X
For a long time these deeds aroused the vocal activity of the citizens and were a cause for quarrels. As Anna had been a witness of the last scene, several came to her to get the facts. She recounted her story with patience, and always in the same way. Her life from now on was entirely expended in religious practices, domestic duties, and in loving ministrations for her turtle. At the first signs of spring, it awoke from its condition of lethargy. One day, unexpectedly, it unsheathed from its shield the serpentine head and swung it weakly, while its feet remained in torpor. The little eyes were half covered with the eyelids. The animal, perhaps no longer conscious of being a captive, pushed by the need to find food, as in the sand of its native wood, moved at length with a lazy and uncertain effort, while feeling the ground with its feet.
Anna, in the presence of this reawakening, was filled with an ineffable tenderness, and looked on with eyes wet with tears. Then she took the turtle, laid it upon her bed, and offered it some green leaves. The turtle hesitated to touch the leaves, and in opening its jaws showed its fleshy tongue, like that of a parrot. The covering of the neck and claws seemed to be the flaccid and yellowish membrane of a dead body. The woman, at this sight, felt herself overcome with a great tenderness; and to restore her beloved she caressed it as would a mother a convalescent child. She greased with sweet oil the bony shield, and as the sun beat down upon it the polished sections shone with beauty.
Among such cares passed the months of spring. But Zacchiele, counselled by the spring season to greater pursuit of love, beset the woman with such tender supplications that he had at last from her a solemn promise. The nuptials should be celebrated the day preceding the nativity of Christ.
Then the idyl reblossomed. While Anna attended to her needlework for her trousseau, Zacchiele read in a loud voice the story of the New Testament. The marriage at Cana, the miracles of the Redeemer, the dead of Nain, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the liberation of the daughter of Cainan, the ten lepers, the blind-born, the resurrection of the Nazarene, all of those miraculous narrations ravished the soul of the woman. And she pondered long on Jesus who entered into Jerusalem riding on an ass, while the people spread in His path their garments and waved palms.
In the room, the herb of thyme shed odour from an earthen vase. The turtle came sometimes to the seamstress and caught in its mouth the hem of the cloth, or chewed the leather of her shoe. One day Zacchiele, while reading the parable of the Prodigal Son, feeling suddenly something soft under his feet, through an involuntary motion of fright, gave a kick, and the turtle, struck against the wall, fell back upside down. Its dorsal shell burst in many places, while a little blood appeared on one of its claws, which the animal waved fruitlessly in an effort to regain its correct position.
In spite of the fact that the unhappy lover showed himself contrite and even inconsolable, Anna, after that day, locked herself in a kind of diffident severity, scarcely spoke, and no longer wished to hear his reading. And thus the Prodigal Son was left forever under the trees with the acorns to watch his master’s pigs.