“Fine consolation, that is!”
This time the old man found words, for they were in his heart, and so came straight to his lips.
“At least, don’t say it to your mother.”
“My mother! She would have done better not to have brought me into the world, my mother!”
“Yes,” assented Padron ’Ntoni, “it would have been better she had not borne you, if you are to begin to talk in this way.”
For a minute ’Ntoni didn’t know what to say, then he began: “Well, I mean it for your good, too—for you, for my mother, for us all. I want to make her rich, my mother! that’s what I want. Now we’re tormenting ourselves for the house, and for Mena’s dowry; then Lia will grow up, and she’ll want a dowry too, and then a bad year will throw us all back into misery. I don’t want to lead this life any longer. I want to change my condition and to change yours. I want that we should be rich—mamma, Mena, you, Alessio, all of us.”
Padron ’Ntoni opened his eyes very wide and listened, pondering, to this discourse, which he found very hard to understand. “Rich!” he said, “rich! And what shall we do when we are rich?” ’Ntoni scratched his head, and began to wonder himself what he should do in such a case. “We should do what other people do,” he said—“go and live in town, and do nothing, and eat meat.”
“In town! go and live in town by yourself. I choose to die where I was born;” and thinking of the house where he was born, which was no longer his, he let his head drop on his breast. “You are but a boy; you don’t know what it is,” he said; “you don’t know, you don’t know! When you can no longer sleep in your own bed, or see the light come in through your own window, you’ll see what it is. I am old, and I know!” The poor old man coughed as if he would suffocate, with bent shoulders, shaking his head sadly. “‘His own nest every bird likes best.’ Look at those swallows; do you see them? They have always made their nest there, and they still return to make it there, and never go away.”
“But I am not a swallow,” said ’Ntoni. “I am neither a bird nor a beast. I don’t want to live like a dog on a chain, or like Cousin Alfio’s ass, or like a mule in a mill, that goes round and round, turning the same wheel forever. I don’t want to die of hunger in a corner, or to be eaten up by sharks.”
“Thank God, rather, that you were born here, and pray that you may not come to die far from the stones that you know. ‘Who changes the old for the new changes for the worse all through.’ You are afraid of work, are afraid of poverty; I, who have neither your youth nor your strength, fear them not. ‘The good pilot is known in the storm.’ You are afraid of having to work for your bread, that is what ails you! When my father, rest his soul, left me the Provvidenza and five mouths to feed, I was younger than you are now, and I was not afraid; and I have done my duty without grumbling; and I do it still, and I pray God to help me to do it as long as I live, as your father did, and your brother Luca, blessed be their souls! who feared not to go and die where duty led them. Your mother, too, has done hers, poor little woman, hidden inside four walls; and you know not the tears she has shed, nor how many she sheds now, because you want to go and leave her; nor how in the morning your sister finds her sheets wet with tears. And nevertheless she is silent, and does not talk of you nor of the hard things you say to her; and she works, and puts together her provision, poor busy little ant that she is; and she has never done anything else all her life long—before she had so many tears to shed, and when she suckled you at her breast, and before you could go alone, or the temptation had come over you to go wandering like a gypsy about the world.”