Something in the presence of those 'slow moving animals, breathing content,' reminded him of his little contadina. A sudden wish to speak to her again made him abandon his wood. Inland, a broad, wet ditch, half full of faded sea-heather, divided him from the ploughed fields. He jumped the ditch, and there, hard at work behind a hedgerow, he stumbled upon Isolina.
Her short blue gown was tucked up above her knees; her scarlet kerchief was hanging loose from her hair; she was digging away like a man, and her bright, childish face was all rosy and warm with the exertion. She nodded in the most friendly fashion to Dino as he came nearer, but time was too precious to be wasted on mere talk this busy morning. Only, as he moved away again, she held her spade suspended in the air for a moment, and her round cheeks grew pinker still as she said, 'As you pass through the farther field, will you greet my Pio for me? Give him tanti saluti, for I have not seen him to-day.'
'Shall I tell him I left you making the cat hole bigger?' asked Dino, beginning to laugh.
Her white teeth flashed. 'Tell him to dig away at his own end of it.' And presently Dino heard her voice singing as he strolled away between the moist brown furrows.
He had no difficulty in finding Pio, a short, thick-set contadino, with a smiling, good-natured face below its thatch of thick, irregularly-clipped hair, brown hair burnt red by the sun. His face was tanned to the colour of yellow bricks, except at the temples and behind the ears, where there were bits of white skin. He wore a ring on his hand, and used the most singular gestures in speaking.
Dino sat down on the edge of the ditch among the weeds and grasses to watch him at his work. Valdez would have talked of common schools, perhaps of politics; would have tried most likely to drive some faint idea of social equality and the rights of labour into this sturdy peasant with the Figaro face. The more Dino looked at him the more remote he felt from any impulse of proselytising.
This idyllic love-making, with its simple interests and its simple cares; its messages sent from field to field;—its naïveté, its sincerity, its security,—ended by plunging Dino into the profoundest melancholy. For the first time he absolutely realised what was this thing which he had undertaken. He gazed at the young fellow beside him; he noted how the strong muscles played along his back as he bent to his work, and the vigorous vital grip of his horny hand.
'Will that piece of ditching be done to-morrow?' he asked suddenly.
The contadino straightened his shoulders and kicked aside a heavy clod. 'Na—ay. I'll be at work here all o' Friday, if the master doesn't put me at something else,' he said slowly.
At work here o' Friday, and Friday was the day of the review. Dino's whiter hand was lying across his knee; he clenched the fingers together with a sudden passion, and thrust his doubled fist into his pocket. His hand, in his own eyes, had seemed the hand of a corpse.