Padron ’Ntoni thought of nothing but the Provvidenza, and when they were not talking of her he said nothing, and sat like a post among the talkers.
“You ought to go across the street to the druggist’s, where they are talking politics. You’d make a fine figure among them. Listen how they shout!”
“That’s Don Giammaria,” said La Locca’s son, “disputing with Don Franco.”
The druggist was holding a conversation at the door of his shop with the vicar and two or three others. As he was a cultured person he got the newspaper, and read it, too, and let others read it; and he had the History of the French Revolution, which he kept under the glass mortar, because he quarrelled about it every day with Don Giammaria, the vicar, to pass the time, and they got positively bilious over it, but they couldn’t have lived a day without seeing each other. On Saturdays, when the paper came, Don Franco went so far as to burn a candle for half an hour, or even for a whole hour, at the risk of a scolding from his wife, so as to explain his ideas properly, and not go to bed like a brute, as Uncle Cipolla and old Malavoglia did. In the summer, besides, there was no need of a candle, for they could stand under the lamp at the door, when Mastro Cirino lighted it, and sometimes Don Michele, the brigadier of the customs guard, joined them; and Don Silvestro, the town-clerk, too, coming back from his vineyard? stopped for a moment. Then Don Franco would say, rubbing his hands, that they were quite a parliament, and go off behind his counter, passing his fingers through his long beard like a comb, with a shrewd little grin, as if he were going to eat somebody for his breakfast; and would let slip broken phrases under his breath full of hidden meaning; so that it was plain enough that he knew more than all the world put together. And Don Giammaria couldn’t bear the sight of him, and grew yellow with fury and spit Latin at him. Don Silvestro, for his part, was greatly amused to see how he poisoned his blood “trying to straighten out a dog’s legs,” he said, “without a chance of making a centime by it; he, at least, didn’t lose his temper, as they did.” And for that reason they said in the place that he had the best farms in Trezza—“that he had come to a barefooted ragamuffin,” added old Goosefoot. He would set the disputants at each other as if they had been dogs, and laughed fit to split his sides with shrill cries of ah! ah! ah! like a cackling hen.
Goosefoot went off again with the old story that if Don Silvestro had been willing to stay where he belonged, it would be a spade he’d be wielding now and not a pen.
“Would you give him your granddaughter Mena?” said Cipolla at last, turning to Padron ’Ntoni.
“Each to his own business—leave the wolf to look after the sheep.”
Padron Cipolla kept on nodding his head—all the more that there had been some talk between him and Padron ’Ntoni of marrying Mena to his son Brasi; if the lupin business went on well the dowry would be paid down in cash, and the affair settled immediately.
“The girl as she has been trained, and the tow as it has been spun,” said Padron Malavoglia at last; and Padron Cipolla agreed “that everybody in the place knew that La Longa had brought up her girl beautifully, that anybody who passed through the alley behind the house by the medlar at the hour at which they were talking could hear the sound of Sant’Agata’s loom. Cousin Maruzza didn’t waste her oil after dark, that she didn’t,” he said.
La Longa, just as she came back from the beach, sat down at the window to prepare the thread for the loom.