"Who's that woman!" asked Zuanne, the lout, when they had moved on.
"Woman? Why, she's a young girl! only nine months older than I am!" cried Anania.
Zuanne was much confused and said no more; but a most strange thing happened to Anania. His will became unable to keep his mouth shut; and he lied, knowing that he lied, but overwhelmed by felicity at the notion that what he said might have been true.
"That's my sweetheart," he said deliberately.
That evening, the olive-miller lounging in his kitchen, made Zuanne describe the ruins of Serrabile, an ancient city discovered near Fonni, and he asked whether there was any chance of treasure being found there. But Anania stood at the window of his little room, watching the slow rising of the moon between the black teeth of Orthobene.
At last he was alone! Night reigned, passionate and sweet. Already the cuckoo was filling the lonely valley with her palpitating cries. Ah! thus sadly did Anania feel his heart palpitate and cry, out of an infinite solitude.
Why had he told that lie? And why had the stupid shepherd said not a word on hearing the stupendous falsehood? Clearly he knew nothing of love—love for a superior creature, love without limit and without hope. But why had Anania stooped to a lie? For shame! He had calumniated Margherita, put himself further than ever from her. It must be the same spirit of vanity, the same desire of the marvellous, which once upon a time had made him tell Zuanne of an imaginary encounter with robbers. Ah! God!
He pressed his cold hands upon his burning cheeks; he fixed his eyes on the melancholy visage of the moon. He shuddered. Then he remembered a bright cold winter moon, the theft of the hundred lire, the figure of Margherita appearing before him like the shadow of a flower against the golden disc of the moon. Ah! his love must have dated from that night; only now after years and years had it burst forth breaking the stone beneath which it had lain buried, like a spring which can no longer keep its course below ground.
These similes of the flower against the moon, of the rising spring, came ready made to Anania. He was pleased with his poetic fancies, but they could not lay the remorse which tormented him. "How vile I am!" he thought; "vile enough to lie, and about her. Well, I may be successful at my books, I may become a great lawyer; but morally I shall never be anything but the son of that lost woman!"
He stood a long time at the window. Some one passed down the street singing, and somehow the song reawakened his memories of infancy and of Fonni, Fonni with its crimson sunsets! He fell into a dream, luminous and melancholy like the moon he was watching. He imagined himself still at Fonni. He had never gone to school, had never felt the shame of his birth. He was a shepherd, simple like Zuanne. And he saw himself standing at the extremity of the village, in a rosy summer twilight; and behold Margherita passed, Margherita she also poor and an exile in the mountain village, wearing that narrow skirt characteristic of the place, the amphora on her head, as if she were a woman out of the Bible. He called to her and she turned, radiant in the sunset dazzle, and she smiled to him rapturously.