"Ah?" said the fisherman gravely.

The words chanted by the women ran as follows:

"Saint Peter he walked down to the sea And into the water his keys dropped he.

Then the Lord unto him did say: 'My Peter, what is it ails thee to-day?'

'Of deadly bites I bear the smart In my two feet, and my back, and my heart.'

'Peter, take of the sad thorn-tree[7]

Pounded as fine as fine may be; Take it three days for thy wound.

So shall Peter be made sound.'

Tarantula, with the painted belly, You have a daughter straitly born, Straitly is your daughter born.

One for the mountain I leave forlorn; One for the mountain, and one for the valley.

You have killed me, and I will kill you."

Meanwhile the group had stopped in front of the mound. The two men, who were provided with spades, began to dig, and Isidoro stood waiting with Giacobbe, the chanting women, and the blind man still playing on his strange instrument. Giacobbe silently watched the operations of his two friends, and Isidoro watched him, puzzled by the transformation he had undergone; he seemed, indeed, like an altogether different person; his face was inflamed, and drawn with fright, and the little eyes, which usually twinkled so shrewdly from beneath their bald brows, were dim with a childish terror of death. When they had come to the end of the chant, the women began again at the first line, the instrument continuing the accompaniment on the same monotonous key as before. It sounded like the humming of a swarm of bees in flight. Puffs of icy wind blew from the west, cutting the faces of the group gathered about the mound, like knives. The purple-blue of the sky was fading into a greenish tint, like the face of a lake when the sun has left it; and over the entire scene there hung a pall of indescribable melancholy--the dull, cold twilight, the darkening uplands, the black village, the shadowy group of people, performing a superst.i.tious rite with all the faith of heathen idolaters.[8] The two men dug with friendly zeal, throwing up spadefuls of black earth mixed with rags, egg-sh.e.l.ls, and refuse of all kinds. As it covered their feet and legs, they would mount higher, bending to their task, panting and sweating, while the women continued their chant, and the blind man his monotonous accompaniment.

A hole of sufficient depth having at last been dug, Aunt Anna-Rosa, never ceasing for an instant to emit the same shrill, mournful sounds, helped Giacobbe to remove his coat, and then, taking him by the hand, they led him to the edge of the excavation. He jumped in at a bound, and the two men, pushing him down with their hands, hastily piled on the earth, until he was buried up to the neck.

The performance that then took place was even more extraordinary. The head, looking as though it had been severed from the body and stuck in the centre of this heap of refuse, was surrounded by spa.r.s.e vegetation, which trembled in the breeze as though affrighted; while overhead hung the melancholy sky. Hardly had the two men completed their task, and stood,--the one wiping the perspiration from his forehead with his sleeve, and the other knocking off the dirt that was sticking to his hands,--when the women closed in a circle around the head, and began to dance to the sound of their own chanting voices and the instrument still played by the blind man, who stood with his sightless b.a.l.l.s and pale, impa.s.sive face turned towards the distant horizon. This continued for some time; then the dancing ceased, the circle broke, but the chanting still went on. Isidoro and the other men threw themselves on the mound, and with spades and hands, had soon disinterred Giacobbe. He was perspiring profusely when he emerged, covered with dirt, and his face and neck were purple. He said he had felt as though he would suffocate; then he shook himself and thrust first one arm and then the other into the sleeves of the coat which his sister held ready.

"Well, so you are not going to die after all, little spring bird?" said Isidoro jokingly. The other, however, made no reply; the cold wind struck his perspiring body with an icy chill, his face grew pallid, and his teeth chattered.

They walked off in the direction of Aunt Anna-Rosa's house, Isidoro, who by this time had lost all interest in his supper, accompanying them.

"Did you kill it?" he enquired of the sick man, remembering to have heard that if one kills a tarantula with his ring finger he acquires the power to cure the bite with a simple touch of the same finger.

"No," said Giacobbe; and then, while the weird chanting still continued, he gave an account of his misfortune.

"I was asleep; suddenly I felt something like the sting of a wasp. I woke up all in a perspiration. Ah, it had stung me! It had stung me! The horrible tarantula! I saw it as plain as I see you, but it was some distance off, on the wall. Ah, the devil take you, accursed creature! So I came right home. Do you know, I am afraid to die; I've been afraid for ever so long."

"But we all have to die some time, whenever the hour comes," said Isidoro seriously.

"Yes, that is true; we all have to some time," agreed one of the men; "but that is poor consolation for Giacobbe Dejas."

"My legs feel as though they had been broken," he groaned. "And oh, my spine! it is just as though some one had struck it with an axe! I am going to die; I know I am going to die----"

As they pa.s.sed along, the people came out of their houses to watch them go by, but it was like a funeral procession; no one spoke, nor did any one follow them. Giacobbe's eyes grew dim, and presently he stumbled and clutched hold of Isidoro for support.

The women were moving along on a trot, like a herd of colts; their voices rose, fell, rose again, and seemed to die away into the chill night air, overpowered at last by the even, strident notes of the cithern, like the gasps of some wounded animal left to die alone in the forest.

At last they reached the little widow's house. A fire was burning in the slate-stone fireplace in the centre of the kitchen, laid on a little heap of live coals which had just been taken out of the oven. This last, a huge, round affair having a hole in the top to allow the smoke to escape, occupied one corner, its square door being quite large enough to allow of the pa.s.sage of a man's body. Into its still hot interior Giacobbe accordingly now crept, the soles of his heavy shoes appearing in the opening, their worn nails shining in the firelight.

Placing themselves around the oven and the fireplace, the women continued their exorcism with renewed vigour, the red and purple lights from the fire falling upon their white blouses and yellow bodices. Aunt Anna-Rosa's round, open mouth looked like a black hole in the middle of her pink, shining face. The blind man, conscious of the fire, felt his way towards it little by little, though without ceasing to play.

Reaching the edge of the fireplace, he put one of his bare feet upon the hot stone. "Zs-s----" whispered Uncle Isidoro warningly. "Look out, boy, or you'll have a surprise."

The words were not out of his mouth when the youth gave a sudden bound backwards, shaking his burned foot in the air. For a moment he stopped playing, but the women never faltered. Standing there, erect and immovable around the huge oven, they might have been intoning a funeral dirge over some prehistoric sepulchre.

"He is coming out!" cried Aunt Anna-Rosa suddenly, and Giacobbe's great feet could be seen issuing from the oven. At the same instant the house-door was thrown violently open, and the black-robed figure of Priest Elias appeared. On hearing what had occurred he had at once hastened to the house, hoping to arrive in time at least to prevent the ordeal of the oven. He was flushed and breathless, and his eyes flashed.

On catching sight of him one of the women gave a scream and others stopped chanting, while the rest motioned to them to continue. Giacobbe, meanwhile, had got out of the oven.

"Be quiet!" commanded the priest, panting. "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No?"

They all became silent.

"Go," he said, opening the door and holding it with one hand, while with the other he almost pushed the women out. When the last had gone he became aware for the first time of the presence of Isidoro, and his face fell. "You too?" he said reproachfully. "Extraordinary, most extraordinary! Don't you see what you have done among you to that poor man?" Then changing his tone, "Quick," he said, "go at once for the doctor as fast as you can. And as for you," turning to Giacobbe, "get to bed at once."

The sick man asked for nothing better; he was burning with fever, his head was shaking, and he could hardly see. Isidoro went off in search of the doctor, somewhat mortified and yet, in spite of his usually hard common sense, his intelligence, and his deeply religious nature, quite unable to see what harm there could be in trying to cure a tarantula sting with the rites, chants, and incantations employed by one's forebears from the days when giants inhabited the _Nuraghes_.

The women had scattered into groups along the street and were discussing the occurrence, some of them a little ashamed, while others were inclined to blame the priest. One irrepressible young girl was beating her hands in time and singing the lament which should have been chanted in chorus around Giacobbe's bed had not the priest's arrival prevented:

"'Oh, mother of the spider!

A stroke has fallen on me.'"

Some of the women would have stopped Isidoro, but he strode quickly on, buried in thought. At last they all dispersed, and the cold, still evening settled down on the little widow's house, while overhead the stars looked like golden eyes veiled in tears.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] _Ispana trista_ or _santa_, from which, according to tradition, the crown of thorns was made. The people use the leaves of this tree for medicinal purposes.

[8] The custom of burying a person bitten by a tarantula in a dunghill, and putting him in an oven, is not so unreasonable as it at first appears, the effect of the poison being neutralised if the sufferer can be made to perspire freely; while the sickening odours of the dunghill induce nausea, also supposed to be very beneficial. Now, however, the people completely ignoring these practical results, the ceremony has come to be an act of pure superst.i.tion. The account given above describes such scenes as they have actually been known to occur.

CHAPTER XIV

The room where Giacobbe lay was extremely lofty, and so large that the oil light did not penetrate the corners. The furniture appeared to have been built expressly with a view to its ample proportions; a huge, red, wooden wardrobe which stood against the end wall, reaching clear to the ceiling. The bed, the lower part of which was draped with yellow curtains, was as high and ma.s.sive as a mountain. Seen thus, in the dim, flickering light, with its black corners and great lofty white ceiling like a cloudy sky, the room had a mysterious, uncanny look. Little Aunt Anna-Rosa seemed almost in danger of losing her way as she moved about among the bulky furniture, and her shoulders hardly reached above 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 h.e.l.l, perhaps, was a huge heated oven where the d.a.m.ned 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?"