The fourth and fifth months passed and the gestation began to develop rapidly. Juliana's person, slender, supple, and flexible, enlarged and naturally conformed to her condition. She felt herself humiliated before me as by a disgraceful infirmity. A poignant suffering appeared on her face when she caught my eyes fixed on her heavy figure.
I felt overwhelmed, incapable of bearing any longer the weight of this miserable existence. Every morning, when I opened my eyes after an agitated slumber, I felt as if someone had given me a deep cup, saying: "If you wish to drink, if you wish to live to-day, you must shed into this cup the last drop of your heart's blood." At each awakening a repugnance, a disgust, an indefinable repulsion assailed me in the most secret recesses of my being. And yet I must live.
The days were cruelly long. Time scarcely passed: it fell drop by drop, lazily and heavily. And I still had the summer before me, part of the autumn, an eternity. I tried to imitate my brother, to aid him in the extensive agricultural labors that he had undertaken, to become enthusiastic with the fire of his faith. I remained on horseback for whole days, like a buttero; I tired myself out with manual labor, at some easy and monotonous employment; I sought to dull the point of my conscience by a prolonged contact with the men of the soil, simple and upright souls, those whom the moral precepts received from their ancestors prompted to perform their functions just as naturally as the corporeal organs performed theirs. Several times I went to visit Giovanni di Scordio, the hermit saint; I wished to hear his voice, I wished to interrogate him concerning his misfortunes, I wished to see once more his sad eyes and his sweet smile. But he hardly spoke; he was a little timid with me; he barely answered me by a few vague words; he did not love to speak of himself, he did not care to complain, he did not stop at the labor at which he was occupied. His hands, bony, dried, and sunburnt, that seemed as if cast in living bronze, were never idle, perhaps did not know fatigue. One day, I exclaimed:
"When will your hands ever rest?"
The good man looked down at his hands with a smile; he looked at the backs and then at the palms, turned them over and over in the sunlight. That look, that smile, that sunlight, that gesture, conferred on those great calloused hands a sovereign nobility. Hardened by the agricultural instruments, sanctified by the good they had shed, by the immense labor they had performed, those hands were now worthy of bearing the palm.
The old man crossed them on his breast, according to the Christian mortuary rites, and answered, without ceasing to smile:
"Very soon, signor, if it please God. When I am laid, in this fashion, in the coffin. Amen!"
XXII.
Every remedy was tried in vain. Labor did not solace me, did not console me, because it was excessive, unequal, irregular, feverish, frequently interrupted by periods of unconquerable inertia and depression.
My brother warned me: