Then they began to dispute—for Padron ’Ntoni insisted upon it that, “after all, Uncle Dumb-bell was a Christian, and hadn’t quite thrown his brains into the gutter, to go and marry his brother’s daughter.”
“What has Christian to do with it, or Turk either?” growled Goosefoot. “He’s mad, you mean! He’s as rich as a pig; what does he want of that little garden of Vespa’s, as big as a nose-rag? And she has nothing but that.”
“I ought to know how big it is; it lies along my vineyard,” said Padron Cipolla, puffing himself like a turkey.
“You call that a vineyard? Four prickly-pears!” sneered Goosefoot.
“Between the prickly-pears the vines grow; and if Saint Francis will send us a good shower of rain, you’ll see if I don’t have some good wine! To-day the sun went to bed loaded with rain, or with wind.” “When the sun goes to bed heavy one must look for a west wind,” said Padron ’Ntoni.
Goosefoot couldn’t bear Cipolla’s sententious way of talking, “thinking, because he was rich, he must know everything, and could make the poor people swallow whatever nonsense he chose to talk. One wants rain, and one wants wind,” he wound up. “Padron Cipolla wants rain for his vines, and Padron ’Ntoni wants a wind to push the poop of the Provvidenza. You know the proverb, ‘Curly is the sea, a fresh wind there’ll be!’ To-night the stars are shining, at midnight the wind will change. Don’t you hear the ground-swell?”
On the road there was heard the sound of heavy carts, slowly passing.
“Night or day, somebody’s always going about the world,” said Cipolla a little later on.
Now that they could no longer see the sea or the fields, it seemed as if there were only Trezza in the world, and everybody wondered where the carts could be going at that hour.
“Before midnight the Provvidenza will have rounded the Cape of the Mills, and the wind won’t trouble her any longer.”