This time he had quarrelled seriously with the Malavoglia, because La Zuppidda had taken his wife’s clothes out of the bottom of the tank and had put hers in their place. Such a mean thing as that he could not bear; La Zuppidda wouldn’t have thought of it if she hadn’t got that pumpkin-head of a ’Ntoni Malavoglia behind her, a bully that he was. A good-for-nothing lot they were, the Malavoglia, and he didn’t want to see any more of them, swearing and blaspheming as his wont was.
The stamped paper began to rain in on them, and Goosefoot declared that the lawyer couldn’t have been content with the bribe Padron ’Ntoni had given him to let them alone, and that proved what a miser he was; and how much he was to be trusted when he promised to pay what he owed people. Padron ’Ntoni went back to the town-clerk and to the lawyer Scipione, but he laughed in his face and told him that he was a fool for his pains; that he should never have let his daughter-in-law give in to it, and as he had made his bed so he must lie down.
“Woe to the fallen man who asks for help!”
“Listen to me,” suggested Don Silvestro. “You’d better let them have the house; if not, they’ll take the Provvidenza and everything else, even to the hair off your head; and you lose all your time, besides, running backward and forward to the lawyer.”
“If you give up the house quietly,” said Goose-foot to the old man, “we’ll leave you the Provvidenza, and you’ll be able to earn your bread and will remain master of your ship, and not be troubled with any more stamped paper.”
After all, Cousin Tino wasn’t such a bad fellow. He went on talking to Padron ’Ntoni as if it hadn’t been his affair at all, passing his arm over his shoulder and saying to him, “Pardon me, brother, I am more sorry than you are; it goes to my heart to turn you out of your house, but what can I do? I’m only a poor devil; I’m not rich, like Uncle Crucifix. If those five hundred lire hadn’t come actually out of my very mouth, I would never have troubled you about them—upon my word I wouldn’t.”
The poor old man hadn’t the courage to tell his daughter-in-law that she must go “quietly” out of the house by the medlar-tree. After so many years that they had been there, it was like going into banishment, or like those who had gone away meaning to come back, and had come back no more. And there was Luca’s bed there, and the nail where Bastianazzo’s pea-jacket used to hang. But at last the time came that they had to move, with all those poor sticks of furniture, and take them out of their old places, where each left a mark on the wall where it had stood, and the house without them looked strange and unlike itself. They carried their things out by night into the sexton’s cottage, which they had hired, as if everybody in the place didn’t know that now the house belonged no more to them but to Goosefoot, and that they had to move away from it. But at all events no one saw them carrying their things from one house to the other. Every time the old man pulled out a nail, or moved a cupboard from the corner where it was used to stand, he shook his poor old head. Then the others, when all was done, sat down upon a heap of straw in the middle of the room to rest, and looked about here and there to see if anything had been forgotten. But the grandfather could not stay inside, and went out into the court in the open air. But there, too, was the scattered straw and broken crockery and coils of old rope, and in a corner the medlar-tree and the vine hanging in clusters over the door. “Come, boys, let’s go. Sooner or later we must,” and never moved.
Maruzza looked at the door of the court out of which Luca and Bastianazzo had gone for the last time, and the lane where she had watched her boy go off through the rain, with his trousers turned up, and then thought how the oil-skin cape had hidden him from her view. Cousin Alfio Mosca’s window, too, was shut close, and the vine hung over the way, so that every one who passed by plucked off its grapes.
Each one had something in the house which it was specially hard to leave, and the old man, in passing out, laid his head softly, in the dark, on the old door, which Uncle Crucifix had said was in need of a good piece of wood and a handful of nails.
Uncle Crucifix had come to look over the house, and Goosefoot with him, and they talked loud in the empty rooms, where the voices rang as if they had been in a church.