"You think I'm crazy?" shouted the doctor, going close to him, and shaking his umbrella. "A purgative! do you understand? A purgative!"
"I heard you," said Costantino.
"Oh, so much the better! Well, I've heard that you say you want to go away. Go-o-o——! Go, by all means. Go to the devil. But first of all, go to the cemetery, go to that dunghill you call a cem-e-te-ry; and dig and scratch like a dog, and tear up Giacobbe Dejas's bones, and gnaw them."
He ground his teeth as though he were crunching bones; it was both grotesque and horrible, and Costantino could do nothing but stare at him in utter amazement.
"What are you looking at me like that for? You've always been a fool, my dear fellow—my dear donkey! Just look at you now! calm and amiable as a pope! They've robbed you of everything you possessed, betrayed you, murdered you, knocked you about among them as though you had been a dried skeleton, and there you sit, bland and stupid as ever! Why don't you do something? Why don't you go to that vile woman, and take her, and her mother, and her mother-in-law by the hair of their heads, and tie them to the tails of the cows they offer to give you as a charity, and set fire to their petticoats, and turn them loose in the fields so that they may spread destruction in every direction? Do you understand? I say, do you understand, idiot?"
He flung the words in the other's face, his breath heavy with absinthe, his eyes bloodshot.
Costantino recoiled, trembling, but the doctor turned to go. On the threshold he paused again and shook his umbrella.
"You make me long to break your neck!" he cried. "Men such as you deserve precisely the treatment they get! Well, take a purgative, anyhow, stupid."
"Yes, I'll do that," said Costantino, with a laugh, but at the same time the doctor's words made a deep impression on him. There were times, indeed, when he felt utterly desperate. He said over and over again that he meant to go away, but, as a fact, he did not know where to go. Nor, on the other hand, could he see what was to become of him should he decide to remain on in the village. He said to himself: "I have no home, and there is no one belonging to me; for this one day every one rushes to see me out of curiosity, but by to-morrow they will all have forgotten my very existence. I am like a bird that has lost its nest. What is there for me to do?"
All the time, though, those words of the doctor's kept ringing in his head. Yes, truly, that would be something for him to do. Go there, fall suddenly upon them like a bolt out of heaven, and utterly destroy all those people who had destroyed his life!