Then he had come home from America with a fair amount of money, he had taken his uncle's garden, had inherited his uncle's little house, and he lived quite alone.
He was rich, Maria said, shouting in her strident voice. He at once disclaimed it, peasant-wise. But before the signori he was glad also to appear rich. He was mean, that was more, Maria cried, half-teasing, half getting at him.
He attended to his garden, grew vegetables all the year round, lived in his little house, and in spring made good money as a vine-grafter: he was an expert vine-grafter.
After the boys had gone to bed he sat and talked to me. He was curiously attractive and curiously beautiful, but somehow like stone in his clear colouring and his clear-cut face. His temples, with the black hair, were distinct and fine as a work of art.
But always his eyes had this strange, half-diabolic, half-tortured pale gleam, like a goat's, and his mouth was shut almost uglily, his cheeks stern. His moustache was brown, his teeth strong and spaced. The women said it was a pity his moustache was brown.
'_Peccato!--sa, per bellezza, i baffi neri--ah-h!_'
Then a long-drawn exclamation of voluptuous appreciation.
He did. And even when he had been ill he was alone. He had been ill two years before. His cheeks seemed to harden like marble and to become pale at the thought. He was afraid, like marble with fear.
'But why,' I said, 'why do you live alone? You are sad--_è triste_.'
He looked at me with his queer, pale eyes. I felt a great static misery in him, something very strange.
'_Triste!_' he repeated, stiffening up, hostile. I could not understand.
'_Vuol' dire che hai l'aria dolorosa_,' cried Maria, like a chorus interpreting. And there was always a sort of loud ring of challenge somewhere in her voice.
'Sad I' he repeated, also in English. And he did not smile or change, only his face seemed to become more stone-like. And he only looked at me, into my eyes, with the long, pale, steady, inscrutable look of a goat, I can only repeat, something stone-like.
'Why,' I said, 'don't you marry? Man doesn't live alone.'
'I don't marry,' he said to me, in his emphatic, deliberate, cold fashion, 'because I've seen too much. _Ho visto troppo._'