Mena said nothing, but leaned on the gate-post, looking at the loaded cart, the empty house, the bed half taken down, and the pot boiling for the last time on the hearth.
“Are you there too, Cousin Mena?” cried Alfio as soon as he saw her, and left off what he was engaged upon.
She nodded her head, and Nunziata ran, like a good house-keeper as she was, to skim off the pot, which was boiling over.
“I am glad you are here; now I can say goodbye to you, too.”
“I came here to see you once more,” she said, with tears in her voice. “Why do you go down there where there is the malaria?”
Alfio began to laugh from the lips outward, as he did when he went to say good-bye to them all.
“A pretty question! Why do I go there? and why do you marry Brasi Cipolla? One does what one can, Cousin Mena. If I could have done as I wished to do, you know what I would have done.”
She gazed and gazed at him, with eyes shining with tears.
“I should have stayed here where the very walls are my friends, and where I can go about in the night to stable my donkey, even in the dark; and I should have married you, Cousin Mena—I have held you in my heart this long while—and I shall carry you with me to the Biccocca, and wherever I may go. But this is all useless talk, and one must do what one can. My donkey, too, must go where I drive him.”
“Now farewell,” said Mena at last. “I, too, have something like a thorn here within me.... And now when I see this window always shut, it will seem as if my heart were shut too, as if it were shut inside the window—heavy as an oaken door. But so God wills. Now I wish you well, and I must go.”