“At least you’ll remember how I melted the pitch for the Provvidenza when you’re out at sea.”
Goosefoot prophesied that all the girls would want to rob her of him.
“It’s I who am robbed,” whined Uncle Crucifix. “Where am I to get the money for the lupins if ’Ntoni marries, and they take off the dowry for Mena, and the mortgage that’s on the house, and all the burdens besides that came out at the very last minute? Christmas is here, but no Malavoglia.”
Padron ’Ntoni went to him in the piazza, or in his own court, and said to him: “What can I do if I have no money? Wait till June, if you will do me that favor; or take the boat, or the house; I have nothing else.”
“I want my money,” repeated Uncle Crucifix, with his back against the wall. “You said you were honest people; you can’t pay me with talk about the Provvidenza, or the house by the medlar-tree.”
He was ruining both body and soul, had lost sleep and appetite, and wasn’t even allowed to relieve his feelings by saying that the end of this story would be the bailiff, because if he did Padron ’Ntoni sent straightway Don Giammaria or Don Silvestro to beg for pity on him; and they didn’t even leave him in peace in the piazza, where he couldn’t go on his own business without some one was at his heels, so that the whole place cried out on the devil’s money. With Goosefoot he couldn’t talk, because he always threw in his face that the lupins were rotten, and that he had done the broker for him. “But that service he could do me!” said he, suddenly, to himself; and that night he did not sleep another wink, so charmed was he with the discovery. And he went off to Goosefoot as soon as it was day, and found him yawning and stretching at his house door. “You must pretend to buy my debt,” he said to him, “and then we can send the officers to Malavoglia, and nobody will call you a usurer, or say that yours is the devil’s money.”
“Did this fine idea come to you in the night,” sneered Goosefoot, “that you come waking me at dawn to tell it me?”
“I came to tell you about those cuttings, too; if you want them you may come and take them.”
“Then you may send for the bailiff,” said Goose-foot; “but you must pay the expenses.”
Before every house the shrines were adorned with leaves and oranges, and at evening the candles were lighted, when the pipers played and sang litanies, so that it was a festa everywhere. The boys played at games with hazel-nuts in the street; and if Alessio stopped, with legs apart, to look on, they said to him: