“That’s what she wants,” cried La Zuppidda, in her abrupt way, “to be pocketed. La Vespa wants just that, and nothing else. She’s always in his house on one pretext or another, slipping in like a cat, with something good for him to eat or drink, and the old man never refuses what costs him nothing. She fattens him up like a pig for Christmas. I tell you she asks nothing better than to get into his pocket.”
Every one had something to say about Uncle Crucifix, who was always whining, when, instead, he had money by the shovelful—for La Zuppidda, one day when the old man was ill, had seen a chest under his bed as big as that!
La Longa felt the weight of the forty scudi of debt for the lupins, and changed the subject; because “one hears also in the dark,” and they could hear the voice of Uncle Crucifix talking with Don Giammaria, who was crossing the piazza close by, while La Zuppidda broke off her abuse of him to wish him good-evening.
Don Silvestro laughed his hen’s cackle, and this fashion of laughing enraged the apothecary, who had never had any patience for that matter; he left that to such asses as wouldn’t get up another revolution.
“No, you never had any,” shouted Don Giammaria to him; “you have no place to put it.” And Don Franco, who was a little man, went into a fury, and called ugly names after the priest which could be heard all across the piazza in the dark. Old Dumb-bell, hard as a stone, shrugged his shoulders, and took care to repeat “that all that was nothing to him; he attended to his own affairs.”
“As if the affairs of the Company of the Happy Death were not your affairs,” said Don Giammaria, “and nobody paying a soldo any more. When it is a question of putting their hands in their pockets these people are a lot of Protestants, worse than that heathen apothecary, and let the box of the confraternity become a nest for mice. It was positively beastly!”
Don Franco, from his shop, sneered at them all at the top of his voice, trying to imitate Don Silvestro’s cackling laugh, which was enough to madden anybody. But everybody knew that the druggist was a freemason, and Don Giammaria called out to him from the piazza:
“You’d find the money fast enough if it was for schools or for illuminations!”
The apothecary didn’t answer, for his wife just then appeared at the window; and Uncle Crucifix, when he was far enough off not to be heard by Don Silvestro, the clerk, who gobbled up the salary for the master of the elementary school:
“It is nothing to me,” he repeated, “but in my time there weren’t so many lamps nor so many schools, and we were a deal better off.”