“Now,” said Padron ’Ntoni, “we are ruined, and the best off of us all is Bastianazzo, who doesn’t know it.”
At these words Maruzza began to cry afresh, and the boys seeing the grown-up people cry began to roar again, too, though it was three days now since papa was dead. The old man wandered about from place to place, without knowing what he was going to do. But Maruzza never moved from the foot of the bed, as if she had nothing left that she could do. When she spoke she only repeated, with fixed eyes, as if she had no other idea in her head, “Now I’ve nothing more to do.”
“No!” replied Padron ’Ntoni. “No! we must pay the debt to old Dumb-bell; it won’t do to have people saying: Honest men when they grow poor become knaves.” And the thought of the lupins drove the thorn of Bastianazzo deeper into his heart.
The medlar-tree let fall dry leaves, and the wind blew them here and there about the court.
“He went because I sent him,” repeated Padron ’Ntoni, as the wind bears the leaves here and there, “and if I had told him to fling himself head foremost from the Fariglione, he would have done it without a word. At least he died while the house and the medlar-tree, even to the last leaf, were his own; and I, who am old, am still here. ‘Long are the days of the poor man.’”
Maruzza said nothing, but in her head there was one fixed idea that beat upon her brains, and gnawed at her heart—to know, if she might, what had happened on that night; that was always before her eyes, and if she shut them she seemed to see the Provvidenza out by the Cape of the Mills, where the sea was blue and smooth and sprinkled with boats, which looked like gulls in the sunshine, and could be counted one by one—that of Uncle Crucifix, the other of Cousin Barrabbas, Uncle Cola’s Concetta, Padron Fortunato’s bark—that it swung her head to see; and she heard Cola Zup-piddu singing fit to split his throat out of his great bull’s lungs, while he hammered away with his mallet, and the scent of the tar came on the air; and Cousin Anna thumped her linen on the stone at the washing-tank, and she heard Mena, too, crying quietly in the kitchen.
“Poor little thing!” said the grandfather to himself, “the house has come down about your cars too.” And he went about touching one by one all the things that were heaped up in the corner, with trembling hands, as old men do, and seeing Luca at the door, on whom they had put his father’s big jacket, that reached to his heels, he said to him, “That’ll keep you warm at your work—we must all work now—and you must help, for we have to pay the debt for the lupins.”
Maruzza put her hands to her ears that she might not hear La Locca, who, perched on the landing behind the door, screamed all day long with her cracked maniac’s voice, saying that they must give her back her son, and wouldn’t listen to reason from anybody.
“She goes on like that because she’s hungry,” said Cousin Anna, at last. “Now old Crucifix is furious at them all about the lupins, and won’t do anything for them. I’ll go and give her something to eat, and then she’ll go away.”
Cousin Anna, poor dear, had left her linen and her girls to go and help Cousin Maruzza, who acted as if she were sick, and if they had left her alone she wouldn’t have, lighted the fire or anything, but would have left them all to starve. “Neighbors should be like the tiles on the roof that carry water for each other.” Meanwhile the poor children’s lips were pale for hunger. Nunziata came to help too, and Alessio—with his face black from crying at seeing his mother cry—looked after the little boys, crowding round him like a brood of chickens, that Nunziata might have her hands free.