Uncle Crucifix would reassure him in this way: “Never fear, never fear; the house won’t run away, you know. Only keep an eye upon it. Every one should keep an eye upon whatever he sets store by.” And once he went on, “Isn’t your Mena going to be married?”
“She shall be married when it shall please God,” replied Padron ’Ntoni. “For my part, I should be glad if it were to be to-morrow.”
“If I were you I would give her to Alfio Mosca; he’s a nice young fellow, honest and hard-working, always looking out for a wife everywhere he goes; it is the only fault he has. Now they say he’s coming back to the place. He’s cut out for your granddaughter.”
“But they said he wanted to marry your niece Vespa.”
“You too! You too!” Dumb-bell began to scream, in his cracked voice. “Who says so? That’s all idle chatter. He wants to get hold of her ground, that’s what he wants! A pretty thing that would be! How would you like me to sell your house to somebody else?”
And Goosefoot, who was always hanging about the piazza, ready to put in his oar whenever he saw two people talking together, broke in with, “Vespa has Brasi Cipolla in her head just now, since his marriage with Sant’Agata is broken off. I saw them with my own eyes walking down the path by the stream together.”
“A nice lot, eh?” screamed Uncle Crucifix, quite forgetting his deafness. “That witch is the devil himself. We must tell Padron Fortunato about it, that we must. Are we honest men, or are we not? If Padron Fortunato doesn’t look out, that witch of a niece of mine will carry off his son before his eyes, poor old fellow.”
And off he ran up the street like a madman. In less than ten minutes Uncle Crucifix had turned the place topsy-turvy, wanting to call Don Michele and his guest to look up his niece; for, after all, she was his niece, and belonged to him, and wasn’t Don Michele paid to look after what belonged to honest men? Everybody laughed to see Padron Cipolla running hither and thither, panting like a dog with his tongue out, after his great lout of a son, and said it was no more than he deserved that his son should be snapped up by the Wasp when he thought Victor Emmanuel’s daughter hardly good enough for him, and had broken off with the Malavoglia without even saying “by your leave.”
Mena had not put on mourning, however, when her marriage went off; on the contrary, she began once more to sing at her loom, and while she was helping to salt down the anchovies in the fine summer evenings, for Saint Francis had sent that year such a provision as never was—a passage of anchovies such as no one could remember in any past year, enough to enrich the whole place; the barks came in loaded, with the men on board singing and shouting and waving their caps above their heads in sign of success to the women and children who waited for them on the shore.
The buyers came from the city in crowds, on foot, on horseback, and in carts and wagons, and Goosefoot hadn’t even time to scratch his head. Towards sunset there was a crowd like a fair, and cries and jostling and pushing so as no one ever saw the like. In the Malavoglia’s court the lights were burning until midnight, as if there were a festa there. The girls sang, and the neighbors came to help their cousin Anna’s daughters and Nunziata, because every one could earn something, and along the wall were four ranges of barrels all ready prepared, with stones on the top of them.