PART I (continued 2)

While his father worked his hoe, bending over the transparent green of the young wheat, Anania wandered about the naked and melancholy fields, crying with the birds, hunting for herbs and mushrooms. Sometimes the father looking up, saw him in the distance, and his heart tightened; for the place, the occupation, the child's small figure, all reminded him of Olì, of her little brothers, of their sin, of all the love and the happiness they had enjoyed together. Where was Olì? Who could tell? She was lost, she had vanished like the birds of the fields. Well—so much the worse for her. Anania the olive-miller thought he was doing all anyone could expect, in bringing up the child. If ever he found the treasure of his dreams, he would put the boy to school. At least he would make a farmer of him. What more could he do? What about the men who didn't acknowledge their children, who instead of taking them home and bringing them up like Christians, left them to misery and an evil life? Yes, some quite rich men, gentlemen, behaved like that. Yes, even his master, even Signor Carboni. Thus "big Anania" consoled himself; yet still the oppression of sadness remained in his heart.

Looking out over the distance he thought he saw the nuraghe near Olì's old home. At meal-times, or during the midday rest, when they stretched themselves under the sounding pine-trees, he questioned his son about his life at Fonni. Anania was shy with his father and seldom dared to meet his eyes; but once pushed into the path of recollection, he chattered willingly, abandoning himself to the homesick pleasure of telling about the past. He remembered everything, the village, the widow's house and her stories, Zuanne of the big ears, the carabiniere, the friars, the convent court, the chestnuts, the goats, the mountains, the candle factory. But in spite of the miller's suggestions he spoke little of his mother.

"Well, did she beat you?"

"Never! Never!"

"I'm sure she beat you."

The child perjured himself swearing he spoke truth.

"Tell me, what did she do all day?"

"She went out to work."

"Did the carabiniere want to marry her?"

"Oh, no. He said to me, 'Tell your mother to come here. I want to talk to her.'"

"What did she say when you told her?" asked the man with some anxiety.

"She was as mad as a dog."

"Ah!"

He sighed. He was relieved hearing she had not gone to talk to the carabiniere. Yes; he was still fond of her. He still remembered her clear and burning eyes; he remembered her little brothers; he remembered her father so sorrowful and so poor. But what could he do? Had he been free he'd have married her. As it was, he had to desert her. It was vain to think any more about it. They finished their frugal meal; then he said to the child:

"Run down there to that fig tree, look and you'll see a very very old house. Root about in the ground there. Perhaps you'll find something!"

The boy sped away, glad to leave the grave, toil-stained man. And the father thought:

"Innocents find treasures easily. If we could find a treasure, then I'd hand over a good lot to Olì, and if my wife were to die, I'd marry her. It was I who made her go wrong."

But Anania found nothing. Towards evening, father and son went slowly home, following the broad white road, the depth of which was flooded with twilight gold. Aunt Tatàna had hot supper waiting for them and a fire crackling on the dean swept hearth. She blew Anania's nose, washed his eyes, told her husband the events of the day.

Nanna had tumbled into the fire, Efès had a new pair of shoes, Uncle Pera had beaten a boy. Signor Carboni had been to the mill to look at the horse.

"He says the beast has grown terribly thin."

"That's all the work he has done. What does the padrone expect? Even animals are flesh and blood."

After supper the olive-miller had forgotten all about Olì and her woes. He went to the tavern. Aunt Tatàna got her distaff, and told stories to the son of her adoption. Bustianeddu came to listen also.

"Once upon a time there was a king with seven golden eyes on his forehead like stars;" and so forth.

Or she told the story of Marieddu and the Hobgoblin. Marieddu had escaped from the Hobgoblin's house. "She ran and ran, all the time dropping nails which as fast as she dropped them began to multiply. They multiplied until they filled the whole plain. Uncle Hobgoblin followed her, followed her, but he never could catch her up because the nails kept sticking into his feet."

Dear! what shudders of delight this story of Marieddu gave the two children! What a difference between the dark cottage, the figure, the stories of the widow of Fonni, and the dear kitchen, the warmth, the sweet face and the enchanting legends of Aunt Tatàna. Yet there were times when Anania was bored. Or at least he did not experience the wild emotion which the widow's narratives had awaked in him. Perhaps it was because the good Zuanne, the beloved brother, was not there and in his place was Bustianeddu, who was so naughty and so cruel, who pinched him and called him names even when people were listening and in spite of Aunt Tatàna's admonitions.

One evening Bustianeddu called him "bastard" in the hearing of Margherita Carboni, who had come with her servant bringing a message to the miller. Aunt Tatàna pushed Bustianeddu away, and silenced him, but it was too late. Margherita had heard, and Anania felt unspeakable distress. Aunt Tatàna got bread and honey and set him and Margherita to eat it together; she gave none to Bustianeddu. But what was the good of bread and honey, when he had been dubbed "bastard" before Margherita Carboni? The little girl was dressed in green; her stockings were violet, and round her neck was a scarf of vivid rose colour. It lent colour to her soft cheeks and brought out the blue of her shining eyes. That night Anania saw her in his dreams; lovely, and coloured like the rainbow. Even in his dream he felt the grief of having been called "bastard" before her.

That year Easter was not till the end of April. The olive miller fulfilled his Easter duty, and his confessor bade him legitimize his son. At Easter too, Anania, now eight years old, was confirmed. Signor Carboni was his godfather. The confirmation was a great event not only for the boy but for the whole place. Monsignore Demartis, the beautiful and imposing bishop, convened everybody to the Cathedral and publicly bestowed the Chrism on a hundred children. Through the open doors, which seemed enormous to Anania, spring, with its sunshine and fragrance, penetrated into the church. It was crowded with women in their purple dresses, with fine ladies, and wondering children. Signor Carboni, stout, florid, with blue eyes and reddish hair, wore a velvet waist-coat crossed by a huge gold chain. He was greeted, saluted, sought after by all the most conspicuous persons, by the peasants both male and female, by the fine ladies and the crowding children. Anania was proud and happy to have such a godfather. True, Signor Carboni was standing sponsor for seventeen others, but that did not detract from the importance of this singular honour done to each of the eighteen.

After the ceremony the eighteen children with their respective parents adjourned to their godfather's house, and Anania was able to admire Margherita's drawing-room of which he had heard marvels. It was a great room with red walls and huge eighteenth century chairs; cabinets adorned with wax flowers under glass shades, with marble dishes of fruit, and plates with slices of cheese and sausage, all of marble. Liqueurs, coffee, cakes and pastry were handed round, and the lovely Signora Carboni who had deep dimples in her cheeks, black hair drawn very tight on her temples, and a pretty muslin gown with flounces and little spots of pink and blue, was most amiable with everybody and kissed all the eighteen god-children, giving each of them a present.

Anania long remembered these details. He remembered too, how ardently and how vainly he had wished that Margherita would come and look at his new clothes, which were of yellow fustian, and as stiff as the skin of the devil. And he remembered that Signora Cecita Carboni had kissed him, and with her jewelled hand had tapped lightly on his little head (cropped horrible close) and said to the miller:

"Ah, gossip, why have you shorn him like this? He seems quite bald!"

"Never mind, gossip," replied Big Anania, carrying on the agreeable jest of this lady who was not exactly his fellow sponsor, "this chicken's feathers were as thick as a wood——"

"Well," interrupted the lady, "have you done your duty?"

"Yes, yes."

"I'm so glad. Believe me, it's only legitimate sons who are the support of their father in his old age."

Then Signor Carboni came over, and said, looking at his godson.

"What demon eyes this young highlander has! Well, youngster, what are you hiding them for? Laughing at me, eh? you little devil!"

Anania was laughing for joy at being publicly addressed by his godfather and favourably regarded by Signora Carboni.

"What are you going to do with yourself, little devil?"

Anania hung his head, then looked up with the bright eyes which Aunt Tatàna's ministrations had quite cured of their weakness. Then he tried to hide behind his parent.

"Well, answer your godfather!" said the miller, shaking him. "What do you intend to do with yourself?"

"Will you be a miller?" suggested the lady.

He shook his head vigorously.

"You don't like that? A farmer perhaps?"

Still no.

"Well, perhaps you want to become a scholar," said his father, diplomatically.

"Yes."

"Bravo!" said Signor Carboni. "You intend to be a scholar. A priest, I suppose?"

"No."

"A lawyer?" prompted the miller.

"Yes."

"The deuce! I said he had bright eyes! So you intend to be a lawyer, little mouse?"

"Ah, my boy, we're too poor," said the miller with a sigh.

"If the child has the wish. Providence will assist him," said the padrone.

"——will assist him," repeated the Signora like an echo. These words decided Anania's destiny, and he never forgot them.

The olive press was shut down for the year and the miller turned into a farmer.

Fierce sunshine was making the grass yellow. Bees and wasps buzzed round Aunt Tatàna's little house; the elder tree in the courtyard wore the wondrous lace of its tiny flowers.

The company which used to meet at the mill now assembled in the courtyard; Uncle Pera with his cudgel, Efès and Nanna generally drunk, the handsome shoemaker, Bustianeddu and his father, as well as other persons from the neighbourhood. Maestro Pane had set up a workshop in a cellar opposite the courtyard. All day long was a coming and going of people, who laughed, talked, quarrelled, and swore.

Little Anania spent his days among these folk; from them he learned rude words and actions, and they accustomed him to the sight of drunkenness, and careless misery. In another smoke-blackened and cobwebby cellar beside Maestro Pane's workship, a poor, sick girl was withering. Years ago her father had gone away to work in an African mine, and he had never been heard of again. The girl, Rebecca, lived alone, diseased and abandoned, in her squalid den, swarming with flies and other insects. A little further on lived a widow, whose five children were supported by begging. Maestro Pane sometimes begged himself. But one and all they were merry. The five beggar children never stopped laughing. Maestro Pane talked to himself and related long pleasant tales of the jolly days when he was young. Only in the long luminous afternoons, when the streets were silent and the wasps buzzed over the elder flowers, inducing sleep to the little Anania stretched at the threshold, then in the hot stillness could be heard the sharp cry of Rebecca. It rose, it grew, it broke off; it recommenced, it hurled itself on high, it dashed itself to earth. It seemed, so to speak, to pierce the silence with a shower of sibilant arrows. In this cry was all the grief, all the evil, the poverty, the forlornness, the unseen wretchedness of the place and its dwellers; it was the voice even of things, the lament of the stones which dropped one by one from the blackened walls of the prehistoric houses, of the crumbling roof, of the broken stairs and worm-eaten balconies which menaced ruin; of the spurge which grew on the pathway, of the wild olive which shadowed the walls, of the children who had no food, of the women who had no clothes, of the men who drank to stupefy themselves, and beat their wives and their children and their beasts because they could not strike at their destiny; it was the voice of all sickness uncured, of all the misery ineluctably accepted like life itself. But who heeded?

Little Anania, stretched across the threshold flapping away the flies and the wasps with a branch of elder, thought sleepily—

"Whew! Why is that girl screaming? What makes her scream? Why are there any sick people in the world?"

He himself had grown plump, fattened by the abundant food, by idleness, by sleep. He slept a great deal. In the silent afternoons not even Rebecca's cry kept him awake. He slept, the branch of elder in his hand, flies settling on his face. He slept, and he dreamed he was there, far away, in the house of the widow, in the kitchen watched by the long black cloak which was like a gibbeted phantom. But Olì his mother was no longer there. She had fled far away, far away to an unknown land. And a monk had come out of the convent and was teaching the little lonely one to read. He wanted to learn, to learn things that he might be wise and able to journey to find his mother. The monk talked and talked but Anania could not hear him, because from the long black cloak came an acute, a lacerating, deafening lament! Ah God! he was afraid! It was the voice of the ghost of the dead bandit.

And, besides the fear of the ghost, Anania was troubled by a strange feeling round his nose. That was the flies!

V

At last came part fulfilment of his dream. One October morning he got up very early, Aunt Tatàna washed him and brushed him, and dressed him in his best suit, that one of yellow fustian which was as stiff as the skin of the devil. Big Anania was at breakfast, eating roast liver. When he saw his boy dressed for school, he laughed with satisfaction, and said, threatening with his finger—

"Ho! ho! If you aren't a good boy. I'll send you to Maestro Pane to make coffins."

Bustianeddu came for Anania and somewhat contemptuously took him under his wing. It was a splendid morning. The fresh breeze carried pleasant odours of new made wine, of coffee, of refuse grape-skins. Hens clucked in the street. Peasants came in from the country their long carts decked with vine branches, attended by frisking and noisy dogs.

Anania was happy, though his companion reviled the school and the schoolmaster and the teachers.

"Yours is like a cock," he said, "he has a red cap and a great hoarse voice. I had to put up with him for a year. May the devil bite his heels!"

The school was at the far side of Nuoro, in a convent surrounded by dreary gardens. Anania's class-room was on the ground floor, its windows facing the deserted street. The walls were flecked with dust; the master's desk had been gnawed by rats; the benches were adorned with spots of ink, with carvings, with names scribbled like hieroglyphics.

Anania felt defrauded when instead of the master like a cock he saw a mistress, dressed in the costume of the place, a pale, small woman with a little moustache just like Aunt Tatàna's.

Forty idle children made the room lively. Anania was the tallest of them all. Perhaps for this reason the little mistress turned oftenest to him. Besides the moustache she had two terrible, fierce, dark eyes, and she addressed Anania by his surname, speaking partly in Italian, partly in Sardinian. He was honoured by her persistent attention, though he found it a little tedious. At the end of three hours he was actually able to read and to write two letters. One of them was a mere round O, but that did not detract from the importance of his attainment. At eleven o'clock he was dead sick of the school and the mistress and his stiff, smart clothes. He thought longingly of the courtyard, the elder tree, the basket of fruit into which he was in the habit of thrusting predatory fingers. He yawned. Was the going away hour never coming? Many of the children were in tears, and the mistress wasted her breath preaching about order and the love of lessons.

At last the door burst open. The school officer—also dressed in costume—showed his shaven face for a single instant and shouted, "Time!" The children made one simultaneous rush to the door, tumbling over each other and shouting. Anania was left to the last, and the mistress began to pat his head with her scraggy fingers.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Bravo! Remember me to your mother."

That, of course, referred to Aunt Tatàna. He suddenly felt quite fond of his teacher, who now hurried after the rest of the noisy children.

"What style of going out is that?" she cried, capturing as many as she could. "Come now! Two and two! In a proper line!"

She placed them in order, and they filed down the corridor through the door, out into the street. There they were set free and they scattered like birds escaped from a net, screaming and jumping. Older and more serious scholars issued from the other class-rooms, all in their rows. Bustianeddu fell upon Anania, slamming his copy books on the child's head and seizing his arm.

"Did you like it?" he asked.

"Yes," replied Anania, "but I'm so awfully hungry. I thought it was never going to stop."

"Did you imagine it would only last a minute?" said the other in his superior voice. "Just you wait a bit. You'll know something of hunger in a little while! Look! there's Margherita Carboni!"

The little girl with the violet stockings, the rosy handkerchief, the green woollen sleeves, appeared among the female pupils, who were dismissed after the boys. She passed in front of Anania and Bustianeddu without noticing them, followed by other girls, rich and poor, young ladies and peasants, some nearly grown up, and in training as coquettes. The older boys stopped to laugh with and admire them.

"They're spooning," said Bustianeddu, "if the master were to catch them——"

Anania did not answer. Boys and girls of that dignity seemed to him quite old enough for love-making.

"They even write to each other!" said Bustianeddu importantly.

"I suppose we shall do that when we're in the fourth form," said Anania simply.

"Oh, indeed, will you, Ninny? Better wash your face first," said Bustianeddu; then he pulled the little boy's hand and they ran.

After that day, followed many similar ones. Winter came back, the olive mill was reopened, the scenes of the previous year were re-enacted. Anania was top of his class. No one doubted that he was to be a doctor or a lawyer—possibly a judge. All knew that Signor Carboni had promised to assist his education. He knew it himself, but as yet had no idea of the worth of that promise. Gratitude began in him later. For the present he was overpowered by shyness augmented by delight whenever he encountered his florid and affable godfather. He was often invited to dinner at Signor Carboni's, but in the kitchen with the servants and the cats. This was no annoyance to him, as at table with the gentry he could not have opened his lips for pride and alarm.

After dinner Margherita used to come to the kitchen and entertain him. She asked questions about the people at the mill, then took him to the courtyard, to the granaries, to the cellar. She was delighted when, aping Bustianeddu's grand manner, he said, "Good Lord! What a lot of things you have!"

She never condescended to play with him, but Anania cared little for play. He was timid and grave; without understanding its significance he was already conscious of his position's irregularity.

Years rolled on.

After the mistress with the moustache came the master like a cock: then an old man, much addicted to snuff, who wept when he pointed to Spitzbergen and said, "Here Silvio Pellico was imprisoned." Then came a master with a round face, who was very pale and very lively, and who presently committed suicide. This lamentable event was morbidly impressive to the whole school, and for a long time the children neither spoke nor thought of anything else. Anania could not explain to himself why a man of such great cheerfulness should have cut his throat; but he declared before the whole school that he was ready to follow the example at the earliest opportunity. Fortunately the opportunity was lacking. At this time he had no sorrows. He was loved at home, he did well at school. His life unfolded evenly without change in its events, without change in the faces which surrounded him. One day was like another, one year was like another, resembling an interminable roll of stuff printed all over on the same pattern.

In winter the same people assembled round the olive press. In spring the elder flowered in the courtyard, the flies and the bees buzzed in the luminous air. The same figures moved in the streets. Uncle Barchitto, the madman, with his staring blue eyes, his long beard, and flowing hair, like a Jesus become old and a beggar, continued his harmless extravagances. Maestro Pane rapped on the table and talked to himself in a loud voice. Efès and Nanna reeled and stuttered. The ragged children played with the dogs, and the cats, and the chickens, and the baby pigs. The women squabbled. The young men sang melancholy love songs in the serene moonlit nights. Rebecca's lament shook the air like the cry of the cuckoo across the sadness of a barren landscape. As the sun sometimes shines out from an unexpected quarter of a cloudy sky, so the florid figure of Signor Carboni sometimes appeared in this district of dismal poverty. Then the women came to their doors smiling and saluting; the men who did no work, and passed their time stretched out indolently in the sunshine, sprang to their feet and blushed; the children ran after him and kissed his hand which he carried carelessly behind his back. In hard winters he gave polenta (maize) and oil to the whole neighbourhood. People came to him for small loans which they never repaid. Everywhere in the dirty wind-swept lanes he met boys and girls who called him Godfather, and men and women whom he addressed as Gossip. He could not keep count of his god-children, and Uncle Pera declared that many called him Gossip merely to get his money.

"They all hope he'll educate their sons," said the old gardener, warming himself at the olive press furnace, his cudgel across his knees.

"Well, there's one he's going to educate," said the miller, looking proudly at Anania who was gazing out of the window.

"Not even one. The padrone is vain, but he isn't going to ruin himself."

"Oh, shut up, you old grasshopper," said the miller; "you're just like the devil—the older you get the more disagreeable you are!"

"Why doesn't the padrone educate his own bastards?" said the old man, hawking and coughing. Anania, who was looking out of the window felt a shudder run through him as if he had been struck.

The miller coughed in his turn and wished Anania would go away, but he could not restrain himself from reply.

"Dead, dirty, malignant rat!" he exclaimed, "how dare you speak of the master so?"

"Do you suppose it's not known?" said the old man taking up his cudgel as if to defend himself; "that boy who works for Franziscu Carchide—he's a son of Jesus Christ, is he? What I say is why doesn't the padrone educate that boy?"

"He's the son of a priest," said the miller in a loud voice.

"He isn't. He's the padrone's son. Look at him! He's the image of Margherita."

"Well," said the miller, defeated, "that boy's as bad as the devil. What's the good of educating him? You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear."

"Have it your own way!" murmured Uncle Pera, relapsing into his cough.

Anania stood at the window beside the heap of husks, oppressed by mysterious sadness. He knew the boy at Carchide's; he was wild, but not more so than Bustianeddu and many of the schoolboys. Why did not Signor Carboni take him into his house and give him a home, as the olive miller had done for his son? Then he thought—

"Has that boy a mother, I wonder?"

Ah! the mother! the mother! As Anania grew and his mind opened, its ideas and perceptions taking form unobserved like the petals of a wild flower, so the thought of his mother became ever clearer in the haze of his new found conscience. He belonged now to the Fifth Elementary Form, and was associated with boys of every condition and of every character. He began to have knowledge of the science of good and evil. He was now intelligently ashamed if any one alluded to his mother, and remembered that he had always felt ashamed instinctively. Yet he was consumed by the desire to know where she was, to see her again, and reproach her with having deserted him. The unknown land, mysterious and far, to which she had fled, was taking to Anania's eyes clear outline and appearance, like that land discerned amid the mists of dawn to which the voyaging ship draws ever nearer. He studied geography with interest; and knew exactly how he should go from the island to that continent which concealed his mother. As once in the mountain village he had dreamed of the town where his father lived, so now he pondered upon the great cities described by his teachers and his books, and in one of them, and in all, he saw the figure of his mother. Her physical image, like an old photograph, was growing fainter and fainter in his memory; but he always thought of her as dressed in the Sardinian costume, barefoot, slender, and very sorrowful.

That year an event occurred which was deeply impressive to his imagination. This was the return of Bustianeddu's mother.

Anania was a pupil at the Gymnasium, secretly enamoured of Margherita Carboni, and believing himself quite grown up. The woman's reappearance moved the whole neighbourhood, and Anania wondered over it by day and by night. Ostensibly, however, he took no interest in the event.

Some time passed before he saw the woman who had hidden herself in the house of a relative. Bustianeddu, however, who had become grave and astute beyond his years, spoke frequently of her to Anania.

Uncle Pera was growing old and the olive-miller assisted him in the cultivation of his beans and teazles. Anania had free ingress to the garden, and often carried his books to a grassy bank beside the streamlet, whence under the shadow of the prickly pears he could see the wild panorama of mountains and valleys. Here Bustianeddu would find him when he wanted to pour out his confidences. Bustianeddu spoke sceptically and coldly, unaware of the tumults of emotion working in the soul of his friend.

"It would have been better for her to stay away," said Bustianeddu, lying on his face, his legs in the air. "My father was ready to kill her; but he takes it more quietly now."

"Have you seen her?"

"Of course I have. My father doesn't like me to visit her, but, of course, I go. She's grown stout. She's dressed like a lady: I didn't recognize her. The devil!"

"You didn't recognize her?" exclaimed Anania, surprised and thinking of his own mother. Ah, he would know her at once!

Then he thought—

"She will be dressed like that too, and her hair in the fashion. Oh God—oh God—what will she be like?"

Her face eluded him, he was bewildered, confused, then tried to console himself trusting to his instinct.

"I should know her—I'm sure I should," he thought passionately.

"Why has your mother come back?" he asked Bustianeddu once.

"Why? Because this is her own town. She was working at a dressmaker's in Turin. She got tired of it and came home."

There was a pause. Neither of the lads believed in the dressmaker at Turin, but they accepted the story. Anania even said—

"Then your father aught to make it up with her."

"No," said Bustianeddu, defending his father, "he's quite right. You see there was no necessity for her to go away, and work for her living!"

"Your father works himself. What's the shame of working?"

"My father keeps a shop," corrected the other.

"Well, what's she going to do now? And which of them will you live with?"

"Don't know," said Bustianeddu.

Daily, however, the stories became more interesting.

"No end of people come to my father to beg him to forgive her. Even our member of parliament! Grand-mother came yesterday. She said, 'Jesus forgave the Magdalen; remember, my son, that we are all born to die, and it's only our good deeds we can carry over there. Look at the condition of your house! Only the rats are at home in it.'"

"What did your father say?"

"He went away," said Bustianeddu with great indignation; "of course he went away!—for shame!"

Next day he related. "Even Aunt Tatàna has begun to meddle. She preaches long sermons. She said to my father, 'Fancy you are taking a friend as a guest. Oh, do take her! She's penitent. She will reform. If you won't take her back, who knows what will become of her! King Solomon had seventy women in his house, and he was the wisest man in the world!'"

"What did your father say."

"Hard as a stone. He said it was the women who made King Solomon foolish."

The skin-dealer never relented. His wife lived at the far side of the town near the school. She wore the costume again; but slightly altered, slightly embellished with tags and ribbons. Her dress proclaimed her a woman of equivocal character. The husband did not forgive, and she continued her own life.

Anania saw her whenever he went to the Gymnasium. She lived in a black house, the windows of which were outlined with white, the white lines ending in a large cross. There were four steps to the door, and the woman often sat on these steps sewing or embroidering. She was large and handsome, very dark, no longer young. In summer her head was bare, her raven locks raised high on a cushion above her low forehead. Round her long full throat she wore a handkerchief of grey silk.

When he saw her, Anania grew red. He felt a morbid kindness for her, yet often thought he hated her. He would have liked to go to his school another way so as to avoid the sight of her; but an occult and malignant force drew his steps always to that street.

VI

It was the Easter holiday time.

Anania, studying his Greek grammar as he paced the little path which divided the expanse of ashy green teazles, heard a rap at the gate. He had not the garden to himself. His father was there, hoeing and singing love songs of the poet Luca Cubeddu. Nanna was weeding, helped by Uncle Pera. Efès, in his usual condition, lay on the grass. The weather was almost hot. Rosy clouds chased each other over the milky heaven, disappearing behind the Cerulean summits of Monte Aliena. From the valley, as from an immense verdure-clad shell, indefinite sounds and perfumes rose into the sunny air.

Now and then Nanna raised herself upright putting her hand to her back. She blew kisses to the student. "Bless him!" she said tenderly. "There he is studying away like a little bishop! Who knows what he mayn't turn out! He'll be a judge, or an examining Inspector. All the girls of the place will be picking him up like a sugar plum! Ah, my poor back!"

"Get on with the weeds!" growled Uncle Pera, "or I'll break your back in good earnest. Get on with the weeds and let the boy alone."

"Bad luck to you, old tyrant! If I were a lass of fifteen, you wouldn't be talking like that!" she said, bending over the weeds; but after a minute she looked up again, blowing more kisses to Anania.

When the miller heard the knock he called out—

"Who's there?"

Anania and Efès, one from his book, the other from the grass, looked up with the same look of faint anxiety. Suppose it were Signor Carboni? Efès felt all the weight of his degradation when the benevolent padrone, who never worried him with useless reproaches, sat down and talked to him: Anania thought of his mother and remembered the incongruity between his position and that of Margherita whom he was yet daring to love. The knock was repeated.

"I'll go and see who it is," said Anania, running and tossing his book in the air to encourage himself.

"If it's the master," said Uncle Pera, "Efès must get up and pretend he's doing something. It's abominable to see him sprawling about like a dead dog."

Nanna emitted a growl and kilted her ragged petticoat round her red bare legs.

"Get up, you old blunderbuss!" continued Uncle Pera, attacking the sot, "get up and pretend you're some use!"

But the alarm subsided when Anania returned bringing a thin, pale, young man with a face like a scarecrow, dressed in the Fonni costume.

"I suppose you don't know him," said the student to his father; "I didn't! It's Zuanne Atonzu. What a big fellow he is!"

"Greetings, cousin!" said the miller. "Welcome! How's your mother?"

"She is well," said the young man laughing shyly.

"Why have you come?"

"I'm witness in a case at the Tribunal."

"What have you done with your horse? At the tavern? Why you've forgotten we're kin. Well? Are we too poor for you to lodge with us?"

"I wish I was as rich," smiled the youth.

"We'll send for the horse," said Anania, hiding his grammar in his pocket.

They went off together. Anania was childishly pleased at seeing this humble shepherd in his rough clothes which recalled to him a whole wild and far off world. Zuanne was overcome by shyness beholding this handsome young gentleman, fair and fresh with his white collar and splendid necktie.

"Mother, we want some coffee," called Anania from the street.

Then he took the guest to his own room and began to exhibit his possessions. Quaint furniture filled the long narrow room. The ceiling was of cane, whitewashed; there were two wooden chests like antique Venetian coffers, roughly carved with griffons, eagles, and fantastic flowers; a pyramidal chest of drawers, baskets suspended from the walls, and pictures in cork frames: in one corner a vessel of oil, in the other his bed covered with a quilt knitted by Aunt Tatàna. The window looked out on the courtyard elder; between the window and the bed was a little table with a green cover, and a white wood book-case, the corners of which had been carved by Maestro Pane in imitation of the chests. On the table were sundry books and much manuscript written by Anania; a few boxes strangely tied up, almanacs and a packet of Sardinian newspapers. All was tidy and very dean; sweet odours and waves of light entered by the window. The tiled floor was cracked in places, and a couple of elder leaves fluttered over it, chasing each other as if in play. A volume of Les Misérables lay open on the desk. Anania had intended to show everything to the visitor as to a long missed brother; but Zuanne's stupid expression as he opened and shut the mysterious boxes, damped his friend's enthusiasm.

Why had he brought this bumpkin into his little room? It was fragrant not only with the scent of honey, of fruit, of lavender which Aunt Tatàna hoarded in the chests, but also with the perfume of his lonely dreams. From its windows opening on the elder flower and the moss-grown roofs of neighbouring cottages, the world was opening for him, virgin and flowery like the untrodden mountains of the horizon. His pleasure had changed into disappointment.

Something had detached itself and fallen away from him, as a stone sometimes detaches itself from the rock, never to return. His native village, the past, the first years of his life, the homesick memories, the poetic affection for the brother of his adoption—all seemed to vanish in a flash.

"Let's go out," he said brusquely; and led the shepherd through the Nuoro streets, avoiding his schoolfellows lest they should ask who was this peasant walking awkwardly at his side. They passed before Signor Carboni's house. Suddenly appeared at the door a plump and rosy face, illuminated, it seemed, by reflection from a blouse of republican scarlet.

Anania snatched off his hat and the reflection of the blouse flamed on his face also. Margherita smiled, and never were the round cheeks of any maiden marked with more adorable dimples.

"Who's that woman!" asked Zuanne, the lout, when they had moved on.

"Woman? Why, she's a young girl! only nine months older than I am!" cried Anania.

Zuanne was much confused and said no more; but a most strange thing happened to Anania. His will became unable to keep his mouth shut; and he lied, knowing that he lied, but overwhelmed by felicity at the notion that what he said might have been true.

"That's my sweetheart," he said deliberately.

That evening, the olive-miller lounging in his kitchen, made Zuanne describe the ruins of Serrabile, an ancient city discovered near Fonni, and he asked whether there was any chance of treasure being found there. But Anania stood at the window of his little room, watching the slow rising of the moon between the black teeth of Orthobene.

At last he was alone! Night reigned, passionate and sweet. Already the cuckoo was filling the lonely valley with her palpitating cries. Ah! thus sadly did Anania feel his heart palpitate and cry, out of an infinite solitude.

Why had he told that lie? And why had the stupid shepherd said not a word on hearing the stupendous falsehood? Clearly he knew nothing of love—love for a superior creature, love without limit and without hope. But why had Anania stooped to a lie? For shame! He had calumniated Margherita, put himself further than ever from her. It must be the same spirit of vanity, the same desire of the marvellous, which once upon a time had made him tell Zuanne of an imaginary encounter with robbers. Ah! God!

He pressed his cold hands upon his burning cheeks; he fixed his eyes on the melancholy visage of the moon. He shuddered. Then he remembered a bright cold winter moon, the theft of the hundred lire, the figure of Margherita appearing before him like the shadow of a flower against the golden disc of the moon. Ah! his love must have dated from that night; only now after years and years had it burst forth breaking the stone beneath which it had lain buried, like a spring which can no longer keep its course below ground.

These similes of the flower against the moon, of the rising spring, came ready made to Anania. He was pleased with his poetic fancies, but they could not lay the remorse which tormented him. "How vile I am!" he thought; "vile enough to lie, and about her. Well, I may be successful at my books, I may become a great lawyer; but morally I shall never be anything but the son of that lost woman!"

He stood a long time at the window. Some one passed down the street singing, and somehow the song reawakened his memories of infancy and of Fonni, Fonni with its crimson sunsets! He fell into a dream, luminous and melancholy like the moon he was watching. He imagined himself still at Fonni. He had never gone to school, had never felt the shame of his birth. He was a shepherd, simple like Zuanne. And he saw himself standing at the extremity of the village, in a rosy summer twilight; and behold Margherita passed, Margherita she also poor and an exile in the mountain village, wearing that narrow skirt characteristic of the place, the amphora on her head, as if she were a woman out of the Bible. He called to her and she turned, radiant in the sunset dazzle, and she smiled to him rapturously.

"Where are you going, beauty?" he asked.

"I am going to the fountain."

"May I come with you?"

"Come, Nania."

He went. They walked together by the road high up on the shoulder of the valley in whose depth night was waiting, waiting till the purple should fade in the heavens and veils of shadow should fall upon all things. Together they descended to the fountain. Margherita set the amphora under the silver stream of gurgling water, and immediately it changed its tone to one of merriment, as if the descent into the jug had agreeably interrupted the eternal tedium. The two young things sat on a stone bench before the fountain, and they talked of love. The amphora filled, the water overflowed, and for some moments was quite silent as if listening to the lovers. And now the sky was grey and the veils of shadow had fallen on the higher peaks, the more luminous folds of the mountains. And as night enwrapped the valleys, the desire of Anania waxed bolder. He put his arm round the girl's waist, she laid her head on his shoulder, and he kissed her.

At this time Anania was seventeen. He had no friends and mixed little with his schoolfellows. He was painfully conscious of the stain upon his birth. Once overhearing the remark, "If I were he, I would not stay with my father," he fancied the words must refer to himself.

"That's it!" he thought; "why am I here with this man who betrayed my mother and flung her into a bad life? I don't exactly love him, and I certainly don't hate him, but what I ought is to despise him. He is not wicked; he's not completely trivial like the majority of our neighbours. Sometimes I feel quite fond of him, when I hear his simple talk about treasure hunting, when I see his respectful affection for his elderly wife, his unchanging fidelity to his master. But I ought to despise him! I wish to despise him! What claim has he on me? Did I ask him to bring me into the world? I ought certainly to leave him now I understand——"

But gratitude, affection, much confidence, bound him to Aunt Tatàna. She lived almost exclusively for him. She adored him, though she had not succeeded in making him what she would have liked, a pious and obedient boy, reverent of God and the king and the priests. She saw, alas I that he was wrong-headed and self-sufficient, but she loved him none the less. She laughed and jested with him; she taught him to dance; she amused him with all the gossip of the place. Every morning before he was up she brought him a cup of coffee. Every Sunday she promised him money if he would go to mass.

"I'm too sleepy," he would say. "I worked so hard last night."

"Go later," she would insist. Anania did not go, but Aunt Tatàna gave him the money all the same.

The day after his idyllic dream, woven of the moonlight which streamed in at his little window, Anania took Zuanne for a walk, starting with the intention of treating his friend to a cup of aniseed at the tavern.

"Who knows when we shall meet again!" sighed the shepherd. "When are you coming to see us?"

"I can't" said Anania, seeking an excuse, "I have to work so hard. I ought to finish with the Gymnasium this year."

"And then where are you going? To the continent?"

"Yes! to Rome!"

"There are a great many convents at Rome, aren't there? And more than a hundred churches."

"A good many more than a hundred. Who told you?"

"Your father, last night. He said when he was a soldier——"

"Are you to be a soldier?"

"No; my brother. I——" He interrupted himself.

They entered the tavern. It was empty, smelling of tobacco and spirits, swarming with flies.

A girl was sitting on the bench. She was dark, and very handsome, though untidy and dirty.

"Good-morning. Agata."

"What do you want?" she asked, getting up and turning familiarly to Anania.

"What would you like?" Anania asked the shepherd.

"I don't mind," said Zuanne embarrassed.

The girl mimicked him, looking Anania in the face. He returned her look. Zuanne grew red, and looked at the floor. When they came out he asked shyly.

"Is that one your sweetheart too?"

Anania was half-flattered, half-angry. "What makes you think that? Because she looked at me? Good gracious, what are eyes for? You intend to be a monk, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Zuanne simply.

"You're going to be a monk!" repeated Anania astounded. "Come along, then! we'll visit the churchyard. That's what will suit you."

"We shall all go there some day," said Zuanne gravely.

It was soon after Zuanne's visit that the boys at the Gymnasium acted a comedy. They had wanted Anania to take the part of the heroine, but he had obstinately refused. Nor did he repent his resolution, for when the night of the performance came he had a place in the second row of the spectators immediately behind his godfather (now Syndic of Nuoro) by whose side sat Margherita in a white hat and a red dress which shone like a flame.

The Captain of the Carabinieri, the Secretary of the Sub-Prefecture, the Assessor and the Director of the Gymnasium, sat in the front row with the Syndic and his resplendent daughter; but the young lady did not seem pleased with her company; she kept turning her head, though haughtily, to look at the students.

The hall had once been a convent church; now it was the theatre, exhibition-room, centre of reunion for all Nuoro. A curtain, not innocent of patches, concealed the stage, but it blew about in the wind and gave visions of boyish legs jumping and dancing. At last it was drawn with much difficulty and the comedy began.

The time was that of the Crusades, the scene an ancient and much turreted castle, of which, however, nothing was visible but one room containing a round mahogany table and six Vienna chairs.

The faithful Hermengild (a diminutive school-boy, his face rouged with red paper, his legs awkwardly astraddle, his costume one of Signora Carboni's dresses) was embroidering a scarf for the no less faithful Godfrey, a warrior away on some distant expedition.

"Here she pricks her finger," whispered Anania leaning towards Margherita.

She leaned towards him, hiding her laughter with her handkerchief.

The Captain of the Carabinieri seated by her side, turned his head slowly, and glared at the student. But Anania was so happy he wanted to laugh, and wanted to impart to Margherita all the joy which her nearness had waked in him.

At the sixth mocking criticism whispered by the little student, the Captain could endure no more.

"Hold your stupid tongue, will you?" he shouted. Anania shivered, and drew back as a snail withdraws into its shell. He was so angry that for some minutes he could neither hear nor see.

Hold your tongue. Exactly; he was not to be allowed to make his harmless jokes, not to be allowed to speak. Oh yes! he quite understood! He must not lift his eyes, because he was poor and dependent and a foundling. What was he doing here among all these great folk, among all these rich and courted young people? How had he dared to lean towards Margherita Carboni to whisper with her, to make trivial jokes for her smile? He was quite conscious of the triviality of his conversation. How could the son of an olive-miller, the son of an Olì, be expected to talk otherwise? "Hold your tongue, do!" the Captain had said.

Presently Anania revived. He looked contemptuously at the fringe of red hair round the Captain's bald head. He saw deformed ears and the end of a waxed moustache. He felt a ferocious wish to box the deformed ears as many times as there remained hairs on his hideous head. Margherita presently turned round, surprised by Anania's silence. Their eyes met. Seeing him depressed, Margherita's eyes became shadowed. Anania saw it and he smiled. In a moment they were both merry again. Margherita tried to give her attention to the stage, but felt that Anania was smiling still, and that his long, half-closed eyes were still fixed on her.

A delicate intoxication overpowered them both. After the comedy there was a farce at which Signor Carboni laughed immoderately. Margherita was vexed to see her father laughing like a baby. She had read that fashionable persons never attend to the play, still less are amused by it. The Secretary of the Sub-Prefecture frequently turned his back on the stage, and Margherita would have liked her father to do the same.

It was near midnight when Anania accompanied the Carboni's to their home. The Assessor—old and a babbler—walked with the Syndic, telling of an American medical discovery: that microbes are essential to the human organism. The boy and girl walked in front, laughing when they slipped on the cobbles of the miry streets. Other persons went by, laughing and chattering. The night was dark, warm, velvety. Now and then a breeze from the east came, went, returned wafting a wild perfume from the woods outside the town. Stars, infinite like human tears, sparkled in the limitless heaven. Jupiter flamed over Orthobene.

Who does not remember in his early youth some such night, some such hour? Stars quivering in the depths of a night more luminous than twilight, stars not seen but felt—ready to descend upon our brow; the brilliant bear like a golden chariot waiting to carry us to the land of dreams; a dark pathway; felicity so near, she can be grasped and retained for ever and for ever.

More than once Anania felt the girl's hand touch his. The mere thought that he might take it and press it seemed sacrilege. He felt a sort of double consciousness. He spoke yet seemed silent, his thoughts far away. He walked and stumbled yet seemed scarce to touch the earth. He laughed yet was sad almost to tears. He saw Margherita by his side, so near, that he might touch her, yet she appeared far away, intangible like the breath of the wind which went and came. She laughed and jested with him. In her eyes he had seen the reflection of his own distress; yet he told himself she could only regard him as a faithful dog. He thought—

"Could she guess I was consumed with the desire to press her hand she would cry out with horror; she would regard me then as a rabid dog."

What did they say to each other that starlit night, in the dark streets swept by the odorous breeze? He never was able to remember; but, for a long, long time the dull talk between the old Assessor and Signor Carboni remained in his mind.

At last, however, the Assessor's high nasal voice became silent. Margherita and Anania stopped, bid him good-night, went on their way; but now the boy felt himself awakened from a dream, once more solitary, sad and shy, stumbling in the darkened street. The Syndic had interposed his portly person between the poor young creatures!

"Bravo! bravo!" said he, "how did you like the play?"

"It was rot!" replied Anania.

"Bra—a—vo!" repeated the godfather. "You're a cruel critic."

"What else could you expect? Our Director's a fossil—he couldn't choose better. Life's not like that—never has been! If the theatre isn't like life, its ridiculous. If they must have chosen something mediæval, still it might have been something less absurd—something true, human, touching. They might have had Eleonora d'Arborea dying because she had helped the plague-stricken——

"But," said Signor Carboni, astonished by the boy's eloquence, "I don't think our theatre's equal to such a grandiose subject."

"Then a modern comedy would be better—something moving. These stupid legends have had their day," said Margherita, catching up Anania's tone.

"What, Miss? you too? Well, I agree they might have had something more interesting. What's that you said about the Director?"

"I said he's a fossil."

"Good Lord! Suppose I tell him?"

"I don't care! I'm going away next year."

"And pray where may you be going?"

Anania grew red, remembering he couldn't go anywhere without Signor Carboni's assistance. What did the question mean? Had his godfather forgotten? Was he mocking him? Did he want to make the boy feel the weight of his obligation, keeping him on tenter hooks, exhibiting him as at his patron's mercy?

"I don't know," he murmured.

"Do you really want to go, my lad? Then you shall, you shall. You're shaking your wings like a young bird. Oh! you shall fly—you shall fly!"

He made the gesture of throwing a bird in the air; then slapped his godson's shoulder. Anania heaved a sigh of relief. He felt as light as if he had really been launched in flight. Margherita laughed. That laugh vibrating in the stillness of the night seemed to Anania the rose-bush's obscure desire for the bird which perches on it to sing.

VII

Autumn drew on.

These were Anania's last days at home, and heavy weight of sentiment oppressed him. He was still the young bird joyfully ready for flight; but he was sad and tormented by vague fears of the unknown. What was the world like, which had already usurped his thoughts? And the adieu was painful to that humble world in which his childhood had monotonously passed, unstained by active grief, brightened by his evolving love for Margherita. The languor and sweetness of early autumn contributed to render him sentimental. Light clouds veiled the sky. Behind the mountains a vaporous horizon concealed yet suggested worlds of ineffable dream. The pale green twilights were brightened by rosy cloudlets, meandering slowly and interruptedly over the glaucous heaven. In the garden was the rustle, the odour of burning weeds; it seemed to Anania that something of his soul vanished in the smoke of these melancholy fires.

Good-bye! good-bye! gardens and orchards, guardians of the valley! Good-bye! distant roar of the torrent which announced the winter! Good-bye, cuckoo, which foretold the return of spring! Good-bye! grey and savage Orthobene with his holm-oaks outlined against the clouds like upstanding hairs on a sleeping giant. Good-bye! distant cerulean mountains! and good-bye, tranquil and kindly hearth, little room scented with fruit, with honey, and with dreams! Good-bye, humble companions, unconscious of their own ill-fortune, wicked old Uncle Pera, miserable Nanna and Efès, suffering Rebecca, extravagant Maestro Pane, crazy beggars, girls careless of their beauty, children born to want—all of them mean and distressful persons whom Anania did not love, whom he was leaving gladly, yet with a wrench.

And good-bye, Margherita! Light and sweetness among shadows, a rainbow in the cloud, a frame of pearl glorifying the dingy painting of dull memory I Margherita, good-bye!

The day of departure drew near. Aunt Tatàna made endless preparations. She provided shirts and socks, fruit, and cakes white as ivory, cheese, a fowl, dozens of salted eggs, wine, honey, raisins, saddle-bags, and baskets filled to the brim.

"But these are stores for a whole army!" said Anania.

"Hush, my son! You will find it all necessary. There you will have no one to care for you, poor child. Oh! what will become of you?"

"Never fear. I'll look after myself."

The miller and his wife had long, secret consultations and Anania guessed their tenor. One evening they went out together and he anxiously awaited their return.

Aunt Tatàna came in alone.

"Anania, where do you intend to go? To Cagliari or to Sassari?"

Till that moment he had expected to cross the sea: now he understood that some one had decided against that plan.

"Signor Carboni, I suppose?" he said, with ill-concealed bitterness and pride; "don't deny it. What's the good of keeping me in the dark? I see through you. Why won't he send me to the continent? I'll pay all his money back to him in the end."

"Bah!" said Aunt Tatàna alarmed by these symptoms of pride, "whatever have you taken into your head?"

Anania panted, bent his head over a book without seeing a word of it. The woman caressed him.

"Well, what do you wish, my son? Cagliari or Sassari? You mentioned them both yesterday. Why on earth should you go further? Jesus! Mary! The sea's a horrible thing! People get sick on the sea—so I have heard—sometimes they die. And the storms. Do you never think of the storms?"

"You don't understand," said Anania, turning his pages.

"You never said a word about it! You mustn't be so capricious. You can study just as well in Sardinia as on the continent? Why should you go to the continent?"

Ah yes, why? What did Aunt Tatàna know of his secret desires? It was not for the sake of his studies that he wanted to cross the sea. Had he not, since the first day, that sunny autumn day when Bustianeddu had led him to the Convent school, had he not been thinking of something very different from mere study?

However Aunt Tatàna's gentle talk calmed his annoyance.

"You are still a child, my son. At seventeen do you want to run about the world alone? Would you die at sea away from every one, or wither in a city which you tell me is as big as a forest? Go to Cagliari. Signor Carboni will give you introductions. He knows everybody at Cagliari, even a Marquis. Well, then, be reasonable. You shall go further when you are older. You are like a leveret just weaned. It leaves the form and runs away to the very wall of the tanca, then it comes back. Presently it goes further, and further still. It learns what it may do; it sees the path along which it will run. You must wait. Think how near we shall be, think how you can run back to us if anything goes wrong. At Christmas you'll be able to come back——"

"Very well. I'll go to Cagliari," said Anania.

Next day he began his leave-takings. He visited the Director of the Gymnasium, a priest who was a great friend of Aunt Tatàna's, the doctor, the Deputy; then the tailor, the grocer, and the shoemaker, Franziscu Carchide, the handsome young man who had been one of the habitués of the olive-mill. Carchide had, however, made a fortune, no one knew how; he had a big shop with five or six workmen, he dressed like a gentleman, talked affectedly and flirted with the young ladies whose feet he measured.

"Have you any commissions for Cagliari?" said Anania entering his shop.

"Send him a diamond ring," said one of the workmen, "for he's engaged to the Syndic's daughter."

"Well, why not?" said Carchide, with conceit. "Sit down, Anania."

But Anania, irritated by the joke which he thought an insult to Margherita, would not sit down and hurried away. As he went out he met the lad whom rumour called the padrone's son, a tall boy with blue eyes really very like Margherita's, but sadder.

"Good-bye, Antonino," said the student, and the other looked at him with flashes of hatred and envy in his melancholy pupils.

When he came in Anania told everything to Aunt Tatàna, who was preparing a sweetmeat, compounded of oranges, honey and almonds, for him to present to some great person at Cagliari.

"Look," said the boy, "your priest gave me a crown, and the doctor gave me two lire. I don't like to take it."

"Oh, bad child! It's the custom to give presents to a boy going away for the first time!" said the woman, shaking and stirring the slender strips of orange-peel in the shining copper saucepan. Strong smell of boiling honey perfumed the kitchen. Everywhere were little yellow baskets packed with the stores for the student. Anania sat down with the cat on his knee.

"I wonder where I shall be in a week? Stay quiet, Mussittu, put your tail down! Your priest read me such a long sermon."

"I suppose he told you to make your confession and take the Communion before starting?"

"That was necessary twenty years ago, when one went to Cagliari on a horse and took three days over it. It's not the fashion now!"

"You bad child! don't you believe in God? Holy Saint Catharine, what will become of you at Cagliari? I hope you'll anyhow go to La Sea (the cathedral), where there's a picture that does miracles. Cagliari's a very pious place. You won't speak against religion, I hope?"

"Never mind Cagliari! Every one believes what he can and what he likes. I venerate God more in my heart than all the hypocrites."

These words were somewhat consolatory to the good woman. She told him the Bible story of Eli, and then let him continue the description of his visits.

The kitten had climbed on his shoulder and was licking his ear, tickling him in a way that somehow reminded him of Margherita. He was telling the vulgar joke about Carchide's engagement when Nanna came in, Aunt Tatàna having sent her to buy comfits for her sweetmeat. Her skirt was torn, and she looked even worse than usual, as she stood unrolling her package and trying to listen to the conversation.

"Did you hear," said simple Aunt Tatàna, "that horrid Franziscu Carchide wants to marry Margherita Carboni?"

"No, that's not what I said!" cried Anania.

"Oh, I know Franziscu," said Nanna, "he's mad. He asked first for the doctor's daughter. They chased him out with the broom handle, and now he thinks he'll get Margherita because he made her shoes too small."

"He wants a kick in the face!" cried Anania jumping up, the cat round his neck.

Nanna looked at him, her little eyes shining shrewdly.

"That's what I say. But there's an officer, a general I think, who wants to marry Margherita. No, I say, she's a rose and she must marry a pink—fresh and sweet, both of them. Take it!" she went on offering a comfit to Anania. He drew back, while the kitten vainly stretched its paw to the little white object.

"Keep off! You smell like a wine barrel!" said the boy, and Nanna staggered and dropped all her comfits on the floor.

"My pink!" she said coaxingly. "You shall be Margherita's pink! Why are you going away? But I know! it's to become a judge——"

Anania laughed and picked up the comfits.

"And all the girls are to pick me up like a sugar plum, isn't that it?"

He danced the kitten up and down, feeling quite affectionate to Nanna. Then suddenly became very gloomy. Who was the officer who wanted to marry Margherita? Was it that horrible Captain with the red neck who had said, "Hold your tongue, do!" Then he thought of something still worse. Margherita married to some young man, handsome—rich—eternally lost to the poor student.

He set the cat down, and went away, shut himself up in his own room and looked out of the window. He was suffocating. It had never occurred to him that Margherita might marry.

"No, no!" he said, squeezing and shaking his head between his hands. "She mustn't marry. She must wait. She must wait till—till I——. But why should she wait? How could I marry her? I am the son of a lost woman. I have no mission in life but to find my mother and draw her out of the abyss. Margherita could never stoop to me. But until I have fulfilled my mission, I need Margherita as I need a lighthouse. Afterwards—I can die content."

He did not think that his "mission" might be prolonged indefinitely and without success. It did occur to him that he might aspire to Margherita if he were to renounce his mission; but this seemed monstrous, and he put the idea away.

The thought of finding his mother had grown and developed with his growth. It palpitated with his heart, vibrated with his nerves, flowed with his blood. Only death could eradicate it; but it was of his mother's death that he thought when he wished that their meeting might not take place. The yearning for this solution, however, seemed to him great cowardice.

Later he asked himself if it were natural sentimentality which had created this thought of his mission; or whether the thought had made him sentimental. At present he accepted his preoccupations and sentiments without analysis. Accepting them thus childishly he rooted them so firmly in his soul and in his flesh, that no logic, no conscious reasoning could have sufficed to pluck them up.

He spent a fevered night. Already far distant was the time in which he had been content to see Margherita in the orchard garden, without caring for the colour of her hair, the grace of her bosom. Then his dreams had been all fantastic; raptures, meetings, flights to mysterious places, preferably to the white tablelands of the moon; but had he learned she was about to marry, it would have occasioned him no suffering. Once he had thought of persuading her to follow him to the mountains where they might poison themselves with a poison that would not disfigure their corpses; yes, they would lay themselves on the rocks among the wild flowers and the ivy, and they would die together; but into this dream entered the desire neither for a kiss nor for a pressure of the hand.

Afterwards had come the idyllic dream of the mountains at Fonni, of the lover's kiss, of Margherita's surrender. Then came the night of the acting, when the immediate vision of her hair, her eyes, her bosom, had caused him a delicate intoxication.

Now he was racked by the thought that she might be destined for another. In his fevered slumber he was in agony, in his dreams he was writing, writing, at a despairing letter which he never succeeded in bringing to a termination. Then, still dreaming, he remembered having composed a sonnet in dialect for her, and he decided on sending it. He awoke. He rose and flung the window wide. It was near dawn. The heaven was quite clear, a great red star was setting behind the black obelisk of Orthobene, like a dying flame on a candlestick of stone. Cocks were crowing, answering each other with rivalry of raucous cries, each apparently angry with the other, and all with the delay in the coming of the light. Anania looked at the sky; he yawned, and a cold shiver ran from his feet to his head. Oh God! what was happening to him? Part of his soul must detach itself from him, must remain here, under that clear heaven, in sight of those wild mountains whose crests were candlesticks for the stars. As a wayfarer, burdened by too heavy a load wishes to drop some of it so as more lightly to follow his path, so Anania felt a great longing to leave part of his secret with Margherita. He shut the window, seated himself at his table, trembling and yawning. "How cold!" he said aloud.

The sonnet was already written out on pink paper ruled with violet lines. It bore the poetic title "Margherita," and was in the form of an allegory, also highly poetic.

A most lovely marguerite grew in a green meadow. All the flowers admired her, but specially a pale and lowly buttercup which had grown by her side. The buttercup was sick with love for his beauteous neighbour. And lo! on a sweet spring morning, a lovely maiden passed through the meadow, and plucked the daisy, kissing it and hiding it in her bosom, never noticing that she had squashed the unhappy buttercup. But the buttercup seeing his adored neighbour snatched away was glad to die.

The poet read his verses with breaking heart, for instead of the symbolic maiden he saw a captain of Carabinieri with a long moustache. He folded the sheet, enclosed it in an envelope, but remained long undecided whether or no it should be sealed. What would Margherita think of it? Would she receive a sonnet from him? Yes; because when the postman rapped out his three terrible knocks, which seemed a knocking of the iron hand of destiny. Margherita would herself run to take in the letters. That is if she were at home at the time of the postman's coming. She would be there at midday certainly. Therefore it was necessary to post the poetic epistle early.

Feverish agitation preyed upon the student. He could neither hear nor see. He sealed the envelope, left the house, and roamed the dark, deserted streets like a somnambulist. What o'clock was it? He did not know. Cocks were still crowing behind the walls. The damp air smelt of straw. A poor woman who baked barley bread in the poorer houses, came and went on her fatiguing business. The steps of two tall black Carabinieri resounded on the pavement. There was no one else.

Though it was still dark, Anania feared he might be seen. He slunk along the wall, and the moment he had posted the letter he took to his heels. He saw the Carabinieri again at the end of the street, changed his direction and made his way home almost without noticing it. But he could not go in. He was choking. He wanted air, he wanted immensity, and again he ran, his hat in his hand, his feet hurrying towards the high road. But when he had reached it he was still unrelieved. The horizon was clouded, the great valley dark. He went on and up. Only when he was at the foot of Orthobene could he breathe, expanding his nostrils like a colt escaped from the halter. He would have liked to shout aloud for excitement and joy.

It was getting light. Thin azure veils covered the great damp valley. The last stars had vanished. Involuntarily Anania repeated the line—

and tried to forget what he had done, though the thought of it was causing him acute spasms of happiness.

He began the ascent of Orthobene, plucking the leaves, the tufts of grass, throwing stones and laughing aloud. He seemed mad. The turf smelt sweet. The heaven was the colour of cyclamen behind the immense purple rocks of Monte Albo. Anania stood upon a rock looking at the huge cloister of the far mountains, upon which streamed the delicate reflection of the sunrise. Suddenly he became pensive.

Good-bye! To-morrow he would be away beyond the mountains, and Margherita would think in vain of the forgotten buttercup who loved her and who was himself.

A finch sang from its wild nest in the heart of an ilex tree, expressing in its trembling note, all the solitude of the place and of the hour. The note found its echo in the young lad's soul; and he remembered the song of another little bird which had sung from out the damp leafage of a chestnut tree on a morning long ago. A morning long ago, over there, over there, on one of those far distant hills, perhaps on that rosy spur thrust out towards the morning! And again he saw the child merrily descending the slope, beside a sorrowful woman; the child all unconscious of sorrow.

"And now again," he said to himself, "I am glad to go, and who knows what may be awaiting me?"

He came in pale and weary.

"Where have you been, galanu meu (my treasure)? What took you out before sunrise?" asked Aunt Tatàna.

"Give me my coffee," replied Anania.

"Here it is. But what's the matter, dear heart? Cheer up. Get back your colour before you go to your godfather. What? Aren't you going to him to-day? What are you staring at? Has an ant got into your coffee?"

He was staring at a little gold bordered cup reserved exclusively for him. Good-bye, little cup! Just once more to-morrow, and then, Good-bye. A lump rose in his throat.

"I'll go to my godfather later. I've got to finish packing," he said, as if talking to the cup.

"Suppose we never see each other again?" he said to Aunt Tatàna. "Suppose I die before I come back? I daresay it would be better. What's the good of living to be old?"

Aunt Tatàna, looked at him anxiously, crossed herself and said, "Have you been having bad dreams last night? Why does my little lamb without wool talk like this? Have you the headache?"

"You don't understand!" he cried, springing to his feet. He went to his room and packed his books and dearest possessions, now and then his eyes turned to the window.

What would he see from the window of the room which awaited him at Cagliari? The sea? The real sea? The infinite distance of azure water, under the infinite distance of azure heaven? The thought of all that azure had a soothing effect. He repented having been cross to Aunt Tatàna. He was very ungrateful—still nerves are nerves and uncontrollable. But he would not be ungrateful. No! throw down portmanteau, books, boxes, rush to the kitchen, where the good woman is sweeping with an air half sad, half philosophical, grieving probably over the tragic words of her lamb without wool, fall upon her, enfold her and her broom in one embrace, and drag her into a vertiginous whirl of a dance!

"Bad boy, what's the matter with you?" cried the elderly woman palpitating with joy. And then in the middle of the dance he was off again, running and imitating the puffing of a train.

His packing done, he went on with his good-bye visits, going first to Maestro Pane. The old carpenter's shop, generally thronged, was at the moment deserted, and Anania had to wait some time sitting on the bench, his feet among the abundant shavings which strewed the floor. A light breeze blew in from the door, agitating the great cobwebs and the layers of sawdust.

At last Maestro Pane came in, put on an old soldier's tunic, its buttons carefully polished, and smiled with childish satisfaction when Anania told him he looked like a general.

"I have the helmet too," he said, "but when I put it on the children laugh. So you're off, my boy? God go with you and help you. I have nothing to give you."

"Never mind that, Maestro Pane."

"My heart is not wanting, but heart isn't enough. Well, when you're Doctor of Laws I'll make you a writing desk. I've got the pattern!"

He looked up a furniture catalogue and showed a splendid bureau with columns and carving.

"You think I can't do it? You don't know Maestro Pane. If I've not made much precious and expensive furniture it's only because I lack capital. It will be well done."

"I'm sure it will, and when I'm a doctor and a rich man I'll have you to make all the furniture of my palace."

"Will you really?" cried the old hunchback, delighted. "In how many years will it be?"

"That I can't tell you. Ten perhaps, or fifteen."

"Too long. I shall be in heaven by that time. In the workshop of the glorious St Joseph." (He crossed himself.)

"And tell me, what does this catalogue mean by furniture Lui-gi-de-ci-mo-quart-o," (Louis XIV.) he asked reading in syllables.

"He was a king," began Anania.

"I know that much. He was a king very fond of women," said the old man with a grin on his great toothless mouth.

"Maestro Pane, how do you know that?"

"Because I'm not a scholar do you think I know nothing? Victor Emmanuel liked hoeing his garden, and Queen Esther liked picking lavender in the fields, and that King Luigi liked girls."

"You seem to have read a great deal."

"I? I wish I had. My dear boy, all are not born under a lucky star, like you!"

Anania next knocked at Nanna's low door, but the old madman sitting on a stone close by told him she wasn't at home.

"I'm waiting for her myself, you must know. Last night Jesus Christ told me he was wanting a servant."

"Where did you see Jesus Christ?"

"Down there, in the lane. He had a long cloak and his shoes were burst. Why don't you give me a pair of shoes, Nania Atonzu?"

"They're too tight," said the boy, looking at his feet.

"Then go barefoot, strike you dead!" shouted the lunatic menacingly.

"Good-bye," said Anania; "I'm off to college."

"To Iglesias?"

"No, to Cagliari."

"There are pole cats and vampires at Iglesias. Well good-bye. Shake hands. I won't eat you. And where's that mother of yours now, I wonder?"

"Good-bye, take care of yourself," said Anania, freeing his hand from the madman's hard fingers.

"I'm going away myself; to a place where one feasts all day; beans, lentils, sheep's fry——"

"Good appetite to you. Good-bye."

"Eh!" cried the old man, when he had gone some distance, "write to me when you're gone, and don't fall into the hands of the scarlet women."

Anania had other friends to see including the beggar widow, who received him in a little chamber beautifully clean, and gave him a cup of first-rate coffee.

"Are you going to Rebecca?" she said jealously. "She's taken to begging. A shame, isn't it, for a girl like that? Tell her so."

"She's a cripple."

"Not she. She's cured. What are you looking at? My reaping hook?"

"Why's it hanging on the door?"

"For the vampire. When the vampire comes in at night she stops to count the teeth of the sickle. She can't count further than seven so she keeps beginning again. Then the dawn comes, and the moment she sees the light she flies off. Why do you laugh? It's quite true. God bless you, dear; good journey and do the place credit!" said the beggar, going with him to the street.

He went to Rebecca. Huddled up in her dark hole she seemed a wild beast sick in its den—though considerably more than twenty she was still the size of a child.

Seeing the lad, she flushed all over and offered him a bunch of black grapes on a rude cork-tray.

"Take them. I've nothing else!"

"Say 'thou'[12] to me," said Anania, taking one from the bunch.

"I'm not worthy. I'm not Margherita Carboni. I'm a poor wretch," said the girl excitedly. "Take the whole bunch. It's quite clean. I haven't touched it. Uncle Pera su gattu brought it."

"Uncle Pera?" said Anania, who believed all the scandals about the old gardener.

"Yes, poor old fellow. He always remembers me and brings me something every day. Last month I was ill, for my sores broke out again. Uncle Pera sent for the doctor and brought me my medicines himself. He's what my father ought to have been. But my father has left me! Well, never mind." (for she saw that touched Anania). "Why won't you take the whole bunch? It's really quite clean!"

"Give it to me. But where can I put it? Let me wrap it in this newspaper. I'm off to-morrow. Going to Cagliari. I do hope you'll get well."

"Good-bye," she said, tears in her eyes, "I wish I were going away."

Next Anania saw the handsome Agata at the tavern door so he stepped across to take leave of her.

"She smiled, her big eyes sparkling, and kissed her hand.

"Yes, it's good-bye," said Anania, coming closer.

"You've been flirting with that lump of dirt," she said, pointing to Rebecca. "Go away, you smell of her."

For some reason, Anania remembered Margherita, and felt shocked.

"She's jealous of me!" continued Agata, making eyes at him. "Look! she's watching you. The silly fool! She's always thinking of you because last New Year's Eve she drew you for a sweetheart."

"Oh, shut up! I'm off to-morrow. Can I do anything for you?"

"Take me with you!"

A shepherd, who had been drinking a cup of brandy, came out and pinched the girl as he passed.

"Sas manas siccas (wither your hands), skinned hare!" cried Agata. She beckoned Anania into the tavern, and asked what he would drink.

"Nothing. Good-bye! good-bye."

However, she fetched white wine, and, as he drank, leaned languidly against the bar watching him. She said, "I'm going to Cagliari as soon as I've bought a new dress with gold buttons for the chemisette. I'll go to Cagliari and get a place. We shall meet again. The devil! Here comes Antonino! he's my sweetheart, and is mad jealous of you. Ah, my jewel, good-bye! good-bye!"

Saying this she flung herself upon him with a wild cat spring and kissed him hotly on the lips. Then she pushed him away, and he went out, confounded and agitated, hurrying past Antonino whose look of hate he now understood. For some minutes he walked not knowing whither. He was new to kisses, and could only think of Margherita, the longing to see her making his blood boil.

"Oh!" he cried suddenly finding himself in the arms of another woman.

"Child of my heart!" cried Nanna, crying and laughing, and offering him a parcel, "are you really going? God go with you and bless you as he blesses the ears of corn. We shall see you again, but meantime—here take this, my darling. Don't refuse or I shall die of grief."

To prevent Nanna's death he accepted the parcel, but shuddered, feeling something very unpleasant on his cheek.

"There!" said Nanna, when she had kissed him, "I couldn't help it. It will wash off, dear. It won't prevent the flower-smelling kisses of the golden girls who will pick you up like a sugar plum."

Anania made no protests, but this thrust into reality restored his moral equilibrium and cancelled the burning sensation given him by the kiss of Agata.

When he got home he opened Nanna's parcel, and found it contained thirteen soldi (half-pence).

"I hope you've been to your godfather," said Aunt Tatàna.

"I'm going at once after dinner," he replied.

But after dinner he went into the courtyard and stretched himself on a mat under the elder tree, round which buzzed the bees and the flies. The air was warm. Between the boughs Anania saw great white clouds floating across the blue heaven. An infinite sweetness fell from those clouds. It seemed a rain of warm milk. Distant memories, wandering, changing, like the clouds, passed through his mind confused with recent impressions. Now he was back in the dreary landscape guarded by the sounding pines, where his father had ploughed and sown the padrone's corn. The sounding of the pines is like the voice of the sea. The sky is deeply, monotonously blue. Anania remembered the lines—whose? Baudelaire's perhaps?—

The eyes of Margherita? No, that was an insult to her! But it was satisfactory to be able to quote such an original verse—

Who is that behind the pine-tree? The postman with the red whiskers! On his head he wears a crow with outstretched wings. It is pecking hard at the poor man's forehead.

"Rat-tat-tat!" Margherita runs to the door, receives the pink letter, and begins to fly. Anania wants to follow her, but he can't move, can't move, can't speak. It's because the postman is shaking him.

"My son, it's three o'clock. When are you going to your godfather?" asks Aunt Tatàna.

She it is, not the postman, who is shaking him. Anania springs to his feet, one eye still shut, one cheek pale, the other red.

"I'm rather sleepy. It's because I was awake all last night. Very well, I'll go now."

He washed, combed his hair, spent half an hour in making his parting first at the side, then in the middle, then doing away with it altogether.

"What an idiot I am!" he thought, trying to control his feelings but in vain.

"Are you there still? When ever are you going?" called the good woman from the courtyard. He looked out of the window and asked—

"What shall I say to him?"

"Say you are going to-morrow. Say you'll get on well, that you'll always be a good boy."

"Amen. But what will he say to me?"

"He'll give you good advice."

"Won't he say anything about——"

"About what?"

"About money," said Anania in a whisper, putting his hand over his mouth.

"Bless me, what have you to do with money? You know nothing about it!" said the old woman raising her hands.

"Then I'll go."

On the contrary, he visited Bustianeddu; then went to the garden to take leave of Uncle Pera, also of the figs, the teazles, the far-reaching landscape.

He found the old gardener stretched on the grass, his stick by his side, at rest like its master.

"I'm off. Uncle Pera, good-bye. Keep well and take care of yourself."

"Eh?" said the old fellow who was growing blind and deaf.

"I'm going away!" shouted Anania. "I'm going to Cagliari to college."

"Going to sea? Oh yes, there's sea at Cagliari. God bless you, my lad. Old Uncle Pera has nothing to give you but his prayers."

Anania repented his frequent mockery of the old man, who at any rate was kind to Rebecca. He bent down, his hands on his knees. "Have you any commissions?"

The old man sat up, stared, then smiled.

"Commissions? I? But I'm going away myself very soon."

"You?" said the boy, amused at the mania all men, even decrepit ones, have for going away.

"Yes, I'm starting too."

"For what place. Uncle Pera?"

"Ah, for a distant one," said the old man, pointing to the horizon; "for eternity."

Not till evening, nor till he had passed and repassed vainly before Margherita's window did Anania knock and ask for his godfather.

"There's no one at home. They'll be back soon, if you'll wait," said the maid. "Why didn't you come earlier?"

"Because I do what I choose," said Anania entering.

"Oh, very well. It's better to waste your time with that scum Agata, than to come and visit your benefactors."

"Pshaw!" said Anania, leaning against the window.

The servant was insulting as she had been that long ago night when he and Bustianeddu had come for the basin of soup. Nothing was changed. He was still a dependent, an object of charity.

"But I'm grown up!" he thought. "I can renounce it all, go to work, be a soldier—anything that's not abject!"

He moved from the window, brushing against the writing desk, which was already illuminated by the moon. Among the papers, untidily tossed about, he spied a pink envelope lined with green.

The blood rushed to his face. His ears burned, he shook from head to foot. Mechanically he bent and took up the envelope. Yes, it was that one, torn and empty. He felt as if he were touching the remains of some sacred thing which had been violated and destroyed. It was all over! His soul was empty and torn to pieces like this envelope.

Suddenly, brightness flooded the room. Margherita had come in! He tried to drop the envelope, but perceived that the girl had seen it in his hand. Shame now was added to his grief.

"Good evening," said Margherita, placing a lamp on the desk; "they've left you in the dark."

"Good evening," he murmured. He resolved to explain, then to escape, never to be seen in this house again.

"Take a seat."

He looked at her in astonishment. Yes, it certainly was Margherita. At that moment he hated her.

"Forgive me," he stammered, "I didn't do it intentionally. I'm not a beast; but I saw this—this envelope, and I couldn't help—looking——"

"Is it yours?"

"Yes."

Margherita blushed and seemed confused; but Anania as if freed from a burden began to recover his wits. Wounded pride counselled him to assert the sonnet a jest. But Margherita in her walking dress, with her small waist and her bright green ribbon was so beautiful and so rosy that his hatred all disappeared. He wished he might put the lamp out and be alone with her in the moonlight, he wished he might fall at her feet and name her with sweetest names. But he couldn't, he couldn't! though he saw she also was raising and dropping her eyes in delicious alarm, expecting his cry of love.

"Did your father read it?" he whispered.

"Yes, and he laughed," she answered in the same tone.

"Did he laugh?"

"Yes, he laughed. Then he gave it to me and said, 'Who in the world has sent it?'"

"And you—you——?"

"I——"

They spoke anxiously and very low, already involved in a delicious conspiracy. Suddenly Margherita changed her voice.

"Oh, it's Papa! Anania is here," she cried, running to the door.

She hurried out, and the boy remained in the greatest perturbation. He felt the warm, soft hand of his godfather clasping his own, and he saw the blue eyes and the shining gold chain. But he hardly heard the good advice and the pleasantries with which Margherita's father favoured him.

Bitter doubt tormented him. Had Margherita understood the significance of the sonnet? She had said nothing to the point in those precious moments, which he had stupidly not turned to profit. Her agitation was not enough. It told nothing. No, he must really know more—know all.

"Know what?" he asked himself ruefully. "There's nothing to know." It was all useless. Even if she cared for him—but this was folly. Nothing was any good. Great emptiness surrounded him, and in this emptiness the voice of Signor Carboni lost itself and was unheard.

"You're lucky in having only your studies to mind," ended the godfather hearing a sigh from the boy. "Be cheerful; be a man and do us credit."

Margherita now came back accompanied by her mother, who in her turn was prodigal of counsel and encouragement. The girl went hither and thither about the room. She had dressed her hair coquettishly with a curl on her left temple. What was still more important, she had powdered herself. Eyes and lips were resplendent. She was a wonder; and Anania followed her about deliriously, his thoughts running on kisses. She must have understood, she must have been attracted by the fascination of his gaze, for when he was going away—she followed him to the great entrance door!

The court was bathed in moonlight, as it had been that night long ago, when the proud, sweet vision of her had waked his childishness to a sense of duty. So now she was proud and sweet. She stepped lightly, with a rustle of wings, ready to fly. Ah! she was a true angel! Anania thought himself still dreaming. Presently she would float up and vanish, and he would not be able to follow her. And the desire to put his arm round that slender waist with its green ribbon made him giddy.

"I shall never see her again!" he told himself; "I shall fall dead the instant she has shut the door!"

Margherita pulled the chain; then turned and extended her hand. She was pale.

"Good-bye. I'll write to you," she whispered.

"Good-bye!" said he, shivering with joy.

The contact of their hands perhaps caused some grand explosion. For they felt as it were a great booming in their ears, and the heat and the light of a thunderbolt fell round them, while—rapturously—they kissed each other.

VIII

At Cagliari Anania went through the Lyceum course, then two years at the University. He was studying Law. These years were like an intermezzo in his life; sweet and inspiriting music.

He began a new existence from the moment he set foot in the train, and was carried across the lonely plains, the dreariness of which was aggravated by autumn. He felt a new person clothed in a new vesture, soft and comfortable after one torn and narrow. Was it Margherita's kiss which made him so happy? or the good-bye to all the petty wretchednesses of the past? or the somewhat timorous joy of liberty with the thought of the unknown world to which he was hurrying? He neither knew nor sought to know. How beautiful, how easy was life! He felt strong, handsome, victorious. All women loved him, all the doors of life opened to his feet. Pride and enjoyment enwrapped his soul like an odorous, an intoxicating vapour, through which he discerned horizons as yet undreamed.

The whole way from Nuoro to Macomer, Anania stood in the corridor of the railway carriage, violently shaken by the jerks of the little train. Few persons got in or out at the desolate stations, where bored acacia trees seemed waiting for the train, to hurl upon it companies of fast yellowing leaves.

"Take them!" said the acacias to the train, "take them, contemptuous monster; we are stuck always here, and you move about. What more do you want?"

"Yes," thought the joyous student, "life is movement." And he understood the jocund strength of running water. Till now his soul had been a morass, its edge smothered in fetid weeds. Yes! the acacias stuck in the stagnant Sardinian solitudes knew the truth. Yes! move, run, hurry! that is to live!

"Is this devil of a train never going on!" asked the student during one of the interminable delays.

The railway official, who knew Anania by sight as he knew almost all his passengers, calmly lit his pipe and said, sucking its stem:—

"You'll arrive all in good time. If you're in a hurry get out and fly."

Ah t if he could fly! Anania looked at a black nuraghe on a high rock, like a nest of gigantic birds, and wished he could fly thither with Margherita; to be alone with her and with the memories which floated on the wild scent of the heather; alone, inspired by the shadows and by the phantoms of epic passions. Ah, how great he felt!