“What I always said to you, peace of the angels!” said her husband.
“You hold your tongue, you know nothing about it! Just think what a day this would have been for my daughter Barbara if I hadn’t looked out for her!”
Her daughter Barbara stood at the window to see how Padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni looked in the middle of the police when they carried him to town.
“He’ll never get out,” they all said. “Do you know what there is written on the prison at Palermo? ‘Do what you will, here you’ll come at last,’ and ‘As you make your bed, you must lie down.’ Poor devils!”
“Good people don’t get into such scrapes,” screamed Vespa. “Evil comes to those who go to seek it. Look at the people who take to that trade—always some scamp like La Locca’s son or Malavoglia, who won’t do any honest work.” And they all said yes, that if any one had such a son as that it was better that the house should fall on him. Only La Locca went in search of her son, and stood screaming in front of the barracks of the guards, saying that she would have him, and not listening to reason; and when she went off to plague her brother Dumb-bell, and planted herself on the steps of his house, for hours at a time, with her white hair streaming in the wind, Uncle Crucifix only answered her: “I have the galleys at home here! I wish I were in your son’s place! What do you come to me for? And he didn’t give you bread to eat either.”
“La Locca will gain by it,” said Don Silvestro; “now that she has no one to work for her, they will take her in at the poor-house, and she will be well fed every day in the week. If not, she will be left to the chanty of the commune.”
And as they wound up by saying, “Who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind,” Padron Fortunato added: “And it is a good thing for Padron ’Ntoni too. Do you think that good-for-nothing grandson of his did not cost him a lot of money? I know what it is to have a son like that. Now the King must maintain him.”
But Padron ’Ntoni, instead of thinking of saving those soldi, now that his grandson was no longer likely to spend them for him, kept on flinging them after him, with lawyers and notaries and the rest of it—those soldi which had cost so much labor, and had been destined for the house by the medlar-tree.
“Now we do not need the house nor anything else,” said he, with a face as pale as ’Ntoni’s own when they had taken him away to town, with his hands tied, and under his arm the little bundle of shirts which Mena had brought to him with so many tears at night when no one saw her. The whole town went to see him go in the middle of the police. His grandfather had gone off to the advocate—the one who talked so much—for since he had seen Don Michele, also, pass by in the carriage on his way to the hospital, as yellow as a guinea, and with his uniform unbuttoned, he was frightened, poor old man, and did not stop to find fault with the lawyer’s chatter as long as he would promise to untie his grandson’s hands and let him come home again; for it seemed to him that after this earthquake ’Ntoni would come home again, and stay with them always, as he had done when he was a child.
Don Silvestro had done him the kindness to go with him to the lawyer, because, he said, that when such a misfortune as had happened to the Malavoglia happened to any Christian, one should aid one’s neighbor with hands, and feet too, even if it were a wretch fit only for the galleys, and do one’s best to take him out of the hands of justice, for that was why we were Christians, that we should help our neighbors when they need it. The advocate, when he had heard the story, and it had been explained to him by Don Silvestro, said that it was a very good case, “a case for the galleys certainly”—and he rubbed his hands—“if they hadn’t come to him.”