Ciccio worked all day on the land or round about. He was building a little earth closet also: the obvious and unscreened place outside was impossible. It was curious how little he went to Pescocalascio, how little he mixed with the natives. He seemed always to withhold something from them. Only with his relatives, of whom he had many, he was more free, in a kind of family intimacy.
Yet even here he was guarded. His uncle at the mill, an unwashed, fat man with a wife who tinkled with gold and grime, and who shouted a few lost words of American, insisted on giving Alvina wine and a sort of cake made with cheese and rice. Ciccio too was feasted, in the dark hole of a room. And the two natives seemed to press their cheer on Alvina and Ciccio wholeheartedly.
“How nice they are!” said Alvina when she had left. “They give so freely.”
But Ciccio smiled a wry smile, silent.
“Why do you make a face?” she said.
“It’s because you are a foreigner, and they think you will go away again,” he said.
“But I should have thought that would make them less generous,” she said.
“No. They like to give to foreigners. They don’t like to give to the people here. Giocomo puts water in the wine which he sells to the people who go by. And if I leave the donkey in her shed, I give Marta Maria something, or the next time she won’t let me have it. Ha, they are—they are sly ones, the people here.”
“They are like that everywhere,” said Alvina.
“Yes. But nowhere they say so many bad things about people as here—nowhere where I have ever been.”
It was strange to Alvina to feel the deep-bed-rock distrust which all the hill-peasants seemed to have of one another. They were watchful, venomous, dangerous.
“Ah,” said Pancrazio, “I am glad there is a woman in my house once more.”
“But did nobody come in and do for you before?” asked Alvina. “Why didn’t you pay somebody?”
“Nobody will come,” said Pancrazio, in his slow, aristocratic English. “Nobody will come, because I am a man, and if somebody should see her at my house, they will all talk.”
“Talk!” Alvina looked at the deeply-lined man of sixty-six, “But what will they say?”
“Many bad things. Many bad things indeed. They are not good people here. All saying bad things, and all jealous. They don’t like me because I have a house—they think I am too much a signore. They say to me ‘Why do you think you are a signore?’ Oh, they are bad people, envious, you cannot have anything to do with them.”
“They are nice to me,” said Alvina.
“They think you will go away. But if you stay, they will say bad things. You must wait. Oh, they are evil people, evil against one another, against everybody but strangers who don’t know them—”
Alvina felt the curious passion in Pancrazio’s voice, the passion of a man who has lived for many years in England and known the social confidence of England, and who, coming back, is deeply injured by the ancient malevolence of the remote, somewhat gloomy hill-peasantry. She understood also why he was so glad to have her in his house, so proud, why he loved serving her. She seemed to see a fairness, a luminousness in the northern soul, something free, touched with divinity such as “these people here” lacked entirely.
When she went to Ossona with him, she knew everybody questioned him about her and Ciccio. She began to get the drift of the questions—which Pancrazio answered with reserve.
“And how long are they staying?”
This was an invariable, envious question. And invariably Pancrazio answered with a reserved—
“Some months. As long as they like.”
And Alvina could feel waves of black envy go out against Pancrazio, because she was domiciled with him, and because she sat with him in the flat cart, driving to Ossona.
Yet Pancrazio himself was a study. He was thin, and very shabby, and rather out of shape. Only in his yellow eyes lurked a strange sardonic fire, and a leer which puzzled her. When Ciccio happened to be out in the evening he would sit with her and tell her stories of Lord Leighton and Millais and Alma Tadema and other academicians dead and living. There would sometimes be a strange passivity on his worn face, an impassive, almost Red Indian look. And then again he would stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world like a debauched old tomcat. His narration was like this: either simple, bare, stoical, with a touch of nobility; or else satiric, malicious, with a strange, rather repellent jeering.
“Leighton—he wasn’t Lord Leighton then—he wouldn’t have me to sit for him, because my figure was too poor, he didn’t like it. He liked fair young men, with plenty of flesh. But once, when he was doing a picture—I don’t know if you know it? It is a crucifixion, with a man on a cross, and—” He described the picture. “No! Well, the model had to be tied hanging on to a wooden cross. And it made you suffer! Ah!” Here the odd, arch, diabolic yellow flare lit up through the stoicism of Pancrazio’s eyes. “Because Leighton, he was cruel to his model. He wouldn’t let you rest. ‘Damn you, you’ve got to keep still till I’ve finished with you, you devil,’ so he said. Well, for this man on the cross, he couldn’t get a model who would do it for him. They all tried it once, but they would not go again. So they said to him, he must try Califano, because Califano was the only man who would stand it. At last then he sent for me. ‘I don’t like your damned figure, Califano,’ he said to me, ‘but nobody will do this if you won’t. Now will you do it? ‘Yes!’ I said, ‘I will.’ So he tied me up on the cross. And he paid me
