The miller coughed in his turn and wished Anania would go away, but he could not restrain himself from reply.
"Dead, dirty, malignant rat!" he exclaimed, "how dare you speak of the master so?"
"Do you suppose it's not known?" said the old man taking up his cudgel as if to defend himself; "that boy who works for Franziscu Carchide—he's a son of Jesus Christ, is he? What I say is why doesn't the padrone educate that boy?"
"He's the son of a priest," said the miller in a loud voice.
"He isn't. He's the padrone's son. Look at him! He's the image of Margherita."
"Well," said the miller, defeated, "that boy's as bad as the devil. What's the good of educating him? You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear."
"Have it your own way!" murmured Uncle Pera, relapsing into his cough.
Anania stood at the window beside the heap of husks, oppressed by mysterious sadness. He knew the boy at Carchide's; he was wild, but not more so than Bustianeddu and many of the schoolboys. Why did not Signor Carboni take him into his house and give him a home, as the olive miller had done for his son? Then he thought—
"Has that boy a mother, I wonder?"
Ah! the mother! the mother! As Anania grew and his mind opened, its ideas and perceptions taking form unobserved like the petals of a wild flower, so the thought of his mother became ever clearer in the haze of his new found conscience. He belonged now to the Fifth Elementary Form, and was associated with boys of every condition and of every character. He began to have knowledge of the science of good and evil. He was now intelligently ashamed if any one alluded to his mother, and remembered that he had always felt ashamed instinctively. Yet he was consumed by the desire to know where she was, to see her again, and reproach her with having deserted him. The unknown land, mysterious and far, to which she had fled, was taking to Anania's eyes clear outline and appearance, like that land discerned amid the mists of dawn to which the voyaging ship draws ever nearer. He studied geography with interest; and knew exactly how he should go from the island to that continent which concealed his mother. As once in the mountain village he had dreamed of the town where his father lived, so now he pondered upon the great cities described by his teachers and his books, and in one of them, and in all, he saw the figure of his mother. Her physical image, like an old photograph, was growing fainter and fainter in his memory; but he always thought of her as dressed in the Sardinian costume, barefoot, slender, and very sorrowful.