Africana trembled; she pointed to Binchi-Banche still stretched under the table in a heavy sleep.
“Close the door first,” she said submissively.
Passacantando roused Binchi-Banche with a kick, and dragged him, howling and shaking with terror, out into the mud and slush. He came back and closed the door. The red lantern that hung on one of the shutters threw a rosy light into the tavern, leaving the heavy arches in deep shadow, and giving the stairway in the angle a mysterious look.
“Come! Let us go!” said Passacantando again to the still trembling Africana.
They slowly ascended the dark stairway in the corner of the room, the woman going first, the man following close behind. At the top of the stairway they emerged into a low room, planked with beams. In a small niche in the wall was a blue Majolica Madonna, in front of which burned, for a vow, a light in a glass filled with water and oil. The other walls were covered with a number of torn paper pictures, of as many colours as leprosy. A distressing odour filled the room.
The two thieves advanced cautiously towards the marital bed, upon which lay the old man, buried in slumber, breathing with a sort of hoarse hiss through his toothless gums and his dilated nose, damp from the use of tobacco, his head turned upon one cheek, resting on a striped cotton pillow. Above his open mouth, which looked like a cut made in a rotten pumpkin, rose his stiff moustache; one of his eyes, half opened, resembled the turned over ear of a dog, filled with hair, covered with blisters; the veins stood out boldly upon his bare emaciated arm which lay outside the coverlet; his crooked fingers, habitually grasping, clutched the counterpane.
Now, this old fellow had for a long time possessed two twenty-franc pieces, which had been left him by some miserly relative; these he guarded jealously, keeping them in the tobacco in his horn snuff-box, as some people do musk incense. There lay the shining pieces of gold, and the old man would take them out, look at them fondly, feel of them lovingly between his fingers, as the passion of avarice and the lust of possession grew within him.
Africana approached slowly, with bated breath, while Passacantando, with commanding gestures, urged her to the theft. There was a noise below; both stopped. The half-plucked dove, limping, fluttered to its nest in an old slipper at the foot of the bed, but in settling itself, it made some noise. The man, with a quick, brutal motion, snatched up the bird and choked it in his fist.
“Is it there?” he asked of Africana.
“Yes, it is there, under the pillow,” she answered, sliding her hand carefully under the pillow as she spoke. The old man moved in his sleep, sighing involuntarily, while between his eyelids appeared a little rim of the whites of his eyes. Then he fell back in the heavy stupor of senile drowsiness.