"Have the Dejases been here?"
"Oh, yes! They've been here, both of them, mother and son. Brontu has been here twice. Oh, they all come!" she said desperately, "but what good does it do? They can't cure him; they can't give him either life or death."
"Either one would be equally a blessing or a curse to him," said Isidoro, carefully wrapping his red handkerchief around the vial of oil.
"As they are for most of us!" said the woman.
Soon after, the doctor arrived in a shrunken overcoat, with the collar turned up. He had been drinking already, and smelled strong of spirits; his lips were white, and he puffed, and spat about, sometimes over himself. He seemed somewhat startled, however, when he saw his patient's condition.
"What the devil's the matter with you?" he demanded roughly. "Your side? your side? You've got the devil in your side. Let's have a look." He threw back the covers, exposing Giacobbe's hairy chest; passing his hand up and down his side, he listened with his ear close to the patient's back. "It's all nonsense," he said. "You've worked yourself up like some old woman." Then he replaced the covers carelessly, and went out. At the door, however, he turned and fixed Aunt Anna-Rosa with his eye.
"Woman," he said, "let him see the priest at once; he has pneumonia."
At dusk Giacobbe confessed; then he called his sister. "Anna-Ro," he said, "Priest Elias is going to Nuoro with you too. You must be sure to have a carriage on account of the cold."
It was, in fact, snowing then, and the big room was filled with the white reflected light.
Priest Elias looked attentively at Aunt Anna-Rosa, for whom he had an especially tender feeling on account of a fancied resemblance to his mother. The poor little black-robed figure seemed to him to have shrunken in the past few days, and now she was hanging her head in a pitiful, shamefaced way; bowed with mortification at her "little brother's" disgrace.