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

and exclaim: “Ah⁠—ah⁠—ah!” rubbing his chest up and down to express the delicious sensation caused by the wine as it flowed down his throat. Soon he began to feel more cheerful.

“She may go to the devil⁠—or to hell, if she wants to!” he exclaimed, thinking of Mattea and her sudden disappearance. But all the while he knew perfectly well that he was forcing himself to dwell despitefully upon her, in order to keep from thinking of the other. At last he went out, and, stretching himself upon the stone bench, allowed his thoughts to take their own course.

“She is alone,” he reflected. “Well, what do I care? I loathe her and I wouldn’t go there, not if she were to give me a chest full of gold! What should I do with gold, anyway?” He put the question to himself in profound dejection, but immediately began to hum a gay little song, having got into a way of trying to fool himself as well as other people:

“ ‘Little heart, dear heart,
I await thee day by day,
But, when thou seest me,
Hovereth near the bird of prey.’ ”

For a time the sound of his own voice⁠—low, monotonous⁠—arrested his attention; then his thoughts once more asserted themselves.

“If I were to go there⁠—well, what would happen? Sin, perhaps. But am I not her husband? I have not the remotest idea of going there, though; I should think not! Uncle Isidoro makes me laugh⁠—old idiot! ‘Go away, go away,’ (imitating Uncle Isidoro’s voice), ‘if you don’t go away, something dreadful is sure to happen! Brontu Dejas will kill you, or have you arrested!’ Well, if he does, what then?”

He began to sing again, the sharp rustle of the fig-leaves, almost like the clash of metal blades, accompanying the subdued murmur of his voice:

“ ‘When you see life
Bloom in January,
When you see a swineherd
Making cheese of pork⁠—’ ”

He shifted his position and his heavy eyelids closed, his head, supported on one hand, rolling from side to side.

“Well, what then?” he repeated, then opened his eyes, as though startled by the sound of his own voice. They closed again presently, and he went on talking to himself:

“No; I would never have her again for my wife. For me she is just an abandoned woman. She has been living with another man, and, as long as she has gone to live with him, she might come back and live with me, and then go and live with someone else! She’s no better than Mattea, and I spit upon them both!”

He opened his eyes and spat on the ground. At the moment he had a genuine scorn of Giovanna, and yet, at the very same time, tender, distant memories surged up in his breast. He remembered a kiss he had once given her as she lay asleep, and how she had opened her eyes with a startled look, exclaiming: “Oh, I thought it was some one else!” Well, what manner of foolishness was this for him to be thinking of now? He was a simpleton, neither more nor less than a simpleton! Moreover, how could he know, supposing for a moment that he were to go, whether Giovanna would receive him or drive him away? The man’s mind was neither trained nor developed, yet, at that moment, he was reasoning as a much more complex nature might have done. He hoped that she would not receive him; he knew that for himself there was nothing for it but to go on living and suffering; yet he felt that, should he go to her and be repulsed, at least a ray of light would penetrate the cold, dreary void that encircled him. But he wanted her, he longed for her still. From the day he had lost her his whole being had suffered like a crushed and twisted limb that still goes on living. Yet, mingled with this sense of longing there was a spiritual breath as well, the instinct of the immortal soul which never wholly dies out, even in the most degraded.

He dreamed of Giovanna an honest woman, lost forever in this world, but restored to him in eternity. Now, if she were to betray her second husband, even for the sake of her first, she would not⁠—could not⁠—be an honest woman! So thought Costantino, and yet⁠—

It was, perhaps, ten o’clock, and he had been lying for half an hour or more on the stone bench, when a mournful strain broke in upon the stillness. It was the blind man, singing and accompanying himself upon his rude instrument. His voice, clear enough, but sad and monotonous, vibrated through the night air with a sobbing suggestion of homesickness that was hardly human, as though it were the wail of a lost soul, recalling the few hours of happiness spent upon earth.

The music seemed to be a cry for light, happiness, the joy of living, all those things whose existence the blind youth half understood, but could never hope to realise⁠—which the dead have lost, and can never hope to repossess. Costantino shivered and got up; the voice and the accompaniment began to die away, growing gradually fainter and fainter, and ceasing at last altogether. He felt a great wave of agony and tenderness surge up in his breast. In the darkness, the silence, the unutterable loneliness that surrounded him, he, too, felt an overmastering longing, like the blind man’s, for light; an agonising homesickness, like the dead recalling their brief experience of life. He turned and began to walk in the direction of the village.

At first he seemed to be in a dream, although he heard beneath his feet the rustle of the dead leaves and stubble blown by the wind about Isidoro’s hut. He rubbed his eyelids and little violet-coloured electric circles seemed to flash and swim in the air. Soon though, his eyes becoming used to the darkness, he discerned clearly the light line of the road, the black cottages, the great, empty void above, where the stars hung