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

no, no! Some one else was there, and it could have been no one but Costantino. Oh, wretched creature! accursed beggar! Is this your gratitude towards those who have fed and clothed and nourished you? But never mind, we will pay you back! We will drive you out of this house with a whip, naked as when you came into it!” And thus, torn by successive impulses of hatred, pity, fury, and despair. Aunt Martina dragged through the weary night.

One significant circumstance she did recall⁠—that Costantino was said to be on good terms with Aunt Bachissia, Giovanna’s mother. Some time previously he had set to work in earnest; had rented a little shop, and was making a good deal of money by his trade of shoemaking. A repulsive thought came into the old woman’s head. What if Aunt Bachissia knew and encouraged her daughter’s intimacy with her first husband! “The old harpy detests us,” said Brontu’s mother to herself. “Perhaps Costantino makes her presents!”

Daybreak found her still wide-eyed and sleepless. Getting up, she went out to examine the wall above which rose the roofs leading to Giovanna’s window. Not a trace was to be found of any one having been on it. The dawn was exquisitely tranquil and beautiful; the village was still asleep, and the fields lay bathed in soft grey haze beneath a silver sky. Aunt Martina drew a deep breath; she felt as though she had awakened from a horrible dream; the utter peace and serenity of the early morning seemed to communicate itself to her distracted spirit. Then, on a sudden, happening to raise her eyes to Giovanna’s window, she saw the young woman watching her. Instantly the conviction flashed across her that she too had lain awake the entire night; that she too was looking now to see if any tell-tale traces remained to betray the fact that she had had a visitor, and more than that, that she now was fully aware of Aunt Martina’s suspicions. Across the space that divided them, the two women exchanged a look of mutual fear and hatred. War was declared!

The battle opened in ominous calm, each side marshalling its forces in silence and secrecy. Aunt Martina’s efforts were directed to allaying Giovanna’s suspicions in the hope that she might some day surprise her and her lover together. Giovanna, perfectly awake to her mother-in-law’s tactics, pretended not to notice anything, but at the same time proceeded with great caution in her relations with Costantino.

He had entirely altered his mode of life; he now worked regularly, and was doing very well; but underneath everything was a sense of unutterable melancholy, which he was never able wholly to throw off.

“I am doing everything I can to provoke Brontu to break with me,” said Giovanna one day. “I want him to apply for a divorce, so as to be rid of me; then I will go back to you, beloved, and nothing shall ever part us again. I will be your servant, your slave⁠—and make you forget all your past sorrows.”

But Costantino only smiled wearily. It was true that he still loved Giovanna, but it was a very different kind of love from that which she had formerly inspired in him. Now, there was more of passion, perhaps, but it did not go so deep, and he knew, though he could not tell her so, that even were she free to return to him as his wife, he could never be happy again as in the old days. She was not the woman to whom he had given his heart, but another and a very different person. One who, having been false to both husbands in succession, was now, perhaps, deceiving them simultaneously.

Often Costantino was seized with an access of rage against the entire human race, Giovanna included. He would have liked to murder some one⁠—Brontu, or Aunt Bachissia, or even Giovanna, in order to avenge himself for what he had been made to suffer. And yet, all the time, he knew himself to be quite incapable of doing anything brutal or violent, and raged and fumed the more at his own weakness. His heart seemed to have sunk into a state of torpor, and to have lost the power to enjoy acutely.

Uncle Isidoro was now constantly urging him to marry again, much as such an act would be contrary to his own principles.

“I have one wife already,” Costantino would reply. “What could I do with another? Have her betray me too? All women are exactly alike.”

Then Uncle Isidoro would sigh, and remain silent. He was in constant dread lest some new tragedy should befall. He was aware, partly from intuition and partly because Costantino himself allowed him to have an inkling of the truth, that the young man was holding secret intercourse with his former wife, and his daily fear was of some explosion. Thus, he argued to himself that if Costantino could only be induced to marry some gentle, affectionate young woman, who would bear him children, he would come in time to forget the other one, and find rest and peace. To these suggestions, however, Costantino only gave the same weary smile that had now become habitual.

“Are you afraid that I will murder some one?” he asked, divining the old man’s nervous terrors. “No, no; there is no need to feel alarmed now; matters are going too much to my taste just at present for me to do anything to disturb the current.”

The current was, however, in a fair way to be disturbed after that night on which Aunt Martina made her discovery.

On the following day Costantino went, as his frequent custom now was, to Aunt Bachissia’s cottage.

He had no liking for the old woman who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing about Giovanna’s divorce; there were even moments when the thought of strangling his ex-mother-in-law got into his blood, filling his veins with a sensation of almost voluptuous joy. But he went there, nevertheless, mainly because he took