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

the counterpane when she came and stood beside the bed where her brother lay in the uneasy grip of the fever.

He seemed to himself still to be in the mound, only the two friends who had interred him, kept on piling the earth higher and higher about his head. He was suffocating, the torture was almost unendurable, and yet he dared not stop them, fearing the cure might not be efficacious unless his head were buried as well; and his head seemed to be Priest Elias, on whose breast the tail of a tarantula could be seen wriggling about.

In his dream Giacobbe was conscious of an almost insane fear of death. It had occurred to him when he was in the oven that hell, perhaps, was a huge heated oven where the damned would sprawl throughout eternity.

Now, in his dream, precisely the same feeling was reproduced. He was in the mound, the earth reached higher and higher about him; he shut his mouth tight to keep from swallowing it, and there, opposite him, he suddenly saw a lighted furnace. It was the infernal regions. Such a feeling of terror seized upon him that even in his dream, in his feverish semi-consciousness, he was aware of an overmastering desire to prove to himself that this horror was an illusion of the senses. In the effort he awoke, but even awake he had something of the same sensation that stones, were they endowed with feeling, would have in a burning building, growing all the while hotter and hotter, and yet unable to stir an inch. Giacobbe felt like a burning brick himself, or a piece of live coal, a part of the infernal fires; and waking, his terror was even more acute than in his dream. He emitted a groan and the noise gave him comfort; it had an earthly, human sound, breaking in on all those diabolical sensations.

Isidoro, who had stayed in case the little widow might have need of him, heard the groan from where he sat dozing in the adjoining kitchen, and bounded to his feet in terror; he thought that Giacobbe had died. Approaching the bed, he found the sick man lying flat on his back, his face drawn, his eyes, which looked almost black, wet with tears.

“Are you awake?” asked the fisherman in a low voice. “Do you want anything?” He felt his pulse, and even laid his ear against it as though trying to hear the throbs.

At the same instant Giacobbe observed the round little visage of his sister appear above the other edge of the bed, enveloped in the folds of a large white kerchief.

Then a curious thing happened: the face of the sick man contracted, his mouth opened, his eyes closed, and a deep sob broke the stillness of the room. Instantly memory carried the woman back to a far-distant day when her brother, a tiny lad, had sat weeping on this very bed; and opening her arms just as she had done then, she took him to her kind bosom, murmuring words of loving remonstrance.

“In the name of the holy souls in purgatory! What is it? What is the matter, little brother?”

Isidoro, quite at a loss, continued to feel his friend’s pulse, trying now one vein, and now another, and muttering to himself: “How strange, how very strange!”

“Well, what is it? Won’t you tell me what it is? You, Isidoro Pane, what happened?”

“Why, nothing happened. He called out, and that was all. May be he had a bad dream. We’ll give him a drink of water. There now, here’s a little fresh water. That’s it, he wants it⁠—see how he is drinking! You were thirsty, weren’t you? It’s the fever, you see; that’s what ails him!”

Giacobbe sat up in bed, and after drinking the water calmed down. He had on an old white knitted cotton shirt, through which could be seen the outline of his small wiry body, the thick growth of black hair on his chest contrasting oddly with the perfectly smooth face and bald head above it. He remained in a sitting posture, leaning forward, and thoughtfully passing his well hand up and down the injured arm.

“Yes,” he remarked suddenly in the panting, querulous tone of a person with fever. “Yes; I had a bad dream. Whew! but it was hot! Holy San Costantino, how hot it was! I was dreaming of hell.”

“Dear me, dear me, what an idea!” said his sister reprovingly; and Uncle Isidoro said playfully: “And so it was hot, little spring bird?”

The sick man seemed to be annoyed.

“Don’t joke, and don’t say ‘little spring bird.’ I don’t like it; I shall never say it again, and I shall never laugh at anyone again.

“Listen to me,” he said, bending forward and continuing to rub his arm. “Hell is a dreadful place. I’ve got to die, and I’ve got to tell you something first. Now listen, but don’t get frightened, Anna-Rosa, because I am certainly going to die; and Uncle Isidoro, you know it already, so I can tell you. Well, this is it. It was I who killed Basile Ledda.”

Aunt Anna-Rosa’s eyes and mouth flew wide open; she leaned against the side of the bed, and began to shake convulsively.

“I knew it already?” exclaimed Isidoro. “Why, I knew nothing at all!”

Giacobbe raised a terrified face, and began to tremble as well.

“Don’t have me arrested,” he implored. “I’m going to die, anyhow; you can tell them then. I thought you knew. What is the matter, Anna-Ro? Don’t be frightened; don’t have me arrested.”

“It’s not that,” she said, raising herself. Her first sensation of having received a blow on the head was passing away, but now, in its place, there came a singular feeling of some change that was taking place within her; her own spirit seemed to have fled in dismay, and in its place had come something that regarded the world, life, heaven, earth⁠—God himself⁠—from a totally different standpoint; and everything viewed in the light of this new