“I must; I have no choice. They help the bread down, and they are cheap. When we haven’t money enough to buy macaroni we always eat them—I and my little ones.”
“For that they sell so well. Uncle Crucifix doesn’t care about planting cabbages or lettuce at the house by the medlar, because he has them at his own house, and so he puts nothing there but onions. But we’ll plant broccoli and cauliflower. Won’t they be good, eh?”
The girl, with her arms across her knees, curled upon the threshold, looked out with dreaming eyes, as well as the boy; then after a while she began to sing, and Alessio listened with all his ears. At last she said, “There’s plenty of time yet.”
“Yes,” assented Alessio; “first we must marry Mena and Lia, and we must find places for the boys, but we must begin to talk it over now.”
“When Nunziata sings,” said Mena, coming to the door, “it is a sign that it will be fair weather, and we can go to-morrow to wash.”
Cousin Anna was in the same mind, for her field and vineyard was the washing-tank, and her feast-days were those on which she had her hands full of clothes to be washed; all the more now that her son Rocco was feasting himself every day, after his fashion, at the tavern, trying to drown his regret for the Mangiacarubbe, who had thrown him over for Brasi Cipolla, like a coquette as she was.
“‘It’s a long lane that has no turning,’” said Padron ’Ntoni. “Perhaps this may bring your son Rocco to his senses. And it will be good for my ’Ntoni, too, to be away from home for a while; for when he comes back, and is tired of wandering about the world, everything will seem as it should be, and he will not complain any more. And if we succeed in once more putting our own boat at sea—and it’s putting our own beds in the old places that we know so well—you will see what pleasant times we shall have resting on the door-steps there, when we are tired after our day’s work, when the day has been a good one. And how bright the light will look in that room where you have seen it so often, and have known all the faces that were dearest to you on earth! But now so many are gone, and never have come back, that it seems as if the room would be always dark, and the door shut, as if those who are gone had taken the key with them forever. ’Ntoni should not have gone away,” added the old man, after a long silence. “He knew that I was old, and that when I am gone the children will have no one left.”
“If we buy the house by the medlar while he is gone,” said Mena, “he won’t know it, and will come here to find us.”
Padron ’Ntoni shook his head sadly. “But there’s time enough yet,” he said at last, like Nun-ziata; and Cousin Anna added, “If ’Ntoni comes back rich he can buy the house.”
Padron ’Ntoni answered nothing, but the whole place knew that ’Ntoni would come back rich, now he had been gone so long in search of fortune; and many envied him already, and wanted to go in search of fortune too, like him. In fact they were not far wrong. They would only leave a few women to fret after them, and the only ones who hadn’t the heart to leave their women were that stupid son of La Locca, whose mother was what everybody knew she was, and Rocco Spatu, whose soul was at the tavern. Fortunately for the women, Padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni was suddenly discovered to have come back, by night, in a bark from Catania, ashamed to show himself, as he had no shoes. If it were true that he had come back rich he had nowhere to put his money, for his clothes were all rags and tatters. But his family received him as affectionately as if he had come back loaded with gold. His sisters hung round his neck, crying and laughing for joy, and ’Ntoni did not know Lia again, so tall she was, and they all said to him, “Now you won’t leave us again, will you?”