XVI

No sooner had news of Costantino’s return got abroad than visitors began to stream to Isidoro’s hut. Throughout the entire day there was an incessant coming and going of friends and relatives, and even of persons who had never in their lives so much as interchanged a word with the late prisoner, but who now hastened with open arms to invite him to make his home with them. The women wept over him, called him “my son,” and gazed at him compassionately; one neighbour sent him a present of bread and sausages. All these kindly demonstrations seemed, however, only to annoy their object.

“Why on earth should they be sorry for me?” he said to Isidoro. “For Heaven’s sake, send them about their business, and let’s get away into the country.”

“Yes, yes, we will go, all in good time, child of the Lord, only have a little patience,” said the other, bending over the fireplace, where he was cooking the sausage. “How naughty you are, I declare!”

Since witnessing that paroxysm of grief in the morning, Uncle Isidoro had felt much more at ease with his guest, and even took little liberties with him, scolding him as though he had been a child. During the short intervals when they found themselves alone, he told him the facts. Costantino listened eagerly, and was annoyed when the arrival of fresh visitors interrupted the narrative. Among these visitors came the syndic, he who was a herdsman, and looked like Napoleon I. His call was especially trying.

“We will give you sheep and cows,” he began, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “Yes, every herdsman will give you a pecus,13 and if there is anything you need, just say so; are we not all brothers and sisters in this world, and especially in a small community like this?”

Costantino, thinking of the treatment he had received at the hands of his “brothers and sisters” of this particular small community, shook his head.

“Yes,” he said; “my brothers have treated me as Cain treated Abel; it would take a good deal more than sheep and cows to make it up to me.”

“Oh, well! that has nothing to do with it,” replied the syndic, absorbed in his idea. “You have travelled; tell me now, have you never stood on the top of some high mountain, and looked down on the villages scattered about in the plain below? Well, didn’t they seem to you like so many houses, each with its little family living inside?” Costantino, who was tired of the conversation, merely replied that all he wanted was to leave this village and never come back to it again.

“Oh, no! You mustn’t do that!” urged the other. “Where would you go? No, no; you must stay here, where we are all brothers.”

The next to arrive was Doctor Puddu, carrying a large, dirty, grey umbrella. He at once peered into the earthenware saucepan to see what was cooking.

“You are all degenerates, every one of you,” he announced in his harsh voice, rapping the saucepan with his umbrella. “And I’ll tell you the reason: it’s because you will eat pork.”

“Don’t break the saucepan, please,” said Uncle Isidoro. “And I beg your pardon, but that is not pork; it’s beans, and bacon, and sausage.”

“Well, isn’t bacon pork? You’re all pigs. Well⁠—” turning to Costantino. “And so, good sheep, you’ve come back? I saw him die⁠—what’s his name?⁠—Giacobbe Dejas. He died a miserable death, as he deserved to. You had better take a purgative tomorrow; it’s absolutely necessary after a sea voyage.”

Costantino looked at him without speaking.

“You think I’m crazy?” shouted the doctor, going close to him, and shaking his umbrella. “A purgative! do you understand? A purgative!”

“I heard you,” said Costantino.

“Oh, so much the better! Well, I’ve heard that you say you want to go away. Go-o-o⁠—! Go, by all means. Go to the devil. But first of all, go to the cemetery, go to that dunghill you call a cem-e-te-ry; and dig and scratch like a dog, and tear up Giacobbe Dejas’s bones, and gnaw them.”

He ground his teeth as though he were crunching bones; it was both grotesque and horrible, and Costantino could do nothing but stare at him in utter amazement.

“What are you looking at me like that for? You’ve always been a fool, my dear fellow⁠—my dear donkey! Just look at you now! calm and amiable as a pope! They’ve robbed you of everything you possessed, betrayed you, murdered you, knocked you about among them as though you had been a dried skeleton, and there you sit, bland and stupid as ever! Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you go to that vile woman, and take her, and her mother, and her mother-in-law by the hair of their heads, and tie them to the tails of the cows they offer to give you as a charity, and set fire to their petticoats, and turn them loose in the fields so that they may spread destruction in every direction? Do you understand? I say, do you understand, idiot?”

He flung the words in the other’s face, his breath heavy with absinthe, his eyes bloodshot.

Costantino recoiled, trembling, but the doctor turned to go. On the threshold he paused again and shook his umbrella.

“You make me long to break your neck!” he cried. “Men such as you deserve precisely the treatment they get! Well, take a purgative, anyhow, stupid.”

“Yes, I’ll do that,” said Costantino, with a laugh, but at the same time the doctor’s words made a deep impression on him. There were times, indeed, when he felt utterly desperate. He said over and over again that he meant to go away, but, as a fact, he did not know where to go. Nor, on the other hand, could he see what was to become of him should he decide to remain on in the village. He said to himself: “I have no home, and there is no one belonging to me; for this one day everyone rushes to see me out of curiosity, but by tomorrow they will all have forgotten my very existence. I am like a bird that has lost its nest. What is there for me to do?”

All the time, though, those words of the doctor’s kept ringing in his head. Yes, truly, that would be something for him to do. Go there, fall suddenly upon them like a bolt out of heaven, and utterly destroy all those people who had destroyed his life!

“No, Costantino,” resumed Uncle Isidoro, as they sat at table, eating the neighbour’s white bread and sausage. “No; she is not happy. I have never looked her full in the face since, and it gives me a queer feeling to meet her, as though I were meeting the devil! And yet, do you know, I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She has a little girl that they tell me is like a young bean, it is so thin and puny. How could a child born in mortal sin be pretty? It was baptised just like a bastard, the priest wouldn’t go back to the house, and the people were sneering all along the street.”

“Ah, do you remember my child?” asked Costantino, cutting off a slice of fat, yellow bacon. “He was not like a bean, not he! Ah, if he had only lived!”

“It may be better so,” said the fisherman, beginning to moralise. “Life is full of suffering; better to die innocent, to go⁠—to fly⁠—up there, above the blue sky, to the paradise that lies beyond the clouds, beyond the storms, beyond all the miseries of human life. Drink something, Costantino; this wine is not very good, but there is still some left.⁠—Well, I remember last year on Assumption Day, Giacobbe Dejas asked me to take dinner with him. He was afraid of me; he thought I knew, and he wanted his sister and me to get married. Oh! if you could just see that little woman you wouldn’t laugh. She went with the priest and me to Nuoro. May the Lord desert me in the hour of death, if ever I saw a more courageous woman in all my life! She hardly seemed to touch the ground! Well, she’s gone all shrunken and shrivelled now, don’t you know⁠—like a piece of fruit that dries up on the tree before it is ripe. I go all the time to see her, and just to amuse her I say: ‘Well, little barley-grain!’ Shall we two get married? She smiles and I smile, but we feel more like crying! Who could ever have imagined such a thing?⁠—I mean, here was Giacobbe Dejas, seemingly happy and contented; he was getting rich, and he talked of being married. And then⁠—all of a sudden⁠—pum!⁠—down he comes, like a rotten pear! Such is life! Bachissia Era sold her daughter, thinking to improve her condition, and now she is hungrier than ever. Giovanna Era did what she did, imagining that she was going to have a heaven upon earth, and instead of that, she’s like a frog with a stick run through it!”

“But does he beat her?” asked Costantino heavily.

“No, he doesn’t do that; but there are worse things than beating. She’s treated just like a servant, or, rather, like a slave. You know how they used to treat their slaves in the old times? Well, that’s the way she’s treated in that house.”

“Well, let her burst! Here’s to her damnation!” cried Costantino, raising his glass to his lips. It gave him a cruel pleasure to hear of Giovanna’s misery, such pleasure as a child will sometimes feel at seeing an unpopular playmate receive a whipping.

Dinner over the two men went out and stretched themselves at full length beneath the wild fig-tree. It was a hot, breathless noontide; the air, smelling of poppies and filled with grey haze, was like that of a summer midday, and there were bees flying about, sounding their little trombones. Costantino, completely worn out by this time, fell asleep almost immediately. The fisherman, on the contrary, could not close an eye. A green grasshopper was skipping about among the blades of grass, giving its sharp “tic, tic.” Isidoro, stretching out one hand, tried to catch it, his thoughts dwelling all the while on Costantino. “I know why he wants to go away,” he ruminated. “He still cares for her, poor boy; and if he stays here he will just suffer the way San Lorenzo did on his gridiron. There he lies, poor fellow, like a sick child! Ah, what have they done to him? Torn him to pieces⁠—Ah-ha! I have you now!” but just as he was about to pull the grasshopper apart, it occurred to him that possibly it too, like Costantino, had had its trials, and he let it go.

A shadow fell across the foot of the path; Uncle Isidoro, recognising Priest Elias, sprang to his feet, went to meet him, and drew him into the hut, so as not to awaken Costantino. The latter, however, was a light sleeper, and, aroused presently by the sound of their voices, he too got up. As he approached the hut he realised that he was being talked about.

“It is far better that he should go,” the priest was saying in a serious tone. “Far, far better.”

Costantino could not tell why, but at the sound of these words his heart sank within him like lead.

However, he did not go.

The days followed one another and people soon ceased to trouble the returned exile; before long he was able to go about the village as much as he chose without being stared at, even by the gossips and ragamuffins. With the savings laid up in prison he purchased a stock of leather, soles, and thread, but he never began to work. Every day he bought a supply of meat and fruit and wine, eating and drinking freely himself, and urging Isidoro to do the same. He was in great dread lest the villagers might think that he was living on the old man’s charity, and wanted to let them see that he had money and was openhanded, not only with him, but with every one else; so he would conduct parties of his acquaintances to the tavern where he would make them all tipsy and get so himself at times, and then the tales he would relate of his prison experiences were marvellous indeed to hear.

In this way his little store of money melted rapidly away, and when Isidoro scolded him, all he would say was: “Well, I have no children nor anyone else to consider, so let me alone.” He was counting, moreover, on the inheritance left by his murdered uncle, which the other heirs had agreed to resign without forcing him to have recourse to the law. “Then,” said he, “I shall take myself off. I am going to give you a hundred scudi, Uncle Isidoro.”

But poor old Isidoro did not want his scudi nor anything else except to see him restored to the Costantino of other days⁠—good, industrious, and frank. Frank he certainly was not at present, and when, occasionally, the fisherman surprised him with tears in his eyes, his sore, old heart leaped for joy.

“What is it, child of grace?” he would ask. But Costantino would merely laugh, even when the tears were actually running down his cheeks. It was heartrending.

Sometimes the two would go off together to fish for leeches; that is, Isidoro would stand patiently knee-deep in the yellow, stagnant water, while Costantino, stretched on his back among the rushes, would spin yarns about his former fellow-prisoners, gazing off, meanwhile, towards the horizon with an unaccountable feeling of homesickness.

Go away? go away? Did he not long to go away? Did he not, up there, beneath that fateful sky, in the deathly solitude of the uplands, under the eternal surveillance of those colossal sphinxes, feel as though an iron circle were pressing upon him? Every object, from the blades of grass along the roadside to the very mountain-peaks, reminded him of the past. Each night he prowled around Giovanna’s house like some stealthy animal, and one evening he saw her tall figure issue forth, and move down in the direction of their cottage. This was the first time that he had seen her, and he recognised her instantly, notwithstanding that it was by the fading light of a damp, overcast evening. His heart beat violently, and each throb gave him an added pang, a fresh memory, a new impulse of despair. His instinct was to throw himself upon her then and there, clasp her in a close embrace⁠—kill her. Before long, however, he was no longer satisfied to catch only furtive glances, secretly and in the dark; he became possessed with the desire to see her and to be seen of her in broad daylight; but she never left the house, and he dared not go by there in the daytime. On another evening, a Saturday, he heard Brontu’s laugh ring out from the portico, and he fancied that hers mingled with it. His eyes filled, and he had much the same sensation of nausea as on that first morning of the sea voyage when he woke up ill.

All this time he continued to feign the utmost indifference, without quite knowing why he did so. The Orlei people had, however, become almost hateful to him, even Uncle Isidoro. Sometimes he asked himself in wonder why he had ever come back.

“I am going away,” he said one day to the fisherman, gazing across the interminable stretch of uplands to the blue and crimson sky beyond, against which the thickets of arbute seemed to float like green clouds. “I have written to a friend of mine⁠—Burrai⁠—he can do anything, you know; he could have gotten me a pardon, even if I had really been guilty.”

“You have told me all that before; I am tired of hearing it,” said Isidoro. “All the same, I notice that he has never even answered your letter.”

“He is going to get me a position; yes, I really mean to go. But tell me why is it that the priest is so anxious for it? Is he afraid that I will kill Brontu Dejas?”

“Yes, he is. He’s afraid of just that.”

“No, he’s not; that’s not it. I said to him: ‘Priest Elias, you must know perfectly well that if I had wanted to kill any one, I would have done it right off.’ And all he said was: ‘Go away, go away! It would be far better.’ What do you think about it, Uncle Fisherman; shall I go or not?”

“I don’t think anything about it,” answered the other in a tone of strong disapproval. “What I do think is that you are an idle dog. Why aren’t you at work, tell me that? It’s because you do nothing but think all the time of your good-for-nothing Burrai, who, however, never gives you a thought.”

“Oh! he doesn’t give me a thought?” said Costantino, piqued. “Well, I’ll just let you see whether he does or not. Look here!”

He drew a letter from the inside pocket of his coat, and proceeded to read it aloud. It was from Burrai, written at Rome, where the ex-marshal had opened a little shop for the sale of Sardinian wines. Naturally, being himself, he had improved upon the facts, and announced that he was the proprietor of a large and flourishing establishment; he invited Costantino to pay him a visit, and reproached him for not having come at once to Rome, where, he said, he could find him a position without difficulty.

The fisherman’s blue eyes grew round with innocent wonder.

“To think, only to think!” he exclaimed. “And you never told me a word about it! What made you hide the letter? How much does it cost to go to Rome?”

“Oh! only about fifty lire.”

“And have you got that much?”

“Why, of course I have!”

“Then go, go by all means!” exclaimed the old man, stretching his arms out towards the horizon.

They were both silent for a moment. The fisherman, bending his head, gazed at the pebbles lying at his feet, while Costantino stared absently ahead of him. Beyond the brook, the tall, yellow, meadow-grass was bowing in the wind, and the long stems of the golden oats rippled against the blue background of the sky.

Uncle Isidoro made up his mind that the moment had come to tell Costantino plainly why all his friends wanted him to leave the village.

“Giovanna,” he began quietly, “does not love her husband; you and she might meet⁠—”

“She and I might meet? Well, and if we did, what then?”

“Nothing; you might, that’s all.”

“Oh, nothing!” cried Costantino, and his voice rang out scornfully in the profound stillness; “nothing! I tell you that I despise that low woman. I don’t want her.”

“You don’t want her, and yet you hang about her house all the time, like a fly about the honey-pot.”

“Ah, you know about that?” said Costantino, somewhat crestfallen. “It’s not true, though⁠—well⁠—yes; perhaps it is. But suppose I do hang about her house, what business is it of yours?”

“Oh! none at all, but⁠—you had better go away.”

“I am going. I suppose the truth is you are getting tired of having me on your hands!”

“Costantino, Costantino!” exclaimed the old man in a hurt voice.

Costantino pulled up a tuft of rushes, threw it from him, and gazed again into the distance. His face was working as it had done on the morning of his return, after he had closed the door of Isidoro’s hut; his brain swam, once or twice he gulped down the bitter saliva that rose in his throat; then he spoke:

“Well, after all, why does the priest insist so on my going? Am I not actually her husband? Suppose even that she were to come back to me? Wouldn’t it be coming back to her own husband?”

“If she were to come back to you, my dear fellow, it would be Brontu Dejas either killing you or having you arrested.”

“Well, you needn’t be afraid; I don’t want her. She’s a fallen woman, as far as I am concerned. I shall go off somewhere, to a distance, and marry someone else.”

“Oh, no! You would never do that,” murmured Isidoro appealingly. “You are too good a Christian.”

“No; I would never do that,” repeated Costantino mechanically.

“Never in the world; you are far too good a Christian.” The old man said it again, but without conviction. The experience of a long life was battling with the tenets of his simple faith.

“If he does not do it,” he sighed to himself, “it will not be merely because he is a good Christian.”