"To the magistrate's; it's cold, though, now, and it's a long way to go; you must not go on horse-back, Anna-Rosa, do you hear? You will have to have a carriage to drive to Nuoro."

"What for?" she faltered distressedly, pretending not to understand.

"Why, to see the magistrate, of course."

She scolded him, and then went into the kitchen and wept bitterly.

"Here is your oil," she said presently, as Isidoro came out and prepared to leave. "You could not do anything but bring it, of course. When is Priest Elias coming?"

"This evening."

"Yes, he ought to; Giacobbe must confess. Time is flying, and he is very ill; last night he didn't close an eye. Ah!" she added suddenly, "he seems to me just like some wounded bird."

"Have the Dejases been here?"

"Oh, yes! They've been here, both of them, mother and son. Brontu has been here twice. Oh, they all come!" she said desperately, "but what good does it do? They can't cure him; they can't give him either life or death."

"Either one would be equally a blessing or a curse to him," said Isidoro, carefully wrapping his red handkerchief around the vial of oil.

"As they are for most of us!" said the woman.

Soon after, the doctor arrived in a shrunken overcoat, with the collar turned up. He had been drinking already, and smelled strong of spirits; his lips were white, and he puffed, and spat about, sometimes over himself. He seemed somewhat startled, however, when he saw his patient's condition.

"What the devil's the matter with you?" he demanded roughly. "Your side?

your side? You've got the devil in your side. Let's have a look." He threw back the covers, exposing Giacobbe's hairy chest; pa.s.sing his hand up and down his side, he listened with his ear close to the patient's back. "It's all nonsense," he said. "You've worked yourself up like some old woman." Then he replaced the covers carelessly, and went out. At the door, however, he turned and fixed Aunt Anna-Rosa with his eye.

"Woman," he said, "let him see the priest at once; he has pneumonia."

At dusk Giacobbe confessed; then he called his sister. "Anna-Ro," he said, "Priest Elias is going to Nuoro with you too. You must be sure to have a carriage on account of the cold."

It was, in fact, snowing then, and the big room was filled with the white reflected light.

Priest Elias looked attentively at Aunt Anna-Rosa, for whom he had an especially tender feeling on account of a fancied resemblance to his mother. The poor little black-robed figure seemed to him to have shrunken in the past few days, and now she was hanging her head in a pitiful, shamefaced way; bowed with mortification at her "little brother's" disgrace.

Instinctively the priest understood the heroic part that quivering soul had been called upon to play in this tragedy, and he breathed an inward benediction upon her.

CHAPTER XV

It was the month of May, and the wild valley of the Isalle, usually so forbidding and rugged, lay smiling in the sun, adorned with tall gra.s.s and clumps of flowering shrubs and fields of barley, which rippled in the breeze like cloths of greenish gold. It was as though some old pagan, drunk with sunlight and sweet scents, had decked himself out in branches and garlands.

The clear, liquid note of a wild bird would occasionally pierce the silence of the valley, then die away, drowned in the fragrance of the narcissuses and flowering broom, which gleamed like nuggets of molten gold on the very edges of the loftiest cliffs, as though peeping over to see what lay in the ravine below.

A spendthrift fay had pa.s.sed along, scattering flowers, colours, scents, with a reckless hand. Some meadows in the distance, pranked with ranunculuses, looked like stretches of green water reflecting a starry sky. Here and there a group of trees nodded and whispered together in the breeze. The sun had but just sunk and the west was still glowing like the cheek of a ripe peach; while in the east the mountains lay like a huge parure of precious stones set in a case of lilac satin.

Costantino Ledda, liberated only a few hours before at Nuoro, was returning to his native village on foot, descending leisurely into the valley, his small canvas pack slung on his back. Now and then he would stop and look around him curiously.

"Ha! the valley seems smaller, perhaps because I have seen the sea," he murmured.

He looked older; his face was clean-shaven and intensely white; but otherwise he had none of the tragic air which would have been appropriate under the circ.u.mstances. He was coming back in this manner,--alone and on foot,--because he had not been able to say precisely what day he would be freed; otherwise some one, relative or friend, would certainly have gone to meet him. Besides, his impatience to reach home would brook no delay. Down and down the mountain-side he went; he was almost gay, possibly because of some wine he had drunk at Nuoro, where he had also provided himself with more for the journey. As he continued to descend his legs would occasionally double up under him, but he cared little for so trifling an inconvenience as that.

"Why," he said to himself, "when I am tired I have only to lie down and go to sleep. I have plenty of bread and wine in my bag; what more could any one want? I'm as free as the birds of the air. Yes, that's true; I am free; I'm a bachelor now; that's a funny thing; once I was a married man with a wife, and now I'm a bachelor." He thought that he found this idea amusing.

Down and down, now watching the sandy path, winding between high gra.s.s on either side, now gazing at the birds to whom he had compared himself, as they flew hither and thither, at times almost skimming the ground, then darting into the bushes where they would find a roosting-place for the night. He thought of the prison magpie, and felt a sudden tightening at his heart. Yes; it was true he had been sorry, when the time came to leave that place of torment--the companions whom he disliked so heartily, the horrible, enclosing walls, the strip of sky that for all those years had seemed to overhang the prison courtyard like a metal lid.

After the death of the real culprit days and months had elapsed before Justice had completed its leisurely formalities and the innocent man could be liberated. During these months Costantino, informed of the event, had been wild with impatience, and the days had seemed like years; yet, when the moment of departure actually came, he nearly wept.

This emotion, however, which was apparently the outcome of pity and sympathy for the beings whom he was leaving behind, was, in reality, for the things he was leaving behind; for all those inanimate objects that had engulfed and swallowed up his life--both his past and his future. Now this sorrow was done with, everything was done with; even that horrible torture that followed Giovanna's act was all so much a thing of the past that he really fancied that he could laugh at it.

Down, and down; he reached the bottom of the valley and began to skirt the edge of the Isalle. The sunset sky was still bright, and here and there the water shone between the oleanders and rushes, or reflected the rose and yellow lights in the sky. The delicate lace umbrellas of the elder-flower, and the brilliant coral blossoms of the oleanders stood out in the clear atmosphere as though from a setting of silver.

Costantino, by this time very tired, began to think that perhaps the valley was not, after all, so small as it had seemed at first.

"I can sleep out of doors perfectly well," he thought, "but it would have been so amusing to walk up to Isidoro's door--Bang, bang--'Who's there?' 'I'--'Who's I?' 'Why, Costantino Ledda!' How astonished old Isidoro would look! Perhaps he would be singing the lauds; may be _those_ lauds, who knows? Why, let's see! _I_ wrote a set of lauds once!

How extraordinary that seems!"

He wondered over many incidents of the past as a boy will sometimes be astonished to think of things he did as a child. But the present held many surprises as well. The glory of the springtide amazed him, as did the length of time it took to cross a valley that appeared to be so small. But most of all he wondered to think that he was crossing it on his way back to his own village.

He was walking now between two fields of grain above which the slanting light threw a veil of golden haze, and its surface, rippled by the breeze, seemed stroked by an invisible hand.

He went on picturing his arrival, Isidoro having written to ask him to come straight to his house: "'Come in,' he will say, and then, 'Giacobbe Dejas is dead; it was he who did it!'--'I know that already. The devil!

Is that all you have to tell me?' 'Well, then, your wife has married some one else.' 'I know that too.' 'Then why don't you cry?' 'Why on earth should I? I have cried enough; I don't want to any more now. I've crossed the sea; I've seen the world. I'm not a boy any longer; nothing makes much difference to me any more.'" But at the very moment when he was boasting to himself of his indifference and worldly cynicism, an icy grip closed about his heart.

Oh! to be going back to find the little house, Giovanna, his child, his past!

"There is nothing left," he said aloud. "The storm has swept over it and carried everything away, everything, everything----"

He threw himself down on the edge of the field of grain in an agony of grief. It was often this way; the great tempest of sorrow had broken over him long before and seemingly pa.s.sed on; but instead of that it had only hidden itself for a time; it was there now, stealing along, keeping pace with him; for long distances he would not see its evil shape; then suddenly it would leap forth, bursting through the ground at his very feet and whirling around its victim, clutch him by the throat, beat him to the ground, suffocate him--then leave him spent, exhausted.

After a while Costantino sat up, unfastened his wallet, and drew out a dried gourd filled with wine, throwing his head back, he took a deep draught; then he put it away, and sat looking around him at the sea of grain on whose golden-green surface floated splotches of crimson poppies. Somewhat revived he presently resumed his journey, but all the eagerness and spring with which he had set out had died away. What did it matter whether he got home this day or the next, since there was no one to expect him? And so he plodded on till the first shadows of approaching night overtook him just as he reached the end of the valley.

The crickets had turned out like a tribe of mowers with their tiny silver sickles, the scent of the shrubs and flowers hung heavy in the warm air; the breeze had died away, and the birds were silent; but the black triangles of the bats circled swiftly in the luminous grey dusk.

Oh, that divine melancholy of a spring evening! Felt even by happy souls, may it not be an inherited homesickness, transmitted through all the ages? A longing for the flowers, and perfumes, and joys of that eternal, albeit earthly, paradise which our first parents lost for us forever.

Costantino tramped on and on: he had pa.s.sed long years under a brutal oppression, between infected walls, amid corrupt companions in an environment whose very air was confined, and now--he was walking in the open, treading gra.s.s and stones under foot! As he ascended the mountain from the valley below, every step brought more of the horizon into view and a wider expanse of soft, overhanging sky as boundless as liberty itself. And yet,--and yet,--never in all those years of imprisonment had he experienced a sense of such utter hopelessness as that with which he now saw the shadows fall from those free skies. He was pressing on, but whither? and why? He had set forth eager, elated, as one hastening to a place where pleasant things await him. Now he wondered at himself. In the uncertain twilight he seemed to have lost his way; his journey had turned out to be vain, abortive. He was trudging on aimlessly; he had no country, nor home, nor family; he would never reach any destination; he had gone astray, and was wandering about in a boundless, desert tract, as grey and cheerless as the sky above him, where the stars were like camp-fires lighted by solitary travellers who, unknown to one another, wandered, lost like himself, in the unwished-for and oppressive liberty of the trackless wilderness.

And yet it was not the actual thought of Giovanna herself that weighed him down, nor yet his lost happiness, nor the misery that a wholly undeserved fate had forced upon him; all these things had long ago so eaten into his soul that they had come to form a part of his very nature, and he had grown almost to forget them, as one forgets the shirt he has on his back. Now his grief fastened upon memories of certain specific objects which had pa.s.sed out of the setting of his life, and which he could never recover.

His mind dwelt, for instance, persistently on the little common in front of Giovanna's cottage, the stones in the old wall where they used to sit together on summer evenings, and above all on the great, wide bed, where he would lay himself down beside her after the hard day's work was over.

He felt now as though he might be going home at the close of one of those long, toilsome days. But now--now--where was he to turn for rest and ease? Thus, up through the load of unhappiness that bore him down, all-pervading and indefinable as the fragrance of the wild growth about him, a sense of physical discomfort forced itself; he was conscious of hunger and weariness.

Reaching the top of a knoll, he sat down and opened his wallet. Night had fallen, but the atmosphere was clear and bright; the mountains which hid the sea on the east were bathed in moonlight, and the Milky Way spanned the heavens like a white, deserted causeway; in the west a pale, uncertain reflection hung over the distant sea; a magical aurora encircled the mountains. The path stood out distinctly, and the round, compact clumps of bushes might have been a scattered flock of black sheep. No sound broke the stillness but the mournful hoot of an owl.

Costantino ate and drank; then, stretching himself out on the ground, he allowed his gaze to wander for a moment along that vast white roadway that traversed the heavens; then he shut his eyes, and the sense of bodily comfort, the repose for his tired limbs, and the effect of the food and drink were such that he became almost cheerful again. Hardly, however, had his lids closed, when all his prison companions began to troop before his vision, and he seemed to be seated at work at his shoemaker's bench. The thought of all the wonderful things he would have to tell his friends at Orlei then came into his mind, and filled him with such childish pride that he had an impulse to get up at once and push on so as to get there without delay.

"Yes, I must get up and go on," he said, and then, "No, I won't; I shall stay here and go to sleep; I am very sleepy; no, I must get on,"--the words came confusedly this time. "Isidoro Pane expects me. I shall say, 'What a lot of people I have met! I have seen the sea; I know a man who is a marshal, Burrai is his name; he's going to get me a position of shoemaker in the king's household.' Now I am going to get up and start--start--star----" But he did not. Confused visions flitted across his brain. The _King of Spades_, astride of a donkey, came riding down that great white road that stretched across the sky; all at once he heard him cry out,--once,--twice,--three times. He was calling Costantino, who, opening his sleepy eyes, shut them again, and then opened them wide: "Idiot," he muttered; "it's the owl; yes, I'm going directly; I'm going----" And he fell fast asleep.