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

“My soul!” moaned the woman, “he must be ill as well.”

As well! Then some one else was ill! Who, he wondered. Perhaps Giovanna. He listened intently, still keeping his face covered.

“He has no fire and no light!” she muttered. “What does it all mean? Wait, I’ll strike a light. Where are my matches?”

The pale, blue flame of a sulphur match shot up for a moment, and then suddenly died away.

Costantino could see nothing, but he heard Aunt Bachissia stumbling her way towards him, moaning: “Costantino, Costantino!”

A wave of anger swept over him; he tried to cry out, to rise and fling himself upon her, choke her⁠—but he was powerless. A cold sweat broke out all over him, and he knew that if he attempted so much as to speak, he would burst into tears. How hatefully weak he was!

Aunt Bachissia struck another match, and began searching for a light of some sort, but all she could find was a rude iron lamp hanging on a nail, with neither wick nor oil. Then she groped her way to the fireplace, and, stooping down, held out her hand with the lighted match between her fingers. There were the saucepan full of water, the heap of wet ashes, the soaked hearthstone, and beyond, half in the circle of light, the figure of Costantino extended motionless on the pallet. The match flared up and then went out, and all became again perfectly dark and silent.

For a moment Aunt Bachissia did not stir; she hardly seemed to breathe; then a long, choking sob broke from her.

Of what had she been thinking in that moment of silence and darkness? Did that vision of Costantino lying apparently dead before her awaken a sudden, agonising sense of what she had done; of her iniquitous responsibility in the ruin that had been wrought in Giovanna’s and Costantino’s lives, and in the lives of every one concerned in the melancholy drama? Throwing herself on the floor beside the pallet, she passed her hands tremblingly over his body and face, sobbing in the darkness and silence: “Costantino, Costantino! are you alive? Answer me⁠—Yes,” she murmured presently, “he is alive, but ill, ill⁠—you are ill, aren’t you?” she went on coaxingly. “Is it a wound? Ah, God! If you only knew what terrible things have happened! Giovanna sent me; she was frightened, you know; she thought you might have been hurt, that some one might have been lying in wait for you; she’s more dead than alive herself⁠—Costantino⁠—!”

At last Costantino gave a moan; something hard in his breast seemed to melt; he was moved⁠—affected. Then he was not forgotten, after all; Giovanna had been anxious; she had sent to find out about him; she was frightened, unhappy. Then, in his changed mood, Aunt Bachissia’s words of a moment before came back to him with fresh meaning. “He is ill as well,” she had said. Who was this other person who was ill? Again he thought of Giovanna, and his heart sank.

“Is it a wound?” she repeated.

“Yes,” murmured Costantino.

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know; some one hired by Aunt Martina Dejas.”

“Ah!” cried Aunt Bachissia, her voice thick with anger; then, in a changed tone, she said: “The saying goes that God does not pay on Saturday⁠—well⁠—Brontu Dejas is dying⁠—poor wretch!”

Costantino felt as though an electric shock had gone through him; he started to his feet, swayed, and fell back on his knees. In the darkness his hands encountered those of Aunt Bachissia, and she felt that they were scorching hot and trembling.

“Costantino! my soul!” she cried, alarmed lest in his weak and exhausted condition the shock of her news had been too great for him. “Costantino, what is it? You are shaking all over like a little kid! Yes; Brontu is very ill. He came back yesterday; it was a holiday, you know, and he came home so drunk that he was like something crazy. It seems that he has been drinking all the time lately, even up at the sheepfolds. So then yesterday when he came in he was horribly drunk, and he began quarrelling with his mother and Giovanna, and tried to beat them; they were so frightened that they ran up and locked themselves in their rooms. Brontu stayed down in the kitchen, and he must have stretched himself out alongside the fire. After some time they heard him crying out, but they thought it was just some drunken foolishness, and did not go down to see what it was. After a while, though, when he had become quiet, Aunt Martina went and found him lying there unconscious and frightfully burned. He had evidently fallen asleep and had put his legs right over the fire,14 and then his clothing caught. There was an empty brandy-bottle lying beside him. He hasn’t come to since, and the doctor says he can’t live through the night. Poor Brontu; he wasn’t bad; he was weak, but not really bad⁠—Costantino! Costantino!⁠—what on earth is it? What are you doing?” For in the darkness Aunt Bachissia, who had told her story with moans and sighs of sympathy, partly for Costantino, partly for Brontu, heard what she at first took to be a burst of insane laughter. The young man’s hands became rigid, his limbs contracted, and for one wild moment she thought he had lost his reason. Then the truth broke upon her; he was crying, weeping bitterly, half from weakness and reaction, but half, too, from horror and sympathy at the awful ending of a man whom, but a short while before, he had thought that he hated so much that he was in danger of killing him.

That same night Brontu died, and some time later Giovanna and Costantino were reunited. Old Aunt Martina, absorbed in her grief and completely shattered by it, like an oak-tree that has been struck by lightning, offered no objection, but neither did she forgive the young people, and she demanded that the little Mariedda should