Cousin Tino hadn’t been able to live all that time upon air, and had sold everything to old Dumb-bell to get back his money.
“What can I do Cousin Malavoglia?” he said, passing his arm over his shoulder. “You know I’m only a poor devil, and can’t spare five hundred lire. If you had been rich I’d have sold the house to you.”
But Padron ’Ntoni couldn’t bear to go about the house like that, with Goosefoot’s arm on his shoulder. Now Uncle Crucifix was come with the carpenter and the mason and a lot of people, who ran about the place as if they had been in the public square, and said, “Here must go bricks, here a new beam, here the floor must all be done over,” as if they had been the masters. And they talked, too, of whitewashing it all over, and making it look quite a different thing.
Uncle Crucifix went about kicking the straw and the broken rubbish out of the way, and picking up off the floor a bit of an old hat that had belonged to Bastianazzo, he flung it out of the window into the garden, saying it was good for manure. The medlar-tree rustled softly meanwhile, and the garlands of daisies, now withered, that had been put up at Whitsuntide, still hung over the windows and the door.
From this time the Malavoglia never showed themselves in the street or at church, and went all the way to Aci Castello to the mass, and no one spoke to them any more, not even Padron Cipolla, who went about saying: “Padron ’Ntoni had no right to play me such a trick as that. That was real cheating to let his daughter-in-law give up her rights for the sake of the debt for the lupins.”
“Just what my wife says,” added Master Zuppiddu. “She says even the dogs in the street wouldn’t have any of the Malavoglia now.”
All the same, that young heathen Brasi howled and swore that he wanted Mena; she had been promised him, and he would have her, and he stamped and stormed like a baby before a toyshop at a fair.
“Do you think I stole my property, you lazy hound, that you want to fling it away with a lot of beggars?” shouted his father.
They even took back Brasi’s new clothes, and he worked out his ill-temper by chasing lizards on the down, or sitting astride of the wall by the washing-tank, swearing that he wouldn’t do a hand’s turn—no, that he wouldn’t, not if they killed him for it, now that they wouldn’t give him his wife, and they had taken back even his wedding-clothes. Fortunately, Mena couldn’t see him looking as he did now, for the Malavoglia always kept the door shut down there at the sexton’s cottage, which they had hired, in the black street near the Zuppiddi; and if Brasi chanced to see any of them, if it were ever so far off, he ran to hide himself behind a wall or among the prickly-pears.
Mena was quite tranquil, however—there was so much to do in the new house, where they had to find places for all the old things, and where there was no longer the medlar-tree; nor could one see Cousin Anna’s door, or Nunziata’s. Her mother watched over her like a brooding bird while they sat working together, and her voice was like a caress when she said to her, “Give me the scissors,” or, “Hold this skein for me”; so that the child felt it in her inmost heart, now that every one turned away from them; but the girl sang like a lark, for she was but eighteen, and at that age, if the sun do but shine, everything seems bright and the singing of the birds is in one’s heart. Besides, she had never really cared for “that person,” she said to her mother in a whisper as they bent together over the loom. Her mother had been the only one who had really understood her, and had had a kind word for her in that hard time. At least if Cousin Alfio had been there he would not have turned his back upon them.