“It’s more than ten years that he’s not done a stroke of work,” he replied sullenly, “and yet he expected his share in the polenta and the broth, just for all the world as if he’d earned it. When they get childish, they get unreasonable like children. Many’s the time I’ve said to him, ‘Why aren’t you underground, father?’ We ought to be allowed to put them there when their time’s come, and they won’t go in the course of nature.” The steward turned from him in disgust and pain, and rested his gaze on the old, worn, rugged form lying on its bed of sacking. About the doorway, peeping and curious, the children were gathered. “Is it all over?” said their mother with a whine. “It is all over indeed!” said the steward gravely, and with a flash of loathing in his blue eyes. “You will learn what he suffered when you lie on your own death-bed. I came as soon as I heard of it. Why could you not even let me know?” They tittered in concert: men, women, boys, and girls. What a fuss about old Nonno! But, of course, this young man was a foreigner, and that was as good as saying he was a fool. Did he not want dogs fed, and cows kept clean? Did he not say men should wash their bodies and women should not swaddle their children? Was he not a new-comer, an interloper, a meddler, a stranger from nobody knew where? Alcide’s wife, however, had the wit to see that they were on the wrong tack. “Good sir,” she said, with tears in her voice, “we have done what we could, but you know we are poor, poor, poor; and now there will be no end of money to find for the burial, and we ought to be allowed to scratch a hole and put him in the woods, but you know the powers that be won’t let us, and we have to carry him all the way to San Vitale, and we must borrow a neighbour’s mule, and when we get there pay all the church and graveyard dues, and sacristans and sextons--they live like carrion flies getting fat on corpses----” “Hold your tongue, you idiot!” said her husband. “For sure the Ministro here will help us through all these troubles. He knows how poor we are. Not a bit of bread sometimes all the twenty-four hours through.” “I will send here early in the forenoon, and will do all that is necessary,” said the steward. “Let your women folk cleanse and clothe the body, and watch by it through the night. You may be poor, but poverty need not be brutality, and you--you would make the wolves of the steppes seem beside you like angels of mercy.” His words were unintelligible to his auditors; but they understood that he was offended and disgusted with them. They did not care a jot for his opinion, but they cared much for his purse. Without even a glance at them, he made the sign of the cross reverently on the brow and breast of the corpse, and in silence went out of the garret; took the bridle from the nail on the wall, led his horse out over the doorstep, and vaulted into the saddle. “Not even a copper piece has he left behind him!” moaned the woman.