“Yes. But nowhere they say so many bad things about people as here—nowhere where I have ever been.”
It was strange to Alvina to feel the deep-bed-rock distrust which all the hill-peasants seemed to have of one another. They were watchful, venomous, dangerous.
“Ah,” said Pancrazio, “I am glad there is a woman in my house once more.”
“But did nobody come in and do for you before?” asked Alvina. “Why didn’t you pay somebody?”
“Nobody will come,” said Pancrazio, in his slow, aristocratic English. “Nobody will come, because I am a man, and if somebody should see her at my house, they will all talk.”
“Talk!” Alvina looked at the deeply-lined man of sixty-six, “But what will they say?”
“Many bad things. Many bad things indeed. They are not good people here. All saying bad things, and all jealous. They don’t like me because I have a house—they think I am too much a signore. They say to me ‘Why do you think you are a signore?’ Oh, they are bad people, envious, you cannot have anything to do with them.”
“They are nice to me,” said Alvina.
“They think you will go away. But if you stay, they will say bad things. You must wait. Oh, they are evil people, evil against one another, against everybody but strangers who don’t know them—”
Alvina felt the curious passion in Pancrazio’s voice, the passion of a man who has lived for many years in England and known the social confidence of England, and who, coming back, is deeply injured by the ancient malevolence of the remote, somewhat gloomy hill-peasantry. She understood also why he was so glad to have her in his house, so proud, why he loved serving her. She seemed to see a fairness, a luminousness in the northern soul, something free, touched with divinity such as “these people here” lacked entirely.