JELI, THE SHEPHERD.
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JELI, THE SHEPHERD.
JELI, THE SHEPHERD.
JELI, who had charge of the horses, was thirteen when he first became acquainted with the young gentleman, Don Alfonso, But he was so small that he did not come up to the belly of the old mare Bianca, who carried the big bell for the drove. Wherever his animals wandered for their pasturage, here and there, on the mountains and down in the plain, he was always to be found erect and motionless on some eminence or squatting on some big rock.
His friend, Don Alfonso, while he was at his country seat, went to find him all the days that God sent to Tebidi, and shared with him his piece of chocolate and shepherd's barley-bread and the fruit stolen in the neighborhood.
At first Jeli called the young nobleman eccellenza—your excellence—as is the custom in Sicily, but after they had had one good quarrel their friendship was established on a solid basis. Jeli taught his friend how to climb up to the magpies' nests on the tiptop of the walnut-trees, higher than the campanile of Licodia, to knock down a sparrow on the wing with a stone, and to mount with one spring on the bare backs of his half-wild animals, seizing by the mane the first that came within reach, without being frightened by the wrathful whinnyings and the desperate leaps of the untrained colts.
Ah! the delightful gallops across the mown fields with their hair flying in the wind; the lovely April days when the wind billowed the green grass and the horses neighed in the pastures; the glorious summer noons when the whitening fields lay silent under the cloudy sky, and the crickets crackled among the clods as though the stubble were on fire; the bright wintry sky seen through the naked branches of the almond trees shivering under the north wind, and the narrow path sounding frozen under the horses' hoofs, and the larks singing on high in the warmth, in the azure; the delicious summer afternoons that passed slowly, slowly, like the clouds; the sweet odor of the hay in which they plunged their elbows, and the melancholy humming of the evening insects, and those two notes of Jeli's zufolo or whistle, always the same—iuh iuh!—making one think of distant things, of the feast of Saint John, of Christmas eve, of the dawn of the scampagnata,[1] of all those great events of the past which seemed sad, so distant were they, and made you look up with moistened eyes as if all the stars that were kindling in heaven poured showers into your heart and made it overflow!
Jeli, himself, did not suffer from any such melancholy; he squatted on the side of the hill with puffed-out cheeks, quite intent on sounding his iuh! iuh! iuh! Then he would bring together his drove by dint of shouts and stones, and drive them into the stable beyond the "poggio alla Croce."[2]
Out of breath he sould mount the hillside beyond the valley, and sometimes shout to his friend Alfonso,—
"Call the dog! ohè! Call the dog!" or "Fling a good-sized stone at the bay who's got the better of me and is slowly wandering away, dallying among the bushes of the valley," or "To-morrow bring me a big needle—one of gnà Lia's."
He could do all sorts of things with the needle, and he had a heap of odds and ends in his canvas bag, in case of need, to mend his trousers or the sleeves of his jacket; he also knew how to braid horse-hairs, and with the clay in the valley he used to wash out his own handkerchief which he wore around his neck when it was cold. In fact, provided he had his bag with him, he needed nothing in the world, whether he were in the woods of Resecone, or lost in the depths of the plain of Caltagirone. Gnà Lia used to say,—
"Do you see Jeli, the shepherd? He is always alone in the fields, as if he himself had been born a colt, and that's why he knows how to make the cross with his two hands!"[3]
Indeed, it is true that Jeli needed nothing, but everybody connected with the estate would have gladly helped him in any way because he was a serviceable lad, and there was always a chance of getting something from him. Gad Lia baked bread for him out of neighborly love, and he showed his gratitude by making her osier baskets for her eggs, reels of reeds, and other little things.
"Let us do as his animals do," said gnà Lia, "they scratch each other's backs."
At Tebidi every one had known him since he was a baby; there was no time when he wasn't seen among the tails of the horses pasturing in the "field of the lettighiere," and he had grown up, so to speak, under their eyes, though really no one ever saw him very much, for he was forever here and there, roaming about with his drove.
"He had rained down from heaven and the earth had taken him up," as the proverb has it; he was just one of those who have neither home nor relatives, His mamma was out at service at Vizzini, and he never saw her more than once a year when he went with his colts to the fair of San Giovanni; and the day that she died they came to call him—it was one Saturday evening—and on the following Monday Jeli was back with his drove, so that the contadino who had taken his place in looking after the horses might not lose a day's work; but the poor lad came back so upset that he kept letting the colts get into the ploughed land.
"Ohè! Jeli!" cried massaro Agrippino, from the threshing-floor. "You want to have a taste of the rope's end, do you, you son of a dog?"
Jeli started to run after his stray colts, and drove them mechanically toward the hill; but always before his eyes he saw his mamma with her head done up in the white handkerchief. She would never speak to him more!
His father was a cow-herd at Ragoleti, beyond Licodia, "where the malaria could be harvested," as the peasants of that region say, meaning to signify its density; but in the malarious lands the pasturage is fat and cows do not catch the fever. Jeli for that reason stayed in the fields all the year long, either at Don Ferrante's, or in the enclosure of la Commenda, or in the valley of il Jacitano, and the hunters or travellers who took cross-cut over the country saw him in this place or in that, like a dog without a master.
He did not suffer from this state of things because he was accustomed to be with his horses, as they moved about leisurely nibbling the clover, and with the birds who flew around him in bevies, while the sun accomplished his daily journey, slowly, slowly, until the shadows grew long and then vanished; he had time to watch the clouds pile up on the horizon, one behind another, and imagine them mountains and valleys; he knew how the wind blew when it brought thunder-showers, and what color the clouds were when it was going to snow. Everything had its aspect and significance, and his eyes and ears were kept on the alert all day long. In the same way when toward sunset the young herdsman began to play his alder-whistle, the brown mare would come up, lazily cropping the clover, and also stand looking with great, pensive eyes.
The only place where he suffered a little from melancholy was in the desert lands of Passanitello, where not a grass-blade or a shrub is to be seen, and during the hot months not a bird flies. The horses there would cluster together with drooping heads to shade one another, and during the long days of the threshing that mighty silent radiance rained down without mitigation for sixteen hours. Wherever pasturage was abundant and the horses liked to loiter, the lad busied himself with something else—he would make reed-cages for the crickets, or carved pipes and little baskets of bulrushes; with four branches he could set up a shelter for himself when the North wind drove the long lines of crows through the valley, or, when the cicadæ fluttered their wings in the broiling sun over the parched stubble; he would roast acorns in the coals of his sumach fire and imagine they were chestnuts, or toast his thick slice of bread when it began to grow musty, because, when he was at Passanitello in winter, the roads were so bad that sometimes a fortnight would elapse without a single soul passing.
Don Alfonso, who had been kept in cotton by his parents, envied his friend Jeli the canvas bag in which he stored his effects,—his bread, his onions, his bottle of wine, his neckerchief for cold weather, his little hoard of rags and thread and needles, his little tin food-box and his flint; he envied him especially that superb spotted mare, that animal with rough forelock and wicked eyes, swelling her indignant nostrils like a fierce mastiff when anyone tried to mount her. Sometimes she would allow Jeli to get on her back and scratch her ears; she was jealous of him, and would come smelling round to find out what he was saying.
"Let the vajata be," Jeli would say, "She isn't ugly, but she doesn't know you."
After Scordu from Bucchiere took away the Calabrian which he had bought at San Giovanni's Fair, under agreement to keep her in the drove until vintage time, Zaino, the bay colt, orphaned, refused to be comforted and galloped over the mountain precipices with long, lamenting neighings, and its nose in the wind, Jeli ran behind it, calling to it with loud shouts, and the colt paused to listen with its head in the air, and its ears pricking back and forth, and switching its flanks with its tail.
"It's because they have carried off his mother, and he doesn't know what to make of it," observed the herdsman. "Now we must keep him in sight, for he would be capable of jumping over the precipice. That was the way I felt when my mamma died; I couldn't see with my eyes."
Then, after the colt began to try the clover and to make believe bite:—
"See! he is gradually beginning to forget . . . But this one will be sold, too. Horses are made to be sold, just as lambs are born to go to the butcher, and the clouds to bring the rain. Only the birds have nothing else to do but sing and fly all day."
These ideas did not come to him clear cut and in sequence one after the other, for it was rarely that he had anyone to talk with, and, therefore, he had no cause for haste in starting them up and disentangling them in the depths of his brain, where he was accustomed to let them sprout and grow gradually, as the twigs burgeon under the sun.
"Even the birds," he added, "have to hunt for food, and when the snow covers the ground they perish."
Then he pondered for a moment,—"You are like the birds; but when winter comes you can sit by the fire and do nothing."
But Don Alfonso replied that he too went to school and had to study. Jeli opened his eyes wide and was all ears, while the signorino began to read, and he looked at the book and at the young master himself with a suspicious air, listening with that slight winking of the eyelids which indicates intensity of attention in beasts little accustomed to mankind.
He was delighted with the poetry that caressed his ears with the harmony of an incomprehensible song, and occasionally he frowned, drew up his chin, and made it evident that a great mental operation was taking place within him; then he nodded "yes, yes," with a crafty smile, and scratched his head. Then when the signorino started to write so as to show how many things he knew how to do, Jeli could have staid whole days watching him; and suddenly he would look round suspiciously. He could not be persuaded that the words that were said either by him or by Don Alfonso could possibly be repeated on paper, and still more—those things that had not proceeded from their mouths, and he ended with that shrewd smile.
Every new idea which knocked for entrance at his head made him suspicious; he seemed to try it with the wild diffidence of his vajata, But he expressed no wonder at anything in the world; he might have been told that in cities horses rode in carriages,—he would have kept on that mask of oriental indifference which is the dignity of a Sicilian peasant. It would seem as if he intrenched himself instinctively in his ignorance, as if it were the force of poverty. Every time that he remained short of arguments he would repeat,—
"I do not know at all. I am poor," with that obstinate smile that was intended to be shrewd.
He had asked his friend Alfonso to write for him the name of Mara on a piece of paper that he had found somewhere, because it was his habit to pick up whatever he saw lying about and put into his packet of odds and ends. One day, after being rather quiet and locking round anxiously, he said, very gravely,—
"I'm in love with some one."
Alfonso, though he knew how to read, opened his eyes in astonishment.
"Yes," continued Jeli, "massaro Agrippino's daughter Mara, who used to be here; but now they're at Marineo, in that great house in the plain that you can see from the 'plain of the lettighiere' yonder."
"O you're going to get married, then?"
"Yes, when I'm grown up and have six onze a year wages. Mara knows nothing about it."
"Why, have n't you told her?"
Jeli shook his head and reflected. Then he opened his hoard and unfolded the paper which bore the written name.
"It must be that it says 'Mara'; Don Gesualdo, the campiere,[4] has read it; and fra Cola, when he came down here begging for beans."
"He who knows how to write," he went on saying, "is like one who preserves words in his tinder-box and can carry them in his pocket, and even send them this way and that."
"Now what are you going to do with that piece of paper that you can't read?" asked Alfonso.
Jeli shrugged his shoulders, but kept on carefully folding his written leaf to put away in his heap of odds and ends.
He had known la Mara ever since she was a little girl. Their acquaintance had begun in a pitched battle once when they met down in the valley, both of them after blackberries. The little girl, knowing that she was "within her rights," had seized Jeli by the neck as if he were a thief, For awhile they exchanged blows on the slope—"You one, I one,"—as the cooper does on the hoops of his barrels; but when they got tired of it they gradually calmed down, though they still had each other by the hair.
"Who are you?" demanded Mara.
And when Jeli with less breeding refused to tell who he was,—
"I am Mara, the daughter of Massaro Agrippino, who is the keeper of all these fields here."
Jeli then let his grasp relax, and the little girl set to work to pick up the blackberries that had fallen during their struggle, now and then glancing with curiosity at her antagonist.
Just beyond the bridge, on the edge of the orchard, there are lots of big berries," suggested the little maid, "and the hens are eating them."
Jeli meantime was creeping off stealthily, and Mara, after standing on tiptoe to watch him disappearing in the grove, turned her back and ran home as fast as her legs would carry her.
But from that day forth they began to be friends. Mara went with her hemp to spin on to the parapet of the little bridge, and Jeli would slowly drive his cattle toward the slopes of the poggio del Bandito. At first he kept at a distance, roving around and looking from afar, with suspicion in his face, but he kept gradually edging near, with the watchful gait of a dog used to stones. When at last he joined her, they remained long hours without speaking a word, Jeli attentively watching the intricate work of the stockings which Mara's mamma had hung round her neck, or she looking on while he carved his pretty zig-zags on the almond sticks. Then they would separate, he going one way, she the other, without saying a word, and the little girl as soon as she was in sight of her house would start to run, kicking high her petticoat with her little red legs.
When the prickly pears were ripe they would settle down in the thick of the bushes, peeling the figs all the livelong day. They would wander together under the immemorial walnuts, and Jeli would beat so many of the walnuts that they would shower down thick as hail, and the girl would tire herself out picking them up with jubilant shouts—more than she could carry; and then she would scamper away nimbly, holding up the two corners of her apron, bobbing like a little old woman.
During the winter time, Mara dared not put her nose out of doors, it was so cold. Sometimes toward evening could be seen the smoke of Jeli's fires of sumach wood, which he built on the Piano del lettighiere, or on the Poggio di Macca, so as not to perish of the cold, like the tomtits which he sometimes found in the morning behind some rock, or in the shelter of a clod. The horses also found pleasure in dangling their tails around the fire, and they would cuddle close together so as to be warmer.
In March, the larks came back to the plain, the sparrows to the roofs, the leaves and the nests to the hedges. Mara took up her habit of going about with Jeli in the soft grass among the flowering bushes under the still bare trees which were just beginning to show tender points of green. Jeli would make his way through the brambles like a bloodhound, so as to discover the nests of the blackbirds which would lock up to him in astonishment with their little keen eyes; the two children would carry, cuddled in their hearts, little wee rabbits just born, almost without fur, but already quick to move their long ears.
They would scour the fields in pursuit of the drove of horses, entering the plains behind the hay-gatherers, step for step with the herd, pausing every time that a mare stopped to pluck a mouthful of grass. At evening, when they got back to the bridge, they separated, he going in one direction, she in another, without saying good-by.
Thus they passed the whole summer. When the sun began to go down behind the Poggio alla Croce, the robin red-breasts also went toward the mountain, as it grew dark, following the light among the clumps of prickly pears. The crickets and cicadæ were no longer heard, and at that hour a great melancholy spread through the air.
About that time, to Jeli's tumble-down hovel came his father, the cowherd, who had caught the malaria at Ragoleti, and could scarcely dismount from the ass which brought him, Jeli started a fire quickly, and ran to "the hall" for some hen's eggs.
"Put a little straw down in front of the fire as soon as you can," said his father, "for I feel the fever returning."
The chill of the fever was so severe that compare Menu buried under his thick cloak, the saddie-bags of the ass and Jeli's sacks shook as the leaves do in November, in spite of the great blaze of branches which made his face white as a corpse.
The contadini of the farm came to ask him,—
"How do you think you feel, compare Menu?"
The poor man could only answer with a whine like a sucking puppy.
"It's a kind of malaria that kills more surely than a rifle bullet," said his friends, as they warmed their hands at the fire.
The doctor was called, but it was money thrown away, because the disease is one of those clear and evident ones which even a boy would know how to cure; unless the fever happens to be so severe that it will kill at any rate, a little quinine cures it quickly.
Compare Menu spent the eyes of his head for quinine but it was as good as thrown down a well.
"Take a good dose of ecalibbiso tea, which does not cost anything," suggested massaro Agrippino, "and if it doesn't work as well as quinine it doesn't ruin you by its cost."
So he took the decoction of eucaliptus, but the fever returned all the same, and even more violently. Jeli attended to his. father the best he knew how. Every morning before he went off with his colts, he left him his medicine all prepared in a drinking cup, his bundle of dry branches within reach, his eggs in the hot ashes, and he came back as early as he could in the afternoon with more wood for the night, and the bottle of wine and a little piece of mutton, which he had gone as far as Licodia to buy for him. The poor lad did everything as handily as a clever maiden would have done, and his father, following him with weary eyes in his operations about the hovel, sometimes smiled to think that the boy would be able to do for himself in case he were left alone in the world.
On days when the fever left him for a few hours, compare Menu would get up, all feeble as he was, and with his head wrapped in his handkerchief, would stagger out to the door to wait for Jeli while the sun was still warm. When Jeli dropped the bundle of wood at the doorsteps, and placed the bottle and the eggs on the table, he would say to him,—
"Put the eccalibbiso to boiling for to-night," or, "Remember that your aunt Agata has charge of your mother's money, when I shall be no more."
Jeli would nod "yes" with his head.
"It is hopeless," said massaro Agrippino, every time he came to see compare Menu and his fever. "His blood is all diseased by this time."
Compare Menu listened without winking, with his face whiter than his night-cap.
He now no longer got up. Jeli began to weep when he found himself not strong enough to help him turn from one side to the other; shortly after compare Menu lay perfectly still. The last words that he spoke to his boy were,—
"When I am dead, go to the owner of the cows at Ragoleti and let him give you the three onze and the twelve tumoli of corn, which are my due from March till now."
"No," replied Jeli, "it's only two onze and a half, because you left the cows more than a month ago, and one must be fair to one's padrone."
"True!" agreed compare Menu, closing his eyes.
"Now I am quite alone in the world, like a lost colt which the wolves may eat!" said Jeli to himself, when his father had been carried off to the cemetery of Licodia.
Mara had been one of those who came to see the dead man's house with that morbid curiosity which is excited by horrible things.
"Do you see how I am left?" asked Jeli, but the girl drew back so frightened that he could not induce her to step inside the house where the dead man had been.
Jeli went to receive the money due his father, and then he started off with his drove for Passanitello, where the grass was already tall on the fallow-land, and the fodder was abundant; therefore, the colts remained there for some time in pasture.
Meantime Jeli had been growing into a big lad, and Mara also must be grown tall, he often thought to himself, while he played on his zufalo; and when he returned to Tebidi after some little time, slowly driving forward the mares through the dangerous paths of "Uncle Cosimo's Fountain," he scanned the little bridge down in the valley, and the hovel in the Valle del Jacitano, and the roof of "the Hall" where the pigeons were always flying.
But at that time the sadrone had dismissed massaro Agrippino, and all Mara's family were just on the point of moving away.
Jeli found the girl, who had grown tall and very pretty, standing at the entrance of the yard watching the furniture and things, which they were loading on the cart. The empty room seemed to him more gloomy and smoky than ever before. The table, the commode and the images of the Virgin and of Saint John, and even the nails for hanging up the gourds for seed had left on the walls the marks where they had been for so many years.
"We are going away," said Mara, when she saw him looking around. "We are going down to Marineo, where the great house stands in the plain."
Jeli took hold and helped massaro Agrip- . pino and la gà Lia load up the cart, and when there was nothing else to carry out of the room he went and sat down with Mara on the edge of the watering-trough.
"Even houses," he remarked, when he saw the last hamper piled on, "even houses, when anything is taken away from them, do not any longer seem the same."
"At Marineo," replied Mara, "we shall have much better rooms, mamma says, and large as the cheese house."
"Now that you are going away, I shall not want to come here any more; it seems to me as if winter had come back—to see that door closed."
"At Marineo we shall find other friends, Pudda la rossa and the campiere's daughter; it will be jolly there; they have more than eighty harvesters in the season, and the bag-pipes, and they dance on the threshing-floor."
Massaro Agrippino and his wife had gone off with the cart. Mara ran behind them, full of joyous excitement, carrying the baskets with the pigeons. Jeli was going to accompany her as far as the little bridge; and when Mara was just on the point of disappearing down the valley he called after her, "Mara! oh! Mara!"
"What do you want?' demanded Mara.
He knew not what he wanted.
"Oh! what will you do here all alone?" asked the girl.
"I shall stay with the colts."
Mara ran skipping away, and he stood there as if rooted to the spot so as to catch the last sounds of the cart rattling over the stones.
The sun was just resting on the high rocks of the Poggio alla Croce, the gray crests of the olive trees were shading into the twilight and over the vast campagna far away, nothing was heard except the tinkling bell of "Bianca" in the gathering stillness.
Mara, now that she was in the midst of new faces and amid all the bustle of the grape gathering, forgot about Jeli; but he was always thinking about her, because he had nothing else to do in the long days that he spent looking at the horses' tails. There was now no special reason for him to go down into the valley beyond the bridge, and no one ever saw him any more at the farm.
Thus it was that he was for some time ignorant that Mara had become betrothed—so much water had run and run under the bridge. The only time that he saw the girl was on the day of Saint John's Festa, when he went to the fair with his colts to sell; a festa which changed everything for him into poison, and caused the bread to fall out of his mouth by reason of an accident that befel one of the padrone's colts—the Lord deliver us!
On the day of the fair, the factor waited for the colts ever since dawn, walking impatiently up and down in his well-polished boots behind the groups of horses and mules that came filing in along the highway from this direction and that. It was al most time for the fair to close, and still Jeli with his animals was not in sight be yond the turn made by the highway. On the parched slopes of Calvario and the Mulino a vento—the Wind-Mill Mountain—there remained only a few droves of sheep gathered in a circle, with noses drooping and weary eyes, and a few yoke of oxen with long hair—of the kind that are sold to satisfy unpaid rent, waiting motionless under the boiling sun.
Yonder toward the valley, the bell of San Giovanni's was ringing for High Mass, accompanied by the long crackling of the fireworks.
Then the fair grounds seemed to spring up, and there ran a prolonged cry among the shops of the green grocers, clustered in the place called salita dei Galli, spreading through the country roads and seeming to return from the valley where the church stood.
"Viva San Giovanni!"
"Santo diavolone!" screamed the factor. "That assassin of a Jeli will make me lose the fair!"
The sheep lifted their heads in astonishment and began to bleat all at once, and the cattle also made a step or two, slowly looking around with their great, calm eyes.
The factor was in a rage because he was expected that day to pay the rent due for the large enclosures—as the contract expressed it, "when Saint John arrived under the elm;" and to make up the full sum, the profits on the sale of the colts was necessary. Meantime the colts and horses and mules were coming in such numbers as the good Lord had seen fit to make, all curried and shining and adorned with tassels and cockades and bells; and they were switching their tails to while away their tedium, and turning their heads toward every one who passed, and evidently waiting for some charitable soul willing to buy them.
"He must have gone to sleep on the way, the assassin!" yelled the factor, "and so made me lose the sale of my colts."
In reality, Jeli had travelled all night so that the colts might reach the fair fresh, and get a good position on their arrival; and he had reached the piano del Corvo, and the "three kings" had not yet set, but were shining over monte Arturo, There was a continuous procession of carts passing along the road, and people mounted on horses or mules going to the festa. Therefore, the young fellow kept his eyes open so that the colts, frightened by the unusual commotion, might not get away, but that he might keep them together along the ridge of the road behind la bianca, the white mare, who with the bell around her neck, always travelled straight ahead without minding anything.
From time to time, when the road ran over the crest of the hills, the bell of Saint John's could be heard in the distance, and in the darkness and silence of the plain the rumor of the festa was distinguishable, and along the whole road far away, wherever there were people on foot or on horseback going to Vizzini, were heard shouts of "Viva San Giovanni!" And the rockets rose up high in the air and brilliant behind the mountains of la Canzaria, like the rain of meteors in August.
"It is like Christmas Eve!" Jeli kept saying to the boy, who was helping him drive the herd. "And in every place there is feasting and light, and throughout the whole campagna you can see fireworks."
The boy was half asleep as he forced one leg after the other, and he made no response; but Jeli, who felt his blood stir within him at the sound of that bell, could not keep quiet, as if each one of those rockets that left their silent shining trails on the darkness behind the mountains burst forth from his soul.
"Mara also must be going to the festa of Saint John," he said, "because she goes every year."
And without caring because the boy made no reply,—
"Don't you know? Mara is now so big that she must be taller than her mother, and when I saw her last I could n't believe that it was the very same girl with whom I used to go after prickly pears and knock off the nuts.
And he began to sing at the top of his voice all the songs that he knew.
"Oh Alfio, why do you sleep?" he 56 UNDER THE SHADOW OF ETNA.
cried, when he was through with them. "Look out that you keep la bianca always behind you, look out!"
"No, I am not asleep," replied Alfio, with a hoarse voice.
"Do you see la puddara[5] which stands winking down at us yonder, as if they were firing up rockets also at Santa Domenica? It is almost sunrise; we shall reach the fair in time to secure a good position. Ah! morellino bello! you pretty little brownie! You shall have a new halter, that you shall, with red cockades for the fair; and so shall you, stellato![6]
Thus he went on, talking to one and another of his colts so that they might be encouraged hearing his voice in the darkness. But it grieved him to think that the stellato and the morellino were going to the fair to be sold.
"When they are sold, they'll go off with a new master, and we shan't see them any more in the herd, just as it was with Mara after she went to Marineo.
"Her father is well-to-do down there at Marineo, and when I was there, found myself, poor fellow that I was, sitting down to bread and wine and cheese, and everything good that God gives, and as if he were the factor himself, and he has the keys to everything, and I could eat up the whole place if I had wanted. Mara scarcely knew me, it had been so long since we had seen each other, and she cried out,—'Oh, look! there's Jeli the guardian of the horses, from Tebidi. He is like one who comes home from abroad, who only at the sight of the distant mountain-top is quick enough to recognize the country where he grew up." Gnà Lia didn't want me to speak to her daughter with the thee and the thou, because Mara had grown to be so big, and the people who don't know about things easily gossip. But Mara only laughed, and looked as if she had only just that minute been baking the bread, so rosy her face was; she was getting the dinner ready, and she was unfolding the tablecloth, and she seemed different. 'Oh, have you forgotten Tebidi?' I asked her as soon as gnà Lia went out to broach a fresh cask of wine. 'No, no, I haven't forgotten' said she. 'At Tebidi there was a bell with a campanile looking like the handle of a salt-cellar, and there used to be two stone cats which stood at the entrance of the garden.' I felt all through me those things that she was saying, Mara looked at me from head to heels, with her eyes wide open, and then she said,—'How tall you've grown!' and then she began to laugh, and then she patted me on the head—here!"
In this way Jeli, the guardian of the horses, came to lose his place; for just at that instant there suddenly appeared a coach, which had given no sign of its approach, because it had been slowly climbing the steep ascent, but started off at full speed as soon as it reached the level ground at the top, with a great cracking of whips and jingling of bells, as if it were carried by the devil himself. The colts, in alarm, galloped off quicker than a flash, as if there had been an earthquake, and all the shouts and cries and ohi! ohi! ohi's! of Jeli and the boy scarcely sufficed to collect them again around la bianca, who in spite of her gravity had shied away desperately with the bell around her neck.
When Jeli had counted over his animals he discovered that stellato was missing, and he buried his hands in his hair, because at that place the road ran along side a deep Tavine, and it was down in that ravine that stellato broke his back—a colt worth a dozen onze, like a dozen angels from Paradise! Weeping and shouting he went calling the colt ahu! ahu! It was too dark to see it. At last stellato replied from the bottom of the ravine with a melancholy neigh, as if it had human speech, poor creature!
"Oh, mamma mia!" cried Jeli and the boy, as they went to it. "Oh, what bad luck! mamma mia!"
The travellers on their way to the festa, hearing such a lamentation in the darkness, asked what they had lost, and then when they learned what had happened, went on their way.
The stellato remained motionless where it had fallen, with its legs in the air, and while Jeli was feeling it all over, weeping and talking to it as if he could make it understand, the poor creature stretched out its neck painfully and turned its head toward him, and then could be heard its breathing, cut short by its agony.
"Something must be broken!" mourned Jeli in despair, because nothing could be seen in the darkness; and the colt, inert as a rock, let its head fall back. Alfio, who remained on the road above in charge of the drove, had begun to view the matter more calmly, and had taken out his bread from his bag.
The sky by this time was beginning to grow pale, and the mountains all around seemed to be blossoming out, one after another, dark and high. From the bend in the road the country round about began to stand out, with monte del Calvario and monte del Mulino a vento—the Windmill Mountain—outlined against the dawn. They were still in shadow, but the flocks of sheep made white blurs, and as the herds of cattle grazing along the ridge of the mountains wandered hither and thither against the azure sky, it seemed as if the profile of the mountain itself were alive and full of motion.
The bell from the depths of the valley was no longer heard; travellers were growing less numerous, and those who passed along were in haste to reach the fair. Poor Jeli knew not what saint to call on in that solitude. Alfio himself could not help him in any way; so the boy continued breaking off the morsels of his loaf leisurely.
At last the factor was seen coming along mounted, cursing and swearing as he came, at seeing his animals stopped on the road. When Alfio saw him he ran off down the hill. But Jeli did not stir from the side of the stellato. The factor left his mule by the roadside, and climbed down into the ravine. He tried to help the colt to rise; he pulled him by the tail.
"Let him be," said Jeli, as white in the face as if it were himself whose back was broken. "Let him be! Don't you see that he can't move, poor creature."
The stellato, in fact, at every movement and at every attempt made to help him, set up a screech that seemed human. The factor fell on Jeli tooth and nail, and gave him as many kicks as there are angels and saints in Paradise. By this time Alfio had got his courage back, and had returned to the road, so that the animals might not be without a guardian, and he tried to excuse himself, saying, "'T wasn't my fault I was on ahead with the bianca."
"There's nothing more to be done," said the factor at last, having persuaded himself that it was all time lost. "Nothing can be done with this colt but to take his pelt; that's good for something."
Jeli began to tremble like a leaf when he saw the factor go and fetch his gun from the mule's pack.
"Get off of him, good-for-nothing!" shouted the factor. "I don't know what keeps me from laying you out beside this colt, which is worth more than you, in Spite of the swine's baptism which that thief of a priest gave you!"
The stellato, unable to move, turned its head, with its big, steady eyes, as if it understood every word, and its skin crisped in waves along the back-bone as if a chill ran over it.
In that way, the factor killed the stellato on the spot, so as at least to save his pelt, and the dull noise which the gun held at short range made, as the charge pierced the living flesh, Jeli thought he felt in his own heart.
"Now if you want a piece of advice from me," said the factor, as he left him there, "I'd not let the master lay eyes on you, in spite of that bit of wages due you, for you may be sure, he'd give it to you with a vengeance!"
The factor went off together with Alfio, taking along the other colts, which did not once turn round to see what had become of the stellato, but proceeded cropping the grass along the ridge. The poor stellato was left alone in the ravine waiting for the knacker to flay him, its eyes were still wide open, and its four legs stretched into the air, for to stretch them up was the only thing it could do.
Jeli, now that he had seen how the factor had been able to aim at the colt, as it painfully lifted its head in fear, and had been courageous enough to fire off the gun at it, no longer wept, but remained sitting on a rock looking at the stellato till the men came to take off the pelt. Now he might go at his own pleasure and enjoy the festa, or stand in the square all day long and see the gentlemen in the café, as best pleased him, for now he no longer had bread or a shelter, and it behooved him to find a new padrone, if any one would take him after the misfortune of the stellato. Thus go things in this world:—While Jeli was seeking a new employer, walking about with his bag over his shoulder and his staff in his hand, the band was playing gayly in the square, with plumes in their caps, and surrounded by a merry throng of white hats thick as flies, and the gentlemen were enjoying themselves as they sat at their coffee. All the people were dressed in holiday attire like the animals of the fair, and in one corner of the square was a lady, with a short gown and flesh-colored stockings, making her appear barelegged, and she was pounding on a great box before a great painted sheet on which appeared a slaughter of Christians with blood flowing in torrents, and, there among the throng, gazing with open mouth, was massaro Cola, whom he used to know when he was at Passanitello, and he told him that he would find him an employer, because compare Isidoro Macca was in want of a herdsman for his hogs.
"But I wouldn't say anything about stellato," recommended massaro Cola. "A misfortune like that might happen to any one in the world. But it is best not to talk about it."
So they went in search of compare Macca, who was at the ball, and while massaro Cola went to plead his cause, Jeli waited outside in the street in the midst of the throng, who were gazing in at the door of the hall. In the big room, there was a world of people jumping about enjoying themselves, all flushed and perspiring, and making a great trampling on the floor, while above all was heard the ron ron of the double bass, and as soon as one piece of music, costing a grano,[7] was finished they would all lift their fingers to signify that they wanted another; and the man of the double bass would make a cross with a piece of charcoal on the wall, to keep account to the last, and then begin over again.
"Those in there spend without thought," said Jeli, to himself. "That means that they have their pockets full and are not in trouble as I am, for lack of an employer, and if they sweat and tire themselves out in dancing, it is for their own pleasure, as if they were paid by the day."
Massaro Cola came back saying that compare Macca needed no one.
Then Jeli turned away, and walked off gloomily, gloomily.
Mara's home was toward Sant'Antonio, where the houses climb up the mountainside, facing the valley of la Canziria, all green with prickly pears, and with the mill-wheels churning the water into foam in the lowlands by the stream. But Jeli had n't the courage to go in that direction, now that they needed no one to watch the swine; and, making his way amid the throng which jostled him and pushed him without any thought of him, he seemed more alone than ever he had been when he was with his colts in the plains of Passanitello, and he felt like weeping.
At last massaro Agrippino, wandering about with his arms swinging, and enjoying the yest, fell in with him in the square, and shouted to him,—
"Oh! Jeli! oh!" and took him home.
Mara was in gala dress, with such long ear-tings that they hung down to her cheeks, and she was standing on the threshold with her hands folded, loaded with rings, waiting till it should grow dark, so as to go and see the fireworks.
"Qh!" said Mara to him, "so you have come also for the festa of Saint John!"
Jeli did not want to go in because he was shabbily dressed, but massaro Agrippino forced him in saying that it was not the first time they had ever seen each other, and that he knew that he had come to the fair with his employer's colts. Gnà Lia poured him out a good generous glass of wine, and wanted to take him with them to see the ifluminations, together with the comari and their other neighbors.
When they reached the square Jeli stood with open mouth, wondering at the spectacle; the whole square seemed a sea of fire as when the steppes are burning, and the reason was the great number of torches which the devout lighted under the eyes of the saint, who stood enjoying it all at the entrance of il Rosario—all black under his silver baldachin. The acolytes were coming and going amid the flames like so many demons, and there was, moreover, a woman in loose attire and with dishevelled hair, and with her eyes staring out of her head, also engaged in lighting the candles, and a priest in a black soutane and without a hat, like one rendered crazy by religion.
"There's the son of massaro Neri, the factor of Saloni, and he is spending more than ten lire for rockets," said gnà Lia, pointing to a young man who was going round through the square holding two rockets in each hand, just like candles, so that all the women devoured him with their eyes, and cried to him: "Viva San Giovanni!"
"His father is rich and owns more than twenty head of cattle," added massaro Agrippino.
Mara also knew well that he had carried the great banner in the procession, and held it as straight as a pillar—such a strong and handsome youth was he.
Massaro Neri's son seemed to have heard them, and he set off his rockets for Mara, making the wheel of fire before her, and after this part of the fireworks was over, he joined them, and took them to the ball and to the cosmorama, where the new world and the old world were to be seen depicted, and he paid for them all, even for Jeli, who followed behind the others like a masterless cur, to see massaro Neri's son dancing with Mara, who whirled round and crouched down like a dove on a roof, and held daintily up the corner of her apron, and massaro Neri's son gamboling like a colt, so that gv@ Lia wept like a child at the consolation of the sight, and massaro Agrippino nodded with his head to signify that all was going to his mind.
At last when they were all tired, they went out where the people were promenading, and they were carried away by the crowd as if they were in the midst of a torrent, and there they saw the transparencies lighted where the decapitation of Saint John was represented with such faithfulness that it would have moved the heart of a Turk, and the saint kicked out his legs like a goat under the hatchet. Near by the band was playing under a great wooden umbrella, all lighted up, and in the square there was such a crowd that one would have said never before had so many Christians come to the fair.
Mara went holding massaro Neri's son's arm, as if she were a fine lady, and she whispered into his ear and laughed, as if she were having a fine time. Jeli was utterly tired out, and actually went to sleep sitting on the sidewalk till the first bombs of the fireworks were sent up. At that moment Mara was still by the side of massaro Neri's son, leaning against him with her hands clasped on his shoulder, and in the different-colored lights from the fireworks she seemed now all white and now all rosy. When the last sparks died away in the darkness of the sky, massaro Neri's son turned toward her, with green light on his face, and gave her a kiss.
Jeli said nothing, but at that instant all that he had enjoyed till then changed into poison, and he began once more to think of his misfortunes, which he had for the moment forgotten—that he was without an employer—and knew not what to do, nor where to £0, that he had no food or shelter; that the dogs might eat him as they were eating the poor stellato left down in the bottom of the ravine, skinned to the hoofs!
Meantime, around him the people were still making merry in the darkness that had ensued; Mara, with her companions, was dancing and singing through the rock-paved streets as they turned homeward.
"Good-night! Good-night—buona notte!" shouted the people to one another, as they were left at their own doors. Mara shouted "good-night—buona notte!" in her musical voice, and it expressed her happiness, and massaro Neri's son did not see fit to leave her while massaro Agrippino and gnà Lia were disputing about the opening of the house door. No one gave Jeli a thought, till at last massaro Agrippino remembered him, and said,—
"And where are you going?"
"I don't know," said Jeli.
"Come and see me to-morrow and I will help you find a place. For tonight, go back to the square where we have been hearing the band play. Youll find a spot on some bench, and sleep out doors; you must be used to that."
Jeli was used to that, but what pained him was that Mara said nothing to him, but left him there at the door as if he were a beggar; and the next day when he came back to see massaro Agrippino, he was hardly alone with the girl before he said to her,—
"Oh, gnà Mara! How you forget old friends!"
"Oh, is that you, Jeli?" replied Mara. "No, I haven't forgotten you. But I was so tired after the fireworks!"
"You're in love with him aren't you—massaro Neri's son?" demanded Jeli, twirling his staff in his hands.
"What are you saying?" abruptly interposed gnà Mara. "My mother is there and hears everything you say."
Massaro Agrippino found him a place as shepherd at la Salonia, where massaro Neri was factor, but as Jeli was not very much skilled in taking care of sheep, he had to be content with far smaller wages than he had been having.
Now he attended faithfully to his flocks, and strove to learn how cheese is made—the ricotta and the caciocavallo, and all the other products of the flocks; but in the gossip that went on at eventide in the yard, among the shepherds and contadini, while the women were preparing the beans for the soup, if ever massaro Neri's son was mentioned as soon to marry massaro Agrippino's Mara, Jeli said not a word, and never dared open his mouth.
One time when the keeper insulted him, by saying, jestingly, that Mara refused to have anything more to do with him, after every one had declared that they were to be husband and wife, Jeli, as he went to the pot where the milk was boiling, replied, as he slowly shook in the rennet,—
"Now Mara has grown to be so pretty, she seems like a lady."
But as he was patient and laborious, and quickly got hold of the secrets of the business, even better than one who had been born to it, and as he was accustomed to be with animals, he came to love his sheep as if they were his own, and for this reason the distemper—il male—did not do so much damage at la Salonia, and the flock prospered, so that it was a delight for massaro Neri every time that he came to the estate, and the next year it was no great trouble to induce the padrone to increase Jeli's wages, so that he came to have as much as he got in looking out for the horses. And it was money well spent, for Jeli never thought of reckoning up the miles and miles that he travelled in search of the best pasturage for his flock, and if the sheep were with young or were sick, he would take them to his saddle-bags and carry the lambs in his arms, and: they would lick his face, thrusting their noses out of his pocket, and they would even suck his ears.
In the famous snow storm of Santa Lucia's night, the snow fell four handbreadths deep in the lago morto at la Salonia, and all around for miles and miles there was nothing else to be seen when day came, and nothing would have been left of the sheep but the ears, had not Jeli got up three or four times in the course of the night to drive the sheep into the yard, so that the poor beasts shook the snow from their backs and did not remain, as it were buried, as was the case in so many of the neighboring flocks—at least so massaro Agrippino said when he came to give a look to a field of beans which he had at la Salonia, and he also said that that story of massaro Neri's son marrying his daughter Mara was a lie made up of whole cloth—that Mara had some one else in mind.
"It was said they were to be married at Christmas," said Jeli.
"Nothing of the sort; they aren't to marry at all; it's all the gossip of envious folks who meddle with others' business," replied massaro Agrippino.
But the keeper, who had known about it for some time, having heard it talked about in town when he was there on Sunday, told the story as it really was, after massaro Agrippino had gone away.
"The engagement was broken because massaro Neri's son had learned that massaro Agrippino's Mara was keeping company with Don Alfonso, the signorino, who had known Mara from a little girl; and massaro Neri had declared that his son was to be a man respected as his father was, and the only horns he wanted in his house should be those of his oxen."
Jeli was present at this conversation, sitting with the others in the circle at breakfast, and at that instant was cutting his bread. He still said nothing, but his appetite left him for that day.
While he was driving his sheep out to pasture he began to think of Mara, as she had been when she was a little girl, when they were together all day long wandering through the valle del Jacitano and over the poggio alla Croce, and how she stood look ing at him, with her chin in the air, while he climbed up to the treetops after the birds' nests; and he thought also of Don Alfonso, who used to come and see him from the neighboring villa, and how they would stretch themselves out on their bellies, stirring up crickets' nests with straws. All these things he considered and reconsidered for hours and hours, as he sat on the edge of the brook, holding his knees between his arms, and thinking of the tall walnuts of Tebidi, and the thick bushes in the valleys and the slopes of the hills, green with sumachs, and the gray olive trees spreading through the valley like a fog, and the red-tiled roof of the house, and the campanile that looked like "a handle of a salt cellar" among the oranges of the garden.
Here the campagna stretched away naked, desert, speckled with dried grass, blending silently with the distant horizon.
In Spring the bean pods had begun to fill out when Mara came to la Salonia with her father and mother and the boy and the ass, to pick the beans, and they all came together to sleep at the farm for two or three days during the picking.
In this way Jeli saw the girl morning and evening, and they would sit together on the wall of the sheep-fold and talk, while the boy looked after the sheep.
"It seems as if I were at Tebidi again," said Mara, "when we were little things, and used to stand on the foot bridge.
Jeli also remembered everything, though he said little, being always a judicious youth, and of few words.
When the harvest was over, and the eve of parting had come, Mara went out to talk with the young man, just as he was making "ricotto cheese," and he was wholly intent in skimming the whey with his ladle:
"Now I'll say addio," said she, "for to morrow we return to Vizzini."
"How have the beans gone?"
"Bad! la lupa[8] has eaten them all this year."
"It depends on the rain which has been scarce," said Jeli. "We have had to kill even the lambs because there hasn't been enough feed for them. Over all of la Salonia there hasn't been three inches of grass."
"But that doesn't affect you. You always have your wages, good year or bad."
"Yes, that's so," said he. "But it disgusts me to give those poor creatures to the butcher."
"Do you remember when you came for the festa of Saint John, and were left without a padrone?"
"Yes, I remember."
"It was my father who got you a place here with massaro Neri."
"And why didn't you marry massaro Neri's son?"
"Because it was n't the will of God. My father has been unlucky," she continued, after a brief pause. "Since we came to Marineo, everything has gone ill with us. The beans, the corn, that piece of vineyard that we have yonder. Then my brother went off to the army, and we lost a mule that was worth forty onze."
"I know," said Jeli, "the bay mule."
"Now, that we have lost all our property, who would want to marry me?"
Mara was breaking up a twig of briar while she said this, with her chin in her bosom, and, with her elbow, she gently nudged Jeli's elbow without appearing to mean it. But Jeli, with his eyes on the churn, also made no response, and she went on,—
"At Tebidi they used to say that you and I would be husband and wife, do you remember?"
"Yes," said Jeli, and he laid his ladle on the top of the churn. "But I am a poor shepherd, and I can not pretend to a massaro's daughter like you."
La Mara remained silent for a little while, and then she said, "If you want me, I will willingly be yours."
"Really?"
"Yes, really."
"And what will massaro Agrippino say to it?"
"My father says that now that you know your trade, and since you are not one of those who waste their wages, but make one soldo into two, and do not eat to consume bread, in time you will come to have flocks of your own, and will be rich."
"If that is so," said Jeli, in conclusion, "I will gladly take you."
"There," said Mara, as soon as it had grown dark and the sheep were relapsing into silence, "if you want a kiss, I will give you one, because we are going to be husband and wife."
Jeli took one in "holy peace," and not knowing what to say, added, "I have always loved you, even when you were going to desert me for the son of massaro Neri."
But he had not the heart to speak of the other one.
"Don't you see? We were meant for one another," said Mara, in conclusion.
Massaro Agtippino, in fact, said "Yes," and gnà Lia put on a new gown, and she had a pair of velvet trousers made for their son-in-law. Mara was as lovely and fresh as a rose, with her white mantellina, reminding you of the Paschal lamb, and that amber necklace which made her neck look so white; so, when Jeli walked through the street at her side, he marched stiffly and erect, dressed in his new cloth and velvet suit, and he did not dare even blow his nose with his red silk handkerchief, lest he should make a fool of himself; and the neighbors and all who knew the story of Don Alfonso laughed in his face.
When Mara said "sissignore," and the priest made her Jeli's wife with a grand sign of the cross, Jeli took her home, and it seemed to him as if they had given him all the gold of the Madonna, and all the lands that he had seen with his eyes.
"Now that we are husband and wife," said he, when they reached their house, as he was sitting in front of her, and trying to appear very humble, "now that we are husband and wife, I may tell you that it does not seem to me true as you pretended—you might have had ever so many better husbands than I—so beautiful and gracious you are."
The poor fellow could not find anything else to say, and he could not contain his delight to see Mara setting and arranging everything through the house, and playing la padrona. He found it impossible to tear himself away to return to la Salonia; when he started Monday, he was very slow in arranging in the pack of the ass, his saddlebags, and his cloak, and his umbrella.
"You ought to come to la Salonia, yourself," he said to his wife, who was watching him from the door-step. "You ought to come with me."
But the young woman began to laugh, and replied that she was not born to look after sheep, and had no reason to go to la Salonia.
Truly, Mara was not born for tending sheep, and she was not accustomed to the January tramontana wind, which stiffens the hand on the staff, and it seems as if your fingers would drop off, or to furious storms that come, when the water penetrates to your very bones, and again, when the dust drives choking through the streets, when the sheep travel under the boiling sun, or to the hard bed on the ground, and the mouldy bread, and the long, silent, solitary days, when through the arid fields nothing else is seen in the distance but occasionally some sun-burned peasant driving his ass silently along over the white, interminable road.
Jeli knew at least that Mara was warm and comfortable under the quilts, or was spinning in front of the fire, talking with the women of the neighborhood, or was enjoying the sun on the balcony, while he was returning from the pasture tired and thirsty, or wet through with the rain, or when the wind drifted the snow back of his hut and put out his fire of branches.
Every month Mara went to receive the wages from the padrone, and they lacked neither eggs nor fowls, nor oil in the lamp, nor wine in the jug. Twice a month Jeli came home to see her, and she would stand on the balcony looking for him with her spindle in her hand, and after he had left the ass in the stable and removed his pack and filled the rack with oats, and placed the wood under the shed in the yard, or whatever he brought into the kitchen, Mara would help him hang his cloak on the nail and take off his leather leggings before the hearth, and pour him out a glass of wine, and set to work to boil the soup and get the table ready, quiet and thoughtful, like a good housewife, while talking of this thing and that,—of the brooding hen that was setting, of the cloth that was on the loom, of the calf which they were raising, never forgetting anything of what she had been doing.
Jeli, when he found himself at home, felt that he was more important than the pope.
But on the eve of Santa Barbara he came home unexpectedly late, when all the lights were out in the street and the town clock was striking midnight. He came in because the mare which the padrone had left out at pasture had been suddenly taken sick, and he saw that it was a case that required the services of the farrier quickly, and he had wanted to bring him to town in spite of the rain that was falling like a torrent, and the muddy roads into which he sunk half up to his knees.
Knock and call as loud as he might behind the door, he had to wait half an hour under the eaves, while the water ran out at his heels. At last his wife came to open for him, and began to scold worse than if it had been herself who had been obliged to wander across country in such a tempest.
"Oh, what's the matter?" she demanded, "How you frightened me coming at this time o' night! Does it seem to you a proper Christian time to come? To-mortow I shall be ill!"
"Go back to bed, I will start up a fire."
"No, I'll have to go and get some wood."
"«"I'll go."
"No, I say."
When Mara returned with the wood in her arms Jeli said to her, "Why did you leave the door to the yard open? Was there not enough wood in the kitchen?"
"No, I went to get it under the shed."
She let him kiss her, coldly, coldly, and turned her head in another direction.
"His wife lets him wait at the door," said the neighbors, "when there is another bird in the nest."
But Jeli knew nothing about the fact that his wife was untrue to him, nor did any one care to tell him, because it could surely be of no consequence, for he had taken the woman with a damaged reputation after massaro Neri's son had jilted her, because he knew of the story of Don Alfonso. But Jeli seemed to live happy and contented in the shame of it, and grew as fat as a pig; for the proverb has it "horns are lean but they make the house fat." At last, one time, the herdman's boy told it to him in his face, while they were scuffling about the pieces of cheese that had been stolen.
"Now that Don Alfonso has taken your wife you consider yourself his brother-in-law, and you are proud enough to be a crowned king with those horns on your head."
The factor and the keeper expected to see blood flow for those insulting words, but on the contrary Jeli stood stupefied, as if he had not heard, or as if it concerned him not, wearing the dull face of an ox whose horns really fitted him.
Now that Easter was at hand the factor sent all the men of the estate to confession, with the hope that through the fear of God they would not do any more stealing. Jeli also went, and at the church entrance sought for the boy with whom he had exchanged those hot words, and he threw his arms around his neck, saying,—
"The confessor has bade me pardon you; but I am not angry with you for such gossip; and if you will not steal any more of the cheese from me, I will not take any further notice of what you said to me in passion."
It was from that moment that they nick named him Corno d'ore—"Gold horns"—and the nickname stuck to him and all his, even after he had washed his horns in blood.
La Mara also went to confession and returned from the church all wrapped up in her mantellina, and with her eyes cast down, so that she seemed a genuine Santa Maria Maddelena. Jeli, who was silently waiting for her on the balcony, when he saw her coming in that way, seeming as if she had the Holy Presence in her heart, kept looking at her,—pale, pale from his foot to his head as if he saw her for the first time, or as if his Mara had been changed for him, and he seemed hardly to dare to lift his eyes to her while she was shaking the cloth and setting the table, calm and neat as ever.
Then after long thinking he put the question to her: "'"Is it true that you keep company with Don Alfonso?"
Mara looked him full in the face with those black eyes of hers and made the sign of the cross.
"Why do you want to make me commit a sin on this day?" she demanded.
"I did not believe it, because Don Alfonso and I were always together when we were boys, and there never passed a day that he did not come to Tebidi when he was in the country there; and then he is rich, and has bushels of money, and if he wanted women he might get married, nor would he lack anything, either clothes to wear, or bread to eat."
But Mara was really angry, and she began to scold so that the poor fellow did not dare lift his nose from his plate.
At last, so that that gift of God which they were eating might not turn into poison, Mara changed the conversation, and asked him if he had thought of weeding that little plot of flax which they had sowed in the bean field.
"Yes," replied Jeli, "and the flax will do well."
"If that is so," said Mara, "this spring I will make you two new shirts which will keep you warm."
In truth Jeli did not realize what "cuckold" meant, and he did not know what jealousy was. Every new thing found difficulty in getting into his head, and this became so great that, in making its way in, it played devilish work, especially when he saw his Mara before him so beautiful and white and neat, and how she had herself chosen him, and how he had thought about her so many years, and so many years, ever since he was a young boy, so that the day when they told him that she was going to marry some one else, he had had no heart to eat anything or to drink all day long.
Then again he thought of Don Alfonso, who had been his companion so many times, and how he had always brought him strange feeling within his heart. Don Alfonso had grown so tall that he no longer seemed the same person, and now he had a full beard, curly like his hair, and a velvet coat and a gold chain across his waistcoat, But he recognized Jeli, and patted him on the shoulder in salutation. He had come with the padrone of the estate and a number of friends to have a jollification while the sheep-shearing was in progress, and Mara also came unexpectedly, under the pretext that she was pregnant, and longed for some fresh ricotto.
It was a beautiful warm day in the pale fields, with the grain in flower and the long green rows of the vines; the sheep were gamboling and bleating for delight, at feeling themselves freed from all that weight of wool, and in the kitchen, the women had made a great fire to cook all the provisions that the padrone had brought for the dinner.
The gentlemen, while they were waiting, had sat down in the shade under the carob-trees, and were playing tambourines and bag-pipes, and dancing with the girls of the estate, as if they were all of the same class.
Jeli, meantime, went on with his work shearing the sheep, and felt something within him, without knowing what, like a thorn, like a nail, like a pair of shears, working within him, slowly, slowly, like a poison.
The padrone had ordered that they should kill a couple of goats, and the yeatling sheep, and some chickens, and a turkey cock. In fact, he was going to do things on a grand scale, and lavishly, so as to do honor to his friends; and while all those creatures were squealing under the death-agony, and the goats were screaming under the knife, Jeli felt his knees tremble, and little by little, it seemed to him that the wool that he was shearing, and the grass in which the sheep were leaping, were stained with blood.
"Don't go," he said to Mara, when Don Alfonso called her to come and dance with the rest. "Don't go, Mara."
"Why not?"
"I don't want you to go. Do not go."
"I hear them calling me."
He uttered not another intelligible word while he stayed with the sheep that he was shearing. Mara shrugged her shoulders, and went to dance. She was blushing with delight, and her two black eyes shone like two stars, and she smiled so that there was a gleam of white teeth, and all the gold ornaments tossed and scintillated on her wrists and on her bosom, so that she seemed like the Madonna herself.
Jeli had arisen to his full height, with the long shears in his hand, and white in face, as white as once he had seen his father, the cowherd, when he was trembling with fever in front of the fire in the hovel.
Suddenly, when he saw how Don Alfonso, with his curling beard and his velvet coat, and the gold chain at his waiscoat, took Mara by the hand to dance—then—only at that moment that he touched her did he fling himself on him and cut his throat with one stroke, as if he had been a goat. Later, while they were leading him off to the judge, bound, wholly unmanned, without daring to make the least resistance,—"How," said he, "should I not have killed him. He robbed me of my Mara!"