The next morning Giovanna was the first to awaken. Through a pane of glass set in the door came a faint, roseate, sunrise glow; and the early morning silence was broken only by the chattering of the swallows. Not yet fully aroused, her first sensations were agreeable; then, all at once it was as though a terrific clap of thunder had sounded in her ear. She remembered!
This was the day that was to decide her husband's fate. She knew for a certainty that he would be condemned, and yet she persisted in hoping still. It mattered very little to her whether or no he were guilty; probably she had not at any time troubled herself much with that aspect of the case, and what wholly concerned her now were the consequences. The thought of being parted, perhaps forever, from this man, young, strong, and active as a greyhound, with his caressing hands and ardent lips, was agony; and as the full consciousness of her misery came over her, she jumped out of bed, and began drawing on her clothes, saying breathlessly: "It is late, late, late."
Aunt Bachissia opened her little firefly eyes, and then she also got up; but she realised too clearly what that day, and the next, and the year following, and the next two, and five, and ten years would probably be like, to be in any haste to begin them. She dressed deliberately, plunged her hands into water, passed them across her face, and dried it, then carefully arranged the folds of her scarf about her head.
"It is late," repeated Giovanna. "Dear Lord, how late it is!" But her mother's calm demeanour presently quieted her. Aunt Bachissia went down to the kitchen and Giovanna followed. Aunt Bachissia prepared the café-au-lait and bread for Costantino (the two women were allowed to take food to the prisoner), placed them in a basket, and started for the jail, Giovanna still following.
The streets were deserted; the sun, just appearing above the granite peaks of Orthobene, filled the atmosphere with fine, rose-gold dust. The sky was so blue, the little birds so gay, and the air so still and fragrant, that it was like the early morning of some festal day, before the human bustle and the ringing of the church bells have disturbed the stillness and charm.
Giovanna, crossing the street that leads from the station—near which the Porrus lived—to the prison, gazed upon her own violet-coloured mountains in the distance, hemming in the wild valleys below like a setting of amethysts; she inhaled the delicious air filled with the perfume of growing things; she thought of her little slate-rock house, of her child, of her lost happiness, and it seemed as though her heart would burst.
The mother walked briskly on in front, poising the basket on her head. Presently they reached the great, round, white, desolate pile in which are the prisons. A sentry stood, mute and immovable, looking in the morning light like a statue carved out of stone. A single green shrub growing against the blank expanse of wall seemed the rather to accentuate the dreariness of the spot. A huge, green door, which from time to time opened and shut like the mouth of a dragon, now opened and swallowed up the two women. Every one in that dismal abode had come to know them; from the florid, important-looking head-keeper, who might have been a general at the very least, down to the junior custodian, with his pale face, his straight blond moustache, and his pretensions to elegance.
The visitors were not allowed to penetrate beyond the gloomy passageway, whose fetid atmosphere, however, gave some idea of the horrors that lay beyond. The pale and elegant guard, coming forward, took their basket, and Giovanna asked in a low voice if Costantino had slept.
Yes, he had slept, but he kept dreaming all the time. He did nothing but repeat over and over again the words—"The mortal sin!"
"Ah! may he go to the devil with his mortal sin!" exclaimed Aunt Bachissia angrily; "he ought to stop it!"