II.
In the whole place nothing was talked of but the affair of the lupins, and as La Longa returned with Lia from the beach the gossips came to their doors to see her pass.
“Oh, a regular golden business”! shouted Goose-foot, as he hitched along with his crooked leg behind Padron ’Ntoni, who went and sat down on the church-steps with Padron Fortunato Cipolla and Locca Menico’s brother, who were taking the air there in the cool of the evening. “Uncle Crucifix screamed as if you had been pulling out his quill-feathers; but you needn’t mind that—he has plenty of quills, the old boy. Oh, we had a time of it!—you can say as much for your part, too, can’t you, Padron ’Ntoni? But for Padron ’Ntoni, you know, I’d throw myself off the cliffs any day. So I would, before God! And Uncle Crucifix listens to me because he knows what a big ladle means—a big ladle, you know, that stirs a big pot, where there’s more than two hundred scudi a year a-boiling! Why, old Dumb-bell wouldn’t know how to blow his nose if I wasn’t by to show him!”
La Locca’s son, hearing them talk of Uncle Crucifix, who was really his uncle, because he was La Locca’s brother, felt his heart swelling with family affection.
“We are relations,” he repeated. “When I go there to work by the day he gives me only halfwages and no wine, because we are relations.”
Old Goosefoot sneered:
“He does it for your good, so that you shouldn’t take to drinking, and that he may have more money to leave you when he dies.”
Then old Goosefoot went on amusing himself by speaking ill now of one now of another, as it happened; but so good-humoredly, without malice, that no one could catch him in anything actionable.
He said to La Locca’s son:
“Your uncle wants to nobble your Cousin Vespa [wasp] out of her garden—trying to get her to let him have it for half what it’s worth—making her believe he’ll marry her. But if La Vespa succeeds in drawing him on, you may go whistle for your inheritance, and you’ll lose the wages he hasn’t given you and the wine you didn’t drink.”