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 grass 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 passed 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 circumstances. 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 someone, 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 anyone 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 grass 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; maybe 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 passed 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 passed 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 grass 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 passed 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.

When he awoke, the great, shining face of the moon was still high in the heavens; with its flood of steely light there came a fall of dew. Enormous shadows, like vast black veils, hung over certain parts of the mountains, but every crag, every thicket and flower even, stood clearly out wherever the moonlight fell. The owl still gave his penetrating cry, sharp and metallic, cutting through the silence like a blade of steel. Costantino shivered; he was wet with dew, and getting up, he yawned loudly; the prolonged “Ah⁠—ah‑h‑h” fairly resounded in the intense stillness. He scrutinised the heavens to find out the hour. The Star, that is to say, Diana, had not yet lifted her emerald-gold face above the sea; dawn therefore was still a long way off, and Costantino resumed his journey, hoping to reach the village before the people should be about. He did not want to meet the gaze of the curious, and above all else he dreaded being seen by Giovanna or her mother. He had made up his mind to avoid them, if possible not even to see them or pass by their cottage; what good would it do? Everything was over between them.

So he trudged on, and on; now up, now down; along the moonlit mountain-side. The heaps of slate-stone, the asphodels heavy with dew, the very rocks themselves, gave out a damp, penetrating odour, and here and there a rill of water stole in and out between fragrant beds of pennyroyal. As far away as the eye could reach, blue, vapoury skies overhung blue, misty mountains, until, in the extreme distance, they met and melted into one shimmering sea of silver. The man walked on, and on; his brain yet only half awake, but his body refreshed and active. Now and then he would take a shortcut, leaping from rock to rock, then pausing breathless, with straining heart and pulses. In the moon’s rays his limpid eyes showed flecks of silver light.

The further he went the more familiar the way became; now he was inhaling the wild fragrance of his native soil; he recognised the melancholy salti sown with barley, the grain not yet turned; the beds of lentisks, the sparse trees whispering in some passing breath of wind, like old people murmuring in their sleep; and there, far off, the range of mighty sphinxes blue in the moonlight; and further still, the flash of the sea, that sea that he was so proud to have crossed in no matter what fashion. On reaching the little church of San Francisco he paused, and, cap in hand, said a prayer, a perfectly honest and sincere one, for at that moment his freedom gave him a sense of happiness such as he had not as yet experienced at any time since leaving the prison.

Day had hardly begun to break when Isidoro heard a tapping at his door. For fifteen⁠–⁠twenty days, for four months, in fact, he had been waiting for that sound, and he was on his feet before his old heart had started its mad beating against his breast.

He opened the door; in the dim light he saw, or half saw, a tall figure not dressed in the costume of the country, but wearing a fustian coat as hard and stiff as leather, out of which emerged a long, pallid face. He did not know who it was.

Costantino burst into a harsh laugh, and the fisherman, with a pang, recognised his friend. Yes, at last; it was Costantino come back, but in that very first moment he knew it was not the Costantino of other days. He threw his arms around him, but without kissing him, and his heart melted into tears.

“Well, you didn’t know me, after all,” said Costantino, unstrapping his wallet. “I knew you wouldn’t.”

Even his voice and accent were strange; and now, after his first sensations, first of chill and then of pity, Isidoro felt a sort of diffidence. “What are you dressed that way for?” he asked. “If you had let me know I would have brought you your clothes to Nuoro, and a horse too. Did you come all the way on foot?”

“No; San Francisco lent me a horse. What are you about, Uncle Isidoro? I don’t want any coffee. Have you got any brandy?”

The fisherman, who had begun to uncover the fire, got up from his knees, embarrassed and mortified at having nothing better to offer his guest than a little coffee.

“I didn’t know,” he stammered, spreading out his hands, “but just wait a moment, I’ll go right off⁠—you see I expected you, and I didn’t expect you⁠—” And he started for the door.

“Stop; where are you going?” cried the other, seizing hold of him. “I don’t want anything at all. I only said it for a joke. Sit down here.”

Isidoro seated himself, and began to look furtively at Costantino; little by little he grew more at ease with him, and presently passing his hand over his trousers he asked if he intended to go on dressing that way. In the early morning light streaming through the open door, Costantino’s face looked worn and grey.

“Yes,” he said, with another of those disagreeable laughs, “I am going on dressing this way. I am going away soon.”

“Going away soon! Where to?”

“Oh! I have met so many people,” began Costantino, in the tone of one reciting a lesson. “And I have friends who will help me. What is there for me to do here, anyhow?”

“Why, shoemaking! Didn’t you write to me that that was what you wanted to do?”

“I know a marshal named Burrai,” continued Costantino, who always thought of the King of Spades as still holding office. “He lives in Rome now, and he’s written me a letter; he’s going to get me a position in the King’s household to be shoemaker.”

Isidoro looked at him pitifully. “Ah, the poor fellow, he was altogether different. What made him talk like that, and tell all those foolish little things when there were such heartrending topics to discuss.” Thus Uncle Isidoro to his own heart.

Pretty soon, however, he began to suspect that Costantino was putting all this on, and that his apparent indifference was assumed. But why? If he could not be open and natural with him, with whom could he be? “Come,” said he, “let us talk of other things now; we can discuss all that later. Really, though, won’t you have a little coffee? It would do you good.”

“What do you want to talk about?” asked Costantino drearily. “I knew you would think it strange that I don’t cry, but I’ve cried until I haven’t the wish to any more. And I am going away; one can’t stay in this place after having crossed the sea⁠—who is that going by?” he asked suddenly, as the sound of footsteps was heard outside. “I don’t want any one to see me,” and he jumped up and shut the door.

When he turned, his whole expression had changed and his features were working.

“I walked by there,” he said, his voice sinking lower and lower, “on my way here. I didn’t want to, but somehow I found myself there before I knew it. How can I⁠—how can I stay here? Tell me⁠—you⁠—”

He clasped both hands to his forehead and shook his head violently; then, throwing himself at full length on the ground, he writhed and twisted in an agony of sobs, his whole body shaking with the vehemence of his grief. He was like a young bull caught and held fast in the leash, and made to submit to the red-hot iron.

The old fisherman turned deathly white, but made no attempt whatever to calm him. At last, at last, he recognised his friend.