Marry Matteo! She laughed aloud, and thought the face in the moon laughed too.
The outfit was made, the pearls were bought, the 'stimatore' who is called in to appraise every article of a marriage corredo had fingered and weighed and adjudged the cost of every single thing, and the wheelwright had bought the bed and the furniture, and many other matters not usual or incumbent on a bridegroom, and her parents had said that such a warm man and so liberal a one was never seen in their day: and very little time was there now left wherein she could escape her fate.
All unwillingness on her part would have been regarded by her parents as an insanity, and would have only seemed to her bridegroom as the spice which is added to the stewed hare. There was no chance for her but to use this single fortnight which she had been allowed to spend in farewell at the four roads of Genistrello.
Her uncle and aunt had helped generously in the getting together of the corredo; and their wish to have her with them had been at once conceded. Her parents were poor, and the woodsman was rich as rubies are esteemed, amongst the oak scrub and chestnut saplings of the Pistoiese Apennines.
The Massaio people liked her and indulged her; but had they dreamed that she meant to elude her marriage they would have dragged her by the hair of her head, or kicked her with the soles of their hob-nailed boots down the hillside into her father's house, and given her up to punishment without pity, as they would have given a runaway horse or dog.
The day for the ceremony had not been fixed, for in this country, where love intrigues speed by as swift as lightning, matrimonial contracts move slowly and cautiously; but the word was passed, the goods were purchased, the house was ready; and to break a betrothal at such a point would have been held a crime and a disgrace.
Santina herself knew that; she was well aware that decent maidens do not do such things when the dower clothing and linen are all stitched, and the marriage-bed bought by the bridegroom. She knew, but she did not care. She was headstrong, changeable, vain and full of thirst for pleasure and for triumph and for wealth. She would not pass her life in her little native town, in the wheelwright's old house with a jealous rheumatic curmudgeon, for all the saints in heaven and all the friends on earth.
'Not I! Not I! Oh, why did Lisabetta go underground for ever with half the cards unread?' she thought, as she sat upon her couch of sacking and dry maize leaves, and she shook her clenched hands at the moon with anger at its smiling indifference. The moon could sail where it chose and see what it liked; and she was chained down here by her youth, and her sex, and her ignorance, and her poverty; and her only one faint hope of escape and aid lay in the closed grave of a dead old woman.
Though she was voluble and garrulous and imprudent and passionate, she could keep her own counsel.
Under her Tuscan volubility there was also the Tuscan secretiveness. Nobody saw inside her true thoughts. Her mind was like a little locked iron box into which no one could peep.