandoned their efforts to break off the accursed match, but in vain. The Dejases and Eras were like people bewitched, and remained deaf alike to prayers, threats, and innuendoes. The syndic, even the syndic, a pale and haughty personage who resembled Napoleon I, was against this “devil’s marriage,” and when Brontu and Giovanna came to him in great secrecy to have it published, he treated them with the utmost contempt, spitting on the ground all the time they were there.

When the question of the divorce had first been mooted, people talked and wondered, but nothing more; then, when it was said that Brontu and Giovanna were in love with each other, there was general disapproval, yet at bottom the community was not ill-pleased to have such a fruitful theme to gossip about; but when there was talk of a marriage!⁠—then every one said it was simply and purely an impossibility. The neighbours laughed, and rather hoped that Brontu was amusing himself at the expense of the Eras. After that, had the young people merely lived together in “mortal sin” probably nothing more would have been said, and people would have ceased to laugh and thought no more about it. It would not have been the first time that such a thing had occurred, nor was it likely to be the last; and Giovanna could cite her youth and poverty by way of excuse. But⁠—marry a woman who already had a husband! marry her! That was a thing not to be stood! What would you have? People are made that way. And then the disgrace and scandal of it! Why, it was a sin, a horrible sin, and it was feared that God might punish the entire community for the fault of these two. There were even threats of making a demonstration on the marriage day⁠—whistling, stone-throwing, and beating the bride and bridegroom. When rumours of these things reached their ears Brontu became very angry. Aunt Bachissia said: “Leave them to me!” and Aunt Martina threw up her head with the movement of a warhorse when it scents the smell of the first volley.

Ah! she would rather like to fight and⁠—win. She was beginning to feel old, she was tired of work, and well pleased at the prospect of having a strong servant in the house without wages. Moreover, she liked Giovanna, and Brontu wanted her, and so people might burst with envy if they chose.

On the evening of the day when the marriage was published, Uncle Isidoro Pane was working hard in his miserable hut by the brilliant, ruddy light of a large fire. This was the one luxury which Uncle Isidoro was able to allow himself⁠—a good fire⁠—since he collected his wood from the fields, the riverbanks, and the forests. During the winter his chief occupation was weaving cord out of horsehair; he knew, in fact, how to do a little of almost everything⁠—spin, sew, cook (when there was anything to cook), patch shoes⁠—and yet he had never been able to escape from dire poverty.

Suddenly the door was thrown open; there was a momentary glimpse of the March sky⁠—not stormy, but overcast⁠—and Giacobbe Dejas silently seated himself beside the fire.

The fisherman’s