Moreover, if his people were poor, God alone knows how poor their priest was, and the Signore possessed a fine taste in wines,—true Chianti, a very different thing from vino rosso at eighty centesimi the flask,—while his lavishness was that of his country.
As for the Signore, he would pour the oil from a fresh flask any time to unseal the lips pressed together as now over the case of Oreste’s sposa.
“The truth is,” sighed the priest, “the end is too easy to foresee. The child is not like others; and there is nothing worse than that. That’s what Luigi’s sposa said yesterday when I rebuked her for thinking evil, and recalled to her how Gioja helped nurse her three through the fever only last spring. ‘Oh, I’m not saying she has n’t a heart,’ said Luigi’s sposa; ‘but you can’t deny that all is not right when a girl is different from all the rest; it is better to have less heart and be more like one’s neighbors.’ And Luigi’s wife had reason. Nothing is worse than to be different from all the folk about you. When I had her safely married, I thought indeed there would be an end of trouble;—Heaven grant it do not prove a beginning!”
“Does she not love her husband?”
“Who can tell?” sighed the priest, impatiently. “Oreste is not one to set the Arno afire, but he is a good lad. But about her he is a mule,—a very mule. Would you believe, Signore, when I ventured a word,—I, whose duty it is,—he flared up like a Befana torch,—he whose manner to me ordinarily is a lesson to the community!”
The Signore smiled and reflected upon the strength of man.
“One would say I had spoken ill of the Saints,” continued the exasperated priest. “And the thing is becoming insufferable,—such a tale of scandal as some one whispers to me every day. One would think she has neither eyes nor ears, and cares not whether she has friends or foes for neighbors.” There is, in truth, no such broad and flowery path to unpopularity as this which Gioja undeviatingly pursued. Nobody who elects to be unlike his neighbors gets social good of it. Had not the Signore himself seen?
Bad enough it was to have her sitting wide-eyed and absolutely indifferent at her machine, and so pretty that one could see the youths looking at her when they pretended not to; or mooning over her straw work with never a word of gossip or a little story about a friend, more than if they were all stones: but what did these absences all by herself mean, which looked the worse now that she was a decent man’s wife? It was an absolute scandal—which is only another name for a godsend sometimes—to a sober community.
Oreste might pretend to shut his eyes,—he had always been a fool about her; but it could not be asked that all the village should do the same, especially those girls who would have made decent wives if any one had given them the chance, and those lads who would have known how to keep a wife in order if they had taken one.
The priest, thinking of these things, sighed. He, too, might affect blindness; but he would need to be stone deaf as well to escape hearing what every tongue in the village felt it a duty and a privilege to confide to him daily.