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Title: The Last Lady of Mulberry: A Story of Italian New York

Author: Henry Wilton Thomas

Illustrator: Emil Pollak

Release date: May 7, 2022 [eBook #68009]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1900

Credits: D A Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by University of California libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST LADY OF MULBERRY: A STORY OF ITALIAN NEW YORK ***





_The Last Lady of Mulberry_


[Illustration: Flowers for a Neapolitan of the Porto!
                                   (See page 53.)]




  _The Last Lady
  of Mulberry_

  _A Story of Italian New York_
  _By Henry Wilton Thomas_

  _Illustrated by Emil Pollak_

  _New York_
  _D. Appleton and Company_
  _1900_




  COPYRIGHT, 1900
  BY HENRY WILTON THOMAS

  _All rights reserved_




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                       PAGE

      I.--A GODDESS SCORNED                       1
     II.--CASA DI BELLO                          18
    III.--A SPOT OF YELLOW PAINT                 37
     IV.--JUNO THE SUPERB                        44
      V.--THE FIRST LADY                         57
     VI.--CAROLINA RESOLVES TO GO COURTING       75
    VII.--A FLUTTER IN THE TOMATO BANK           82
   VIII.--JUNO PERFORMS A MIRACLE                94
     IX.--THE PERPETUA MEETS A BEAR             102
      X.--BIRTH OF THE LAST LADY                114
     XI.--A RACE TO THE SWIFT                   123
    XII.--THE PEACE PRESERVED                   143
   XIII.--THE PEACE DISTURBED                   153
    XIV.--YELLOW BOOTS AND ORANGE BLOSSOMS      172
     XV.--FAILURE OF BANCA TOMATO               186
    XVI.--THE LAST LADY UNMASKED                211
   XVII.--THE FALCON SAVES THE DOVE             228
  XVIII.--AT THE ALTAR OF SAN PATRIZIO          238
    XIX.--EVENTS WAIT UPON THE DANDELIONS       255
     XX.--A HOUSE DIVIDED                       268
    XXI.--THE FEAST OF SPRINGTIDE               278
   XXII.--CAROLINA CONSTRUCTS A DRAMA           292
  XXIII.--A PARTNERSHIP IN TEN-INCH ST. PETERS  308
   XXIV.--TWO TROUBLESOME WEDDING GIFTS         314




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                               FACING PAGE

  Flowers for a Neapolitan of the Porto!      _Frontispiece_
  Would Genoa be the same when his Juno and Peacock
    should be there?                                    5
  Bertino’s arrival at Paradise Park                   20
  The bear-tamer’s wife                               109
  “A broken leg! _Dio Santo!_”                        111
  It was a wild thrust                                170
  Bridget in _balia_ array                            189
  Jack Tar’s ignoble end                              196
  The Last Lady as Queen of the Feast                 287




THE LAST LADY OF MULBERRY




CHAPTER I

A GODDESS SCORNED


ALL Armando knew of sculpture he had learned from his uncle Daniello, a
mountain craftsman who never chiselled anything greater than a ten-inch
Saint Peter. At night in the tavern on the craggy height, with a flask
of _barbera_ before him, the old carver would talk grandly of his
doings in art, while his comrades, patient of the oft-told tale, nodded
their heads in listless but loyal accord. They all knew very well
that it was young Armando who did most of the carving, yet they cried
“Bravo!” for old Daniello’s wine was good. And so it had been for a
long time. While the lad chipped all day in a little workshop perched
beyond the nether cloud shadows, his uncle passed the hours in Genoa,
where, by sharp wits and bland tongue, he transmuted the marble into
silver.

But Armando had a soul that looked far above the gleaming tonsures of
ten-inch Saint Peters. Wherefore he was unhappy. When his twentieth
birthday dawned it seemed to him that his life had been a failure.
One morning, after a night of much _barbera_ and noisy gasconade, old
Daniello did not wake up, and two days afterward they laid him to rest
in the sloping graveyard in the gorge by the olive-oil mill.

Gloomily Armando weighed the situation, standing by the mullioned
window of the room wherein he had toiled so long and ignobly. Far
in the western distance he could see the ships that seemed to glide
with full sails across the mountains. The serene midsummer vapours,
pendulous above the Mediterranean, were visible, but the sea upon
which their shadows fell and lingered was hidden from his view by a
thicket of silver firs. Southward the trees stood lower, and over their
tops, where tired sea gulls circled, he gazed sadly toward the jumble
of masonry that is Genoa.

Miles below in the sun glare the city lay this morning as Heine found
it decades ago, like the bleached skeleton of some thrown-up monster
of the deep. And a monster it was in the sight of the poor lad who
looked down from the heights of Cardinali--but a monster that he would
conquer, even as Saint George, champion of Genoa, had conquered the
dragon in ages far agone. Yes, he would strike off for evermore the
chains that fettered him to ten-inch Saint Peters, and mount to the
white peaks of art! In the Apennine hamlet he had lived all his days,
and never heard of Balzac; but he clinched his fist, and, with eyes set
upon the cluster of chimney pots at the mountain’s foot, made his vow:

“In this room, O Genoa! will I bring forth a marble that shall make
you do me honour.”

Then he felt uplifted--as though he had burned the bridges that hung
between his old ignominy and the straight path to fame and riches. The
vow was still fervid and strong within him when, two days afterward,
he beheld in a shop window of Genoa a photograph of Falguière’s great
marble, Juno and the Peacock. Before the divine contours of Jupiter’s
helpmeet the simple-hearted graver of saintly images stood enchanted.
Presently, as though spoken by a keen, mysterious voice from the upper
air, there pierced his consciousness the word “Replica!” Again and
again was it repeated, each time with a new insistence. Ah, a copy of
this in marble! Yes; with such a masterpiece he would begin his ascent
to the white peaks. He bought the photograph, put it in his pocket and
kept it there until he was beyond the city’s bounds and trudging up the
causeway toward Cardinali. Now and then he took out the picture,
regarded it fondly, and, peering back at the town, asked himself if
Genoa would look the same when his Juno and the Peacock should be
there. Would the soft murmur of that drowsy mass have the same note?
Would the people move with the same pace, eat, sleep, and drink as they
had always done? He was inclined to think they would not.

[Illustration: Would Genoa be the same when his Juno and Peacock should
be there?]

For a twelvemonth, through early tides and late shifts, he modelled and
chipped: in winter, when the demoniac mistral, raging all about him,
shook the workshop and snapped the boughs of the cypresses; in summer,
when the ortolan and the wood-thrush cheered him with their song. And
the little group of neighbours, from whom he guarded his great artistic
secret, marvelled that no more Saint Peters came forth from their
time-honoured birthplace.

Only two persons in Cardinali besides Armando had knowledge of the
momentous affair that was going forward. One was Bertino, a fair-haired
youth of the sculptor’s age, who busied his hands by day plaiting
Lombardian straw into hats, and his head by night dreaming of America
and showering cornucopias of gold. He was Armando’s bosom friend. The
other confidant was Bertino’s foster sister Marianna, somewhat demure
for a mountain lass, and subject to thinking spells. Beauty she had,
notably on feast days, when she walked to church with a large-rayed
comb in her braided chestnut waterfall, a gorgeous striped apron, and
clattering half-sabots, freshly scraped and polished to a shine. She,
too, plaited straw, and with it wove many love thoughts and sighs for
Armando.

At last the stately goddess and her long-tailed companion stood
triumphant in all the candour of marble not wholly spotless. The hour
of unveiling it to the astonished gaze of Bertino and Marianna was the
happiest that the ruler of Armando’s fate permitted him for many a day
thereafter. The bitterness and crushing disillusion came on the day
that he loaded the carved treasure on the donkey cart of Sebastiano
the carrier, and followed Juno and the Peacock down the mountain pass
to the haven of his sweet anticipation.

“He has been saving up his Saint Peters,” said Michele the Cobbler to a
group of mystified neighbours as the cart passed his shop. “See, he has
a box full of them. I wonder how many saints one can cut out in a year.
Ah, well, it was not thus that his uncle Daniello did, nor his father
before him. Shall I tell you what I think, my friends? Well, I think
that boy is going wrong.”

“Ah, _si_,” was the unanimous voice.

“May your success be great, Armando mine!” said Bertino when they
parted at the first curve of the pass. “Perhaps against your return I
shall have famous news from America. Who knows? Good fortune be with
you. _Addio._”

“The saints be with you to a safe return,” said Marianna. “_Addio_, and
good fortune.”

“_Addio, carissimi amici._”

Sebastiano the carrier lifted the block from the wheel and the donkey
moved on. Armando walked behind, keeping a watchful eye on the thing
in the cart, which was in every shade of the term a reduced replica of
Falguière’s inspiration.

“You must be very careful, Sebastiano,” said he. “Never in your life
have you had such a valuable load on your cart.”

“Bah!” growled the driver. “Valuable! How many have you there? Are
they all the same size? Do you mean to say that I never had a load as
valuable as a boxful of Saint Peters? Oh, _bello_! Only last week did I
haul a barrel of fine _barolo_ to the Inn of the Fat Calf. Ah, my dear,
that is a wine. Wee-ah! wee-ah!--Go on, you lazy one. That donkey is
too careful.”

They reached their destination in Genoa without mishap. When the art
dealer who had consented to look at it had bestowed on Armando’s work
of a year a momentary survey, he turned to the sculptor, who stood hat
in hand, and regarded him earnestly.

“Who told you to do this, dear young man?” he asked, removing his
eyeglasses.

“Nobody, signore. It was my own idea.”

The merchant turned to Juno with a new interest.

“Not so bad as it might have been,” he shrugged, moving aside to view
the figures in profile. “What is your name? Signor Corrini. Well--but,
my dear young man, it will be a long time, perhaps years, before you
are able to do work of this kind. Naturally, I could not permit it
to remain in my place. What else have you done? Something smaller, I
suppose.”

Armando strove hard to keep them back, but the sobs choked him.

While the merchant stood by, offering words meant to comfort, but which
added to his anguish, he replaced the marble in the box and nailed the
lid before rousing Sebastiano from his _siesta_ in the cart.

“It all comes of keeping the saints too long,” grumbled the carrier,
as he helped lift Juno and the Peacock back into the cart. “Never did
your uncle Daniello have any thrown on his hands--not he. Ah, there was
a man of affairs!”

The donkey tugged at the chain traces, moved the wheels a spoke or two,
then stopped and looked around at the driver, wagging his grizzled ears
in mute but eloquent disapproval of hauling a load skyward. But after
duly weighing the matter, assisted by several clean-cut hints from a
rawhide lash, he set off at his own crablike pace.

The first turning of the highway attained, Armando paused and gazed on
the city below, his heart aflood with bitterness. Far to the westward
the sun, in variant crimson tones, lay hidden under the sea, like the
last, loftiest dome of some sinking Atlantis. In every white hamlet of
the slopes the Angelus was ringing. Night birds from Africa wheeled
around the towering snares set for them by the owners of the olive
terraces and villas, whose yellow walls in long stretches bordered the
steep route. With his little group of living and inanimate companions
Armando trudged along, his head bowed, silent as the marble in the
cart. The gloaming quiet was unbroken, save for the gluck of the wheels
and the distant chant of the belfries.

They were yet a long way from the outermost cot of Cardinali when
a resounding shout brought the donkey to a standstill and startled
Sebastiano into a “_Per Bacco_!”

It was the voice of Bertino. He was rounding a curve in the road,
brandishing a piece of folded paper, and clattering toward them as fast
as he could in his heavy wooden shoes. His radiant face proclaimed that
something had happened to fill him with gladness. A few paces behind
came Marianna, but in her eyes there was no token of joy. She had
beheld the loaded cart.

“Long live my uncle!” cried Bertino, grasping Armando’s hand. “The
letter has come, and I’m off for America. Think of it, Armando _mio_,
I, Bertino Manconi, going to America! It is no longer a dream. I am
to go--go, do you understand? The money is here, and nothing can stop
me. But come, you do not seem happy to hear of my great good fortune.
I know, dear friend, you are sorry to lose me. Bah! one can not live
in the mountains all his life, and perhaps you too will be there some
day--some day when your Juno is sold. To-night all my friends shall
drink a glass of _spumante_ to my voyage--yes, the real _spumante_ of
Asti. At the Inn of the Fat Calf will I say _addio_, for I set sail
to-morrow. Tell me, now, do you not count me a lucky devil?”

“You are lucky,” said Armando sadly. “I wish I could go. My own country
does not want me.”

Marianna walked at the tail of the cart. While her brother was talking
she had lifted the box in the hope that it might, after all, be only
the empty one that he was bringing back; but the weight of it told her
the truth she had read in Armando’s face.

“The beast!” she said, “to refuse such a fine thing as that. What
did----”

Armando signalled silence, and pointed to Sebastiano, who walked ahead.
By this time Bertino understood, and he too exclaimed:

“The beast!”

“Who’s a beast?” asked the muleteer.

“That art merchant, whoever he is. Bah! What would you have? In this
country a fellow has no chance. What a fool one is to stay here!”

“No, no; the country is good,” said Sebastiano, shaking his head and
jerking a thumb toward Armando. “But what can you expect when one keeps
his Saint Peters a whole year?”

The others exchanged knowing glances and followed on in silence. The
rest of the way it was plain to all who saw Bertino pass that he was
thinking very hard, and with the product of this mental exertion he was
fairly bursting by the time they reached Armando’s home, for he had not
dared to speak in presence of the carrier. When Juno and the Peacock
had been restored to their birthplace he began:

“Now, listen to me, _amici_, for I have an idea. I am going to America.
Is not that so?”

“Yes; you are going to America. Well?”

“Patience. You know that as the assistant of my uncle in his great shop
in New York I shall be rather a bigger man than I am here. Who knows
what I may become?”

“Ah, _si_; who knows?” said Marianna.

“Listen. Now, let us have a thought together. Here is Armando. He is a
fine sculptor. We know that. The proof is here.” He tapped the big box.
“But in Genoa they are too stupid and too poor to buy his magnificent
work. Now, in America people are neither stupid nor poor. Why can he
not make a fortune in America?”

“I can’t go to America,” said Armando.

“No; he can’t go to America,” chimed in Marianna. “What a foolish
idea!”

“Excuse me. Who wants him to go to America? He stays in Cardinali and
makes statues. I go to New York and sell them. Now, my dears, do you
see which way the swallow is flying?”

“But----”

“But----”

“But nothing. Do you think that I, who sail for America to-morrow, do
not know what I am about? Listen. What do you suppose I was doing on
the way up? Well, I was thinking. I have thought it all out. I ask you
this, Armando: Juno and the Peacock you made from a photograph? Very
well; can you not make other things from photographs? From New York I
shall send you the picture of some great American; some one as great
as--as great as----”

“Crespi,” suggested Armando, now interested in the project.

“Crespi? No, no. Some one greater, like--like----”

“D’Annunzio,” Armando ventured again.

“Bah! Who is he? I mean some one very great, like----”

“I know!” cried Marianna. “Like the Pope!”

“No, no,” persisted Bertino. “It must be some man as big as Garibaldi.
That’s it. But not a dead Garibaldi. He must be alive, so that I may
sell him the bust that you will make of him. What would you do with a
man like that, for example?”

“Well,” said Armando, pausing and looking up at the ceiling, as though
weighing the matter carefully, “I should make a very fine bust of such
a man.”

“Bravo!” cried Bertino. “With a piece of your best work for a sample,
how long should I be getting orders for more? Not many days, I promise.
And the Americans have gold. What say you, my friend? Is it not a grand
idea?”

“_Si, si_; a grand idea.”

In truth it loomed before Armando as the chance of his life. Now as
ardent as the other, he agreed to begin work upon a bust in marble
so soon as he should receive from America a photograph of the chosen
subject. When finished he would send it to New York, there to be put on
exhibition and offered for sale.

That afternoon the Saale steamed from Genoa Bay with Bertino a steerage
passenger. Some time after the ship had swung from her quay Armando and
Marianna looked from the studio window over the cypress fringe toward
the gap in the mountains that shows the sails of ships but conceals the
Mediterranean’s waves. Presently a black bar of smoke moving lazily
across the aperture told them that he was on his way.

Near the window a block of Carrara marble glistened pure and white in
the sunlight. Armando wondered what manner of being he should release
from it--a President, a money king, or a great American beauty?




CHAPTER II

CASA DI BELLO


THE banked fire of America’s Sabbath gave its quiet to Bowling Green
the day that Bertino landed in New York. It was not the New York he had
seen so often from the heights of Cardinali. The cloud-piercing houses
had always loomed in his dream pictures, but no returned exile had
ever told him that they filled the soul with this nameless dread. He
longed to be in Mulberry, which all travellers agreed was the next best
thing to being in Italy. With a goatskin box under one arm, a tawny
cotton umbrella pressed by the other, and his left hand clutching the
knotted ends of a kerchief holding more luggage, he set out from the
Barge Office. In the band of his narrow-brimmed black soft hat--the
precious adornment of festal days--stood a gray turkey feather, and
about his bare neck in sailor noose was tied a cravat of satin, green
as the myrtle of his native steeps. As he strode up Broadway, past old
Trinity and Wall Street, the heavy fall of his hobnailed boots started
the echoes of the New World’s financial centre.

A flock of fellow-pilgrims clattered by at high speed in care of a
guide, who charged five cents a head for piloting them safely to the
Italian colony. The hatless women, burdened with babies and heavy
sacks, struggled bravely to keep up with the men, who carried the
umbrellas. Bertino fell in behind, and soon they turned the corner of
Franklin Street. Here they got their first glimpse of Mulberry, which
lay clearly visible in the distance at the foot of a hill whose summit
is Broadway. Beneath the Bridge of Sighs, which spans the street at the
Tombs Prison, forming an arching frame for the picture, they could see
the pleasant lawn of Paradise Park. It was a bright afternoon, and the
broad patch of greensward gleamed like a great emerald down there in
the sunlight, and the low-roofed houses all around, with the sun’s fire
in their window panes, had a homelike countenance. This was not the
image their minds had wrought of Mulberry, where travellers said the
people were herded in pens that knew not the light of day. How strange
that no one had ever told them it was so cheerful and _bello_! But when
they reached the heart of the quarter they had no more thrills from
the contemplation of natural beauty. Here the air throbbed with the
_staccato_ cadence of south Italian _patois_. The signs over the shops
were no longer gibberish, and Bertino blessed the day that he, Armando,
and Marianna had paid the mountain pedagogue three liras to teach them
words of ordinary size.

[Illustration: Bertino’s arrival at Paradise Park.]

Mulberry was in its accustomed Sunday manner. Nearly all the shops
were closed, and their faces, so smiling on week days in scarlet
wreaths of dried peppers, clusters of varnished buffalo cheeses and
festoons of Bologna _salame_, now frowned in shabby black or dark-brown
shutters. Madre Chiara’s bower, evergreen on working days with chicory
and dandelion salad and Savoy cabbage, had vanished with its owner. No
gossip-hungry women, with primed ears, bent about the basket of the
garlic seller on China Hill, for she was out with everybody to-day in
her best clothes. The crippled beggar at the hydrant was not missing,
but he shivered in the May sunshine because Sara the Frier of Pepper
Pods was not there with her pail of fire. Another important brazier
was in Sunday retirement--that of old Cantolini the Gondolier, and in
consequence there floated on the air no suave odour of cooking pine
cones, whose seed the Napolitani of the Basso Porto so love to munch.

In the rear courts, where gamblers at _morra_ bawled and capered like
madmen, rows of pushcarts, their stubby shafts in the air, told of
a twenty-four-hour truce in the strategic fray waged between the
peddler army and the artful police. The narrow ribbon of sky between
the tall tenements had a Sunday look; it was not mottled with shirts
of many patches hung out to dry, and the iron fire escapes, stripped
of their week-day wash things in the general sprucing up, gave to the
eye here and there the colours of Italy. The dingy _caffès_, from whose
tenebrous depths tobacco smoke poured with the scent of viands, were
crowded with the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani of the
rural districts visiting Mulberry for an innocent spree.

The jewelry shops were open and doing a lively trade. Young men bought
wedding rings and tried them on the fingers of their promised wives,
while faint-hearted bachelors, at the same counter, parted with their
hard-earned coin for little silver-tipped horns against the evil eye.
At the door a brawny flower woman in spickest gingham held a basket of
dahlias fresh, mingled with carnations and asters that had lost the
bloom of first youth. It was a sure vantage ground for her traffic.
The mating couples, proud in their ownership of the wedlock band,
stopped at the basket, every one, and close-fisted indeed was the
future husband who did not hand a posy to his bride elect.

As the wondering Bertino passed, bearded men in the rôle of newsboys
bellowed their wares in his ears: “_Il Progresso! L’Araldo! L’Italiano
in America! Due soldi!_” Literature got scant nourishment, but
tobacco-selling throve, and the man without a lengthy rat-tail cigar
in his mouth was marked among his fellows. They were all in their
smartest clothes. Starched shirts were too numerous to give their
wearers distinction, and not a few of the clean-shaved necks fretted
within stiff collars. Here and there dark-skinned young sparks with
red neckties puffed cigarettes and showed fine in apparel that smacked
of Bowery show-windows. Scarcely a woman was there from whose ears
did not hang long pendants of gold, nor a feminine head that did not
gleam in oily smoothness. Shawls woven in the gaudy hues and fantastic
patterns of Italian looms splashed the throng with colour, and a few of
those large-rayed combs that Apennine maidens love to wear glinted in
the sunshine of Paradise Park. Much courting went forward on the park
benches, the fond ones caring not an atom for the stare of colder eyes,
but retaining their entwined pose in sweet oblivion to the rest of
Mulberry.

The company in charge of the five-cent guide followed their leader into
a broad alley, and Bertino was left alone in the concourse, at loss
whither to turn. Not a soul gave the least heed to him. Those whom he
asked to point him to 342 Mulberry Street, his uncle’s abode, passed
on shaking their heads and mumbling something in broad Sicilian or
Neapolitan which the young Genovese did not understand. Some sighed
as they made the sign of not knowing, as though that number were the
darkest of mysteries. At length a gleam of light came over one face.

“I know,” said the man, a young fellow decked in Sunday corduroy. “It
is Casa Di Bello.”

“Yes; Giorgio Di Bello is the name of my uncle.”

“Your uncle? Santa Maria, signore! Let me carry your trunk.”

But Bertino only hugged the goatskin closer, the tales of Mulberry
sharks current in every mountain hamlet of Italy being vivid in his
mind.

“I’ll show you the house, anyway,” said the man of knowledge, and
Bertino followed.

The sidewalk was too narrow for the buzzing stream. The asphalted
roadway had become the grand promenade, and there the panorama of
Italia’s types unrolled: black men of Messina, with the hair and skin
of Persia, exiled from Etna’s slopes mayhap by the glowing lavas that
burn up olive grove and vineyard; red, flat-nosed men and fair-haired
women of Lombardy, driven perchance from their fertile plains by the
ruin that rides grimly on the freshets of the Po, but brought oftener
by the tax collector; cowherds and clodbreakers of the Roman Campagna,
whose clear-toned dialect found an antiphonal note in the patter of the
gaunt but often brawny sons of fever-plagued Maremma. Here and there
in the moving throng strutted a labour _padrone_, out to salute and be
saluted with lifted hat by all who prized his favour. One and all they
uncovered as he passed--sturdy dwarfs from Calabria and the Basilicata,
mere pegs from the heel and the toe of the Boot; limpid-eyed
mountaineers from the Abruzzi, bronzed fags of half-African Sicily,
riffraff of the Neapolitan slums; America-mad fishermen of the Adriatic
and Tyrrhene, deserters of a coinless Arcadia to become hod-slaves with
a bank account.

Slowly but volubly the clans of toil moved by, unheeded by a little
mother whose life was given for the moment to shining the heavy gold
rings in her baby’s ears.

“_Eccola, signore_,” said the man in corduroy, pausing before a house
that faced St. Patrick’s graveyard. “This is Casa Di Bello, the finest
domicile in the colony.”

It was an old-style brick dwelling of two stories and attic on the
northern fringe of Mulberry--the only house in the street whose front
was not gridironed with fire escapes. The low stoop, iron railing,
and massive dadoes, the Ionian door columns of hard wood, the domed
vestibule and generous width, marked it a rare survivor of the
building era that passed with the stagecoach and the Knickerbocker--a
well-preserved ghost of the quarter’s bygone fashion and respectability.

Bertino looked up and read in bold text upon a well-polished brass
doorplate the assuring name, “Di Bello.”

“_Grazie mille_,” he said to his guide. “I am too poor to make you a
present. _Grazie mille._”

The other made off with a long face, but protesting that he had not
expected a present for such a small service.

Heartened by the nearness of a friend, Bertino gave the heavy bell
handle a stout pull. Decorously and without undue promptness the
broad-panelled oak swung narrowly, and the mountaineer looked into the
stern complacency of his aunt Carolina’s eyes. He was too young to
remember this smug dame of closing forty, who had gone from Cardinali
twelve years before to become _perpetua_[A] in the Mulberry parish
rectory. That peaceful career she had forsaken, for reasons of which we
may learn; but the eight years of churchdom were still in her head. Nor
had she ever lost the outward badge. She was rotund and well-coloured,
monastic of mien, and sleek as a cathedral rat.

“Who are you?” she asked, scanning the lad from his hobnailed soles to
the turkey feather in his hat.

“I am Bertino Manconi, nephew of Signor Giorgio Di Bello,” he answered
proudly, unabashed by her poignant stare. “Are you Angelica the cook?”

[Footnote A: A priest’s housekeeper.]

When her breath came free she said: “But it was to-morrow--Monday.” His
arrival one day ahead of the appointed time shocked her rubric sense
of order and ignored her ritual of coming events. “And you come to the
door like a Sicilian, baggage in hand and----”

“Ha! Welcome to my house!” cried a hearty voice at the head of the
stairs. “A hundred welcomes, _caro_ nephew! But what a stupendous
height! Step aside, my sister, and bid the giant enter. How is this? At
the parish house did they teach you to make friends wait outside? Well,
it is not so at Casa Di Bello. So you are a day ahead? Well, so much
the better. Ah, what a fine voyage you must have had!”

It was no longer a voice on the upper floor, but the form and substance
of a bush-headed, chubby man of dawning fifty, whose prodigious King
Humbert mustache quaked as he puffed down the staircase as best his
short legs would permit. He threw himself upon Bertino, who had to
stoop a little to receive a resonant salutation on each cheek. Then
Carolina bestowed a pair of stony kisses, first remarking with wooden
seemliness, “Welcome, my nephew.”

At the same moment Angelica the cook, a mite of a crone with a Roman
nose, carried a steaming soup into the dining room, set it on the
table, and called out in the shrillest Genovese:

“_Ecco, signori_; the _minestrone_ is served, and the most beautiful
_minestrone_ I have made since the Feast of the Mother.”

After his three weeks of steerage fare Bertino fell upon the dinner
with a zest that delighted his uncle, but dismayed Carolina, and caused
the rims of Angelica’s eyes to spread until they were as round as the O
of Giotto.

“Well, did you stop to pick up any gold in the street?” asked Signor
Di Bello, winking at his sister, and sprinkling grated Parmesan over a
ragout of green peppers. “I suppose you have your valise filled with
it.”

“_Ma che!_” said Bertino, holding up his plate and looking wise. “Do
you think I am such a fool? I don’t expect to pick up money; but shall
I tell you something? Well, it is this: In this country I shall soon
make enough money to fill that valise.”

The others dropped their knives and forks and regarded him with
amazement.

“By the egg of Columbus!” exclaimed Signor Di Bello. “Are you not to
work in my shop?”

“Oh, yes; of course.”

“Then how do you expect to make so much money?”

There was no reason for it; but Bertino, oddly enough, yielded to a
sudden impulse to repress the truth. Cocking his eye first to the
ceiling and then on the tablecloth, he uttered a fib that concealed his
and Armando’s darling project for selling life-size busts in America.

The coffee served and the maraschino sipped, Signor Di Bello drew the
straw from a Virginia and settled for a smoke, while Aunt Carolina
showed Bertino to the room in the attic appointed for his use. She
unpacked his few belongings and placed them tidily in a small chest of
drawers, at the same time laying before him solemnly the parish-house
rules by which she governed Casa Di Bello. Had her brother below stairs
heard this, it is likely that he would have sent up many a guffaw with
his smoke rings, for by him these rules had received little honour save
in the steady nonobservance.

Carolina had never set her face against Bertino’s coming to the house,
and there was no method in the frosty greeting she had given him at
the door. It was merely that the sight of him, standing there, bag
and baggage, a whole day before the time, had staggered her orderly
being and drawn from her an instinctive protest. This all came of her
unruffled years as _perpetua_ of the rectory--that domain of peace and
even tenor, whose broad, clear windows she often regarded wistfully,
looking over the churchyard to Mott Street, from her sanctum on the
second floor.

A half decade had gone by since the Wednesday of Ashes when the brother
and sister patched up the quarrel that had separated them in their
poorer days and she returned to the air of laity. But the sacerdotal
brand would not wear off, nor did she wish it to. In the conduct of
the household her churchly notions had free scope enough, but applied
in censorship of her brother’s life they met with dreary contempt. To
no purpose did she preach when Mulberry buzzed with the latest story
of his gallantries, for his ready argument was always an eloquent “_Ma
che!_” and an unanswerable shrug of the shoulders. In vain did she wait
up, often from compline to prime, that she might shame him when he
came home aglow with bumpers of divers vintage. It was after a certain
rubicund night at the Caffè of the Three Gardens that he cut short her
usual sermon with a roaring manifesto against church and state and a
declaration of personal liberty for all time.

“Snakes of purgatory!” he had remarked in conclusion, one foot on the
staircase. “Am I not a man? If you want priests, go to the parish
house, where you belong. Once a priest always a priest.” With this
taunt, meant to be a parting one, he toddled up to bed, but, reaching
the landing, stopped and called back: “If you don’t leave me alone,
I’ll bring a wife here.”

From that time, which was two years before Bertino’s arrival, she gave
up her nocturnal vigils, and without let or hindrance the signore
feasted and drank with boon comrades, and cracked walnuts on his head
with an empty bottle--a feat for which he was justly renowned in all
the _caffès_ of the quarter. The lowering peril of a wife in the house
had set her to thinking as she had never thought before on this dire
possibility. Her brother’s nonconformity was a flaw in her sceptre,
but she knew that a wife meant the utter collapse of her sovereignty
in Casa Di Bello. Wherefore she resolved to abide by the lesser evil,
and bend her strength to warding off the greater. Thus it befell that
with the accession of Bertino to the family she was not ill content.
The coming of a man to the board imparted no misgiving. What her soul
dreaded and her wits had guarded against was the advent of a woman.
And she felicitated herself that no wife had succeeded in crossing the
threshold. To her ever-watchful eye, she fondly believed, was due the
blessing of her brother’s continuance in the path of bachelorhood,
despite the caps that were set for him on every bush. The first
families of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani, along
with the flower of the Genovesi, the Milanesi, and the Torinesi, had
in turn put forth their famous beauties as candidates for his hand and
grocery store. But they all had been driven from the Rubicon, and at
present there was no pretender in the field. Had there been she would
have known it, as she knew of all the other marital campaigns, through
Angelica, who went to market daily and kept in touch with Sara the
Frier of Pepper Pods, Mulberry’s queen of gossips.




CHAPTER III

A SPOT OF YELLOW PAINT


NEXT morning, while the sun gave its first touch to the bronze head
of Garibaldi, Bertino tied on an apron and set to work in Signor Di
Bello’s shop, that peerless grocery whose small window and large door
look tranquilly on the Park of Paradise. For a dozen years it had been
known far and wide among Italia’s children as “The Sign of the Wooden
Bunch.” The nickname came of a piece of carved oak simulating a bunch
of bananas that hung before the door. In the early days of his business
life the padrone had learned that the air of Mulberry was singularly
fatal to the real fruit that he put on show outside. It happened some
days that as many as twenty bananas on one stem would evaporate,
though all the others remained intact. It was always the ones nearest
the ground that vanished. One evening it struck Signor Di Bello that a
violent chemical change in the exposed fruit would put an end to its
mysterious disintegration. So he substituted the bananas of art for
those of Nature. The evaporation ceased straightway, but for two or
three mornings thereafter certain small boys, on their way to the Five
Points Mission School, beheld with bitter disappointment the oaken
symbol, and answered its grin of mockery with looks of blackest disgust.

Those boys are workingmen now, and when they dream of the springtimes
of childhood, they see Giorgio Di Bello, paint brush in hand, giving a
fresh skin of yellow to the make-believe bananas. It was a promise of
vernal roses as sure as the chirp of a bluebird in the churchyard grass
or the gladsome advent of Simone the Sardinian with his hokey-pokey
cart. When the people saw him giving the bunch its annual sprucing up,
they were wont to exclaim: “Bravo! Summer is coming. Soon we shall
have music in Paradise.”

The morning of Bertino’s _début_ at the shop was a bright one of
young June, and the baby maples of the Park were showing their first
dimples of green. It was the blatant hour when Mulberry’s street
bazaar is in full cry; when the sham battle fought every morning
between honeyed sellers and scornful buyers is in hot movement; when
dimes and coppers are the vender’s prize against flounders, cabbages,
saucepans, calicoes, apples, and shoestrings, as the stake that fires
the housewife’s tongue and eye; when stout-lunged hucksters cut the din
with the siren songs their kind have sung for ages in the market place.

Spick and span in the clean blouse of Monday, Signor Di Bello stood
on his broad threshold ready for the day’s trade. He had just shown
Bertino how to convert the prosy doorway into a bower abloom with
garlands of freckled _salame_, cordons of silvery garlic, clusters of
_cacciocavalli_ cheese; how to hang in the entry luring sheaves of wild
herbs, strings of hazelnuts, and the golden colocynths that are--as all
must know--an anodyne for every ill. To flaunt this ravishing group
to the senses of the colony was Bertino’s first duty of the day. That
accomplished, he set out on either side of the doorway the tubs of
tempting stockfish, the black peas of Lombardy, parched tomatoes and
red peppers, lupini beans in fresh water, ripe olives in brine, and
macaroni of sundry types.

Presently the foraging women, their blue-and-red-skirted hips wabbling
under the weight of well-loaded baskets balanced on their heads, began
to enter the shop. Dexterously taking down their burdens and setting
them on the counter, they called out their wants in the varied jargons
of the Peninsula. Not only was Signor Di Bello equal to them, one and
all, but he could give back two raps in the haggling set-to for every
tap that he received. When the morning had worn on, and the lay of the
last vender had died out, he opened a small can of yellow paint, chose
a brush from the stock, placed it in the hand of his nephew, and said:

“_Nipote mio_, do you see the green spots on the boughs? Well, it is
time to give the Bunch a new coat.”

Bertino applied the colour, while his uncle looked on with fond and
critical eye, for it was the first time he had intrusted the historic
task to other hands than his own. Before the finishing touch had
been given he was called into the shop to hack off a four-cent chunk
of Roman cheese. A moment later Bertino stepped back to survey his
handiwork, the brush at heedless poise--Mulberry’s sidewalks are narrow
and teeming--when an angry voice fairly stung his ear:

“_Guarda_, donkey! What are you about?”

He turned and looked into the blazing eyes of a tall young woman, whose
full-flowered beauty startled him more than her words had done, and
for the moment his tongue had no speech.

“Clumsy dog! Why don’t you look?” she began again, drawing out a
gingham handkerchief of purple and putting it to her face. On her
cheek, just where the flush faded in the rich tawn of her skin, was a
spot of yellow--as strangely there as though some fool had tried to
adorn a radiant blossom.

“But excuse me; a thousand pardons. I did not see you,” he blurted. “I
did not see you, _veramente_, signorina--beautiful signorina.”

“Bah!” she flung back. “Where are your eyes, calf of a countryman?”

He watched her as she sailed away above the heads of Mulberry’s little
brown maids and matrons, and for hours afterward felt the spell of her
massing black tresses, her proud step, and the rugged poetry of her
plenteous line.

Small matters these--a spot of fortuitous colour, flashing eyes among
a people who are always flashing, and a mountaineer with youth in his
veins thinking about a well-knit and warm-hued maid who has proved her
fire with a blistering tongue. But in the light of all that has come
and gone, that stain of yellow may not be wiped out from this record of
the warring dilemmas that sharpened the lives of certain little people
of the little world wherein we have set foot.




CHAPTER IV

JUNO THE SUPERB

    “O dolce Napoli,
    O suol beato,
    Ove sorridere,
    Voile il creato;
    Tu sei l’impero
    Dell ’armonia--
    Santa Lucia!
    Santa Lucia!”


SIGNOR GRABBINI, _impresario_ of the theatre of La Scala, resolved
to give up his valiant but ruinous fight for the legitimate drama.
Such pieces as Othello, Francesca da Rimini, The Count of Monte
Cristo, acted with a complete cast, had proved a strain too severe
for the treasury as well as for the capacity of his ten-foot stage.
In scenes where the entire company was “on,” the jam became so great
that spirited pushing set in, each actor aiming to hold that part of
the stage allotted to him by the playbook. In the struggle, conducted
sometimes with stealthy art, that the audience might not be aware,
toes were trodden upon and tempers badly stirred. Thus it happened
that after the curtain had rolled down, the ladies and gentlemen of
the company were likely to fall to shaking their fists at one another,
naturally to the delight of the audience, who could hear the wordy
battle very distinctly. Wherefore Signor Grabbini decided to change the
policy of his theatre.

One night he stepped before the curtain to make the momentous
announcement. Before he could open his mouth a sailor-man, red as
Hiawatha, reached over from the wicketed parapet of the gallery and
cried:

“A clasp of the hand, comrade!”

With a gallery so low as that it were folly to court dignity, so
the little man shook the big hand and then began his speech, which
he punctuated with glances at a piece of white paper that he held.
In glittering words he set forth the motives that animated him in
deciding upon a change from the plan of amusement that had been so
successful, so profitable to himself, and so agreeable to the signori
of the company. But it was because he wished to serve better, to
captivate even more the highly esteemed, the eminent, the generous
Italian colony, that in the future there would be no five-act
tragedies, but a veritable banquet every night of short comedies--oh,
so laughable!--from the pens of the world’s greatest dramatists, in the
true Italian as well as the dialect of sweet Naples.

“Bravoes!” from all over the theatre put a stop to the speech for a
moment. Men in the orchestra pens leaned over the edge of the stage and
lit their cigarettes at the footlights, and, taking advantage of the
pause, the meal-cake man shouted his wares.

“But this is not all, my friends,” went on Signor Grabbini.

A fresh shower of bravoes.

“Keep your feet off my head!” cried a man in the pit to one in the
gallery.

“Bah!” gave back the other, drawing in a huge boot between the wickets;
“in this theatre one can not stretch his legs.”

“Silence! Hear the _impresario_!”

“Beginning on Sunday night,” said the man on the stage, “I shall have
the distinct honour of presenting to the highly discriminating taste
of the most esteemed and eminent patrons of La Scala an extraordinary
singer of canzonets.”

“Bravo, Signor Grabbini!”

“Silence!”

“Meal cakes! A soldo each!”

“Silence, thou donkey!”

“With your permission, ladies and gentlemen,” the _impresario_ went
on, bowing low, “I will proceed. The artist to whom I have referred
is--ah! my friends--she is an angel of delight--a glorious type, a
creature magnificent. My word of honour, the most beautiful woman in
New York--nay, in all America. To the artistic world she is known as
Juno the Superb. Pay strict attention, my compatriots. The evening of
the Feast of Sunday will indeed be an occasion most extraordinary,
for it is my honoured privilege to inform you that in addition to the
famous comedies and the exquisite Juno, there will be an oyster cook in
the audience under the especial administration of the management, who
will prepare soups of sea fruit in true Neapolitan style and at prices
the most moderate.”

“_Bravissimo!_”

“Meal----”

“Silence! _Evviva_ the oyster cook!”

“With these my humble words, highly prized patrons, I will conclude,
and from the depth of my heart beg you to accept my most cordial
gratitude, and the assurance that in the future as well as the past you
will find me ever alert to serve faithfully and to the plenitude of my
power the highly esteemed, the eminent, the generous Italian colony.”

“Long live the _impresario_!” was rained from all parts as he backed
off, salaaming.

“_Evviva_ Juno the Superb!” piped one voice.

“And the oyster soup!” thundered a Sicilian hod-carrier.

At length the curtain was raised on the last act of the tragedy, and
the knights and ladies, buffoons and sages, soldiers and huntsmen,
began moving about the stage gingerly, with great skill avoiding
collision as they crossed or ducking their heads when they made exits,
hurried or slow, through the dollhouse doors.

On the Feast of Sunday a packed theatre bore witness to the wisdom of
Signor Grabbini’s change of policy. From the base-board of the stage,
which was fringed by a row of shrubby black heads, to the last tier of
benches there was no vacant seat. The first of the short comedies was
reeled off without a single toe trodden on, since it required only five
_dramatis personæ_. Not a joke went begging, for the audience heard
them all twice--first from the prompter, who bawled them from his
little green coop at the footlights, and again from the mouths of the
actors.

Next came the star of the evening, Juno the Superb. As the
orchestra--blaring its brass--struck up the prelude of her song, Signor
Di Bello entered the tiny proscenium box and dropped into a chair. The
fame of her plethoric beauty had reached him, as the _impresario_ had
taken good care it should reach many an appreciative masculine ear.
He was a very different-looking man to-night from the Signor Di Bello
of business hours, clad in a long drab blouse, hacking Parmesan and
weighing macaroni. Now he showed brave in snowy shirt front of bulging
expanse, large diamond, black coat, white waistcoat, lavender trousers,
and a gorgeous bouquet stuck under his left cheek.

When she appeared in the glare of the lights, draped frankly in the
odd colours and tinsel frippery of the Campania peasant maid--as she
is seen nowhere but on the stage--it was plain that the _impresario_
had made an intelligent guess. Her exuberant charms were sufficient to
deal even that audience a start. The men caught their breath, and the
women made wry faces. Had they possessed eyes for anything but Juno,
they would have seen that the grocer in the box was smitten hard by the
sudden picture of billowing womanhood and glowing flesh tint. “Ah, what
beauty!” he breathed, leaning farther over the rail, deep in the spell
of her great hazel eyes, the peony of her cheeks, the soft tawn of her
neck, and shoulders that shaded down to clearest amber. “Pomegranates
and hidden rosebuds! By the egg of Columbus!”

And in truth she was, as every man had to own, as fine a woman as ever
came out of Italy or any other country. But this did not keep their
teeth off edge when she began to voice “Santa Lucia,” that evergreen
canzonet of Naples. She pitched upon a key that baffled the orchestra.
The leader stamped his foot and shifted tones in vain. Only deaf ears
could have failed to perceive that it was her generous friend Nature
and not art that had opened to her the stage door.

“Madonna Maria!” was the criticism of Luigia the Garlic Woman. “She has
the voice of a hungry goat on a foggy morning.”

But there was one pair of eardrums on which her bleating did not grate.
They belonged to Signor Di Bello, in calmer moments a man of very good
hearing. But he was stone deaf now. Before the Levantine charms of this
thrilling creature all his senses were absorbed in sight.

“_Brava, bravissima!_” he shouted at the interlude. “_Oh,
simpiaticone!_”

“What a whale she is!” said a phthisic cigarette girl to her promised
husband, who heard her not.

“An ugly figure she makes, truly,” sneered a barber’s wife to her
husband. “A big cow like that in the frock of a child! No honest woman,
one sees easily. And look, Adriano! Her nose! I find it similar to the
snout of Signora Grametto’s little black-faced dog.”

There was no gainsaying this bold touch of the Supreme Sculptor’s
realism. Glorious her black tresses, delectable her form and colour,
uptilting and ample her nose.

The canzonet ended, she walked off without bowing to or glancing at the
audience, but the men, one and all, their eye thirst still unslaked,
joined in Signor Di Bello’s frantic demand for an _encore_. On she came
with stolid countenance and began the song all over again, although the
women had set up a hissing that matched the strength of the applause.
Signor Di Bello called the flower girl into the box, bought an armful
of her wares, and threw them wildly on the stage. They fell in a shower
on all sides of Juno. Instantly she stopped, put her arms akimbo, and
while the orchestra played on, glared blackly at her vehement admirer.
Flowers for a Neapolitan of the Porto! Blossoms that have poison in
their breath! Stupid Di Bello! Stupid Genovese! Twelve years in
Mulberry, and to forget the hatred that Neapolitans of Naples have for
natural blooms! Perhaps you thought she was from the country, like most
of the people there. Bah! In such a serious matter one ought to be sure.

It was the women’s golden chance. They started a titter of derisive
laughter that became a gale and swept through the theatre. Juno moved
toward the box, trampling the odious flowers, and spat in the face of
Signor Di Bello. Then she left the stage, followed by an outpour of
boorish gibes.

“_Infame! infame!_” It was the voice of Bertino, crying loudly from
the last row of benches, under the gallery hard by the door. With a
firing emotion that he did not know was the green fever, he had watched
the doings of his uncle, and when the bright colours rained about her,
brushing her cheeks and hair, and whisking her shoulders, he thought
with a heart-fall of the wretched blossom his hand had bestowed a week
before at the Wooden Bunch. _Madre Santissima!_ His uncle kissed her
with lovely flowers, and he, miserable soul, kissed her with a spot
of yellow paint. But when the people laughed and sneered, and he saw
her anger kindle, her cause was his own. The pigs and sons of pigs! To
laugh at her! At his queen, the _amorosa_ of his dreamland, by sunglow
and starshine, asleep or at work. Grander than the dames of Genoa
palaces, more beautiful than the peaches of California. And his uncle!
The old mooncalf! He was the cause of it all. Served him right that
kiss she gave him back. Ha-ha! But these jeers, these hounds yelping at
his queen! “_Infame! infame!_”

The people thought he meant it for Juno, and took up the cry, which did
not subside until the Bay of Naples and the cone of Vesuvius rolled
up from the bottom, and the second comedy began. Signor Di Bello
had no appetite for this, and he left the box, passing out amid the
nudges and snickers of the first families of the Genovesi, Milanesi,
and Torinesi, who were there in force along with the flower of the
Calabriani, Napolitani, and Siciliani. But he put a good face on the
matter, and at the door hailed the _impresario_:

“Ha, Signor Grabbini! Your singer has at least one liquid tone.” And he
disappeared, chuckling.




CHAPTER V

THE FIRST LADY


THE following night, and every night of the week, Signor Di Bello
held forth ecstatically in the box at La Scala. But the warmth of his
demonstrations for Juno was unable to melt the frost that her dreadful
voice had caused to settle on the audience--a frost that grew thicker
with each new display of her copious self. From his bench under the
gallery Bertino was a witness of his uncle’s frantic courtship, and
the green fever fairly consumed him, for he had decided that Juno was
made for him, and that neither his uncle nor any one else should have
her for wife. In the matter of courting he too had not been idle,
though he was young enough to know better than to make a public show
of his addresses. More than once it had occurred that while Signor Di
Bello took his ease in the Caffè of the Three Gardens of an afternoon,
Juno and Bertino passed a quarter of an hour together in the grocery.
With a black mantilla of cheap lace thrown over her head, instead of
the accustomed shawl that maids of Mulberry wear on working days,
she visited the shop for her supply of _salame_, lupine beans, or
the goat’s-milk cheese of which she told Bertino she was very fond.
The first time she entered, his heart leaped and he began stammering
excuses for the spot of yellow he had given her cheek at their last
meeting. Would the beautiful signorina believe that it was all an
accident, clumsy calf that he was--a mishap most stupid? He begged her
to forgive him. Would she not? Oh, how happy it would make him!

“Bah!” she answered, looking him over. “Give me good weight of _salame_
and free measure of beans.”

Clearly, the weight and measure that he gave suited her, for she came
every afternoon thereafter, but never when Signor Di Bello happened to
be in the shop. One day he said to her:

“Every night I dream of you.”

“Ah, _si_?” she replied, arching her rich brows. “And every night I
dream. Shall I tell you of what?”

“Of me?” breathed Bertino.

“Of you? Simpleton! I dream of getting out of this hogpen. Blood of San
Gennaro! Do you think I came to America to live a life like this? Wait
until I have money in the Bank of Risparmio.”

“But, signorina, I love you.”

“Love! What good is that? It may do for these animals to live on. For
me, no. When I marry I shall become a grand signora.”

On the fifth day of their acquaintance she told him her troubles. Five
dollars a week was all she got at La Scala, and Signor Grabbini--a
man most stingy--kept back two of that for the dress, the scarlet
slippers, and the pink tights. Don’t talk to her of America as a place
to make money. What a pigsty was Mulberry! Her room, which she hired
of Luigia the Garlic Woman, was smaller and darker than any she ever
had in Naples. And what did it cost? A whole dollar every week! Five
_liras_ for a room! Merciful Madonna!

“Listen,” said Bertino, coming from behind the counter and walking with
her to the door; “I want you for my wife. Marry me, and you shall live
in the finest house in Mulberry--in Casa Di Bello.”

“What have you to do with that house?” she asked quickly.

“I live there.”

“But it belongs to Signor Di Bello.”

“Yes; I am his nephew.”

A new interest awoke in her wary and artful eye. “They say he is very
rich,” she mused, looking toward the patch of green in Paradise. “He
admires my singing very much.”

“Your singing! Bah!” Bertino’s love was not deaf. “Don’t you know why
he makes a baboon of himself when you are on the stage? You have turned
his old head with your beauty.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said absently, while there came into her
mind an extravagant avowal of love that Signor Di Bello had made to her
behind the scenes the night before. “Well, he is rich,” she went on,
“and you--are poor.”

“True; I am not rich now, but I shall be soon. Ha! Do you know how I am
going to make money? I do not tell everybody--not even my uncle--but I
will tell you. I have a friend in Italy, at Cardinali. Do you know the
place? No matter. My friend is what is called a sculptor, and he is
going to make statues--oh, so fine!--of great people in this country.
Now, it is I who am to tell him what to make. When I have made up my
mind, I shall send him the picture of some great American--some famous
man--and from this he will make a marble bust. The marble is all ready.
When it is done he will send it to me, and I shall--well, perhaps I
shall put it in some fine gallery like our Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. Ah,
what a place that is! I was there once on the Feast of the Child. Now,
my friend is a sculptor most wonderful. I know what he can do. You
should see his beautiful Juno and the Peacock. If you----”

“Juno and the Peacock?” she broke in. “What is that?”

“Ah! a lady most beautiful, without any clothes, and a great bird with
a long tail. Oh, how beautiful--as beautiful as you!”

“_Veramente?_”

“I tell you the truth. Now, when the people of America see the bust
that he shall send, what do you think they will do? Why, they will be
mad for it, and some rich man will buy it. I have not yet made up my
mind how much I shall make him pay. Not less than a thousand _liras_,
of that you may be sure. But this will be only the beginning. After
that Armando will make more busts, the rich ladies and gentlemen
will continue to buy, and--who knows?--Bertino Manconi may become a
millionaire. _Now_ will you be my wife?”

“He has made one Juno,” she said, her thought set on a single phase of
his chimera--that whomever he chose for the subject, after that person
a bust would be fashioned. “Since he has made one Juno, why not let
him make another?” She said it seriously, without guile. “Oh, so many
photographs I had taken in Naples! Here, none; I am too poor. Next week
I shall have some. But how fine I should look in marble! I have thought
of it many a time. Ah, _proprio bella, neh_?”

“You would make the finest bust in the world,” he said ardently.

“I think so myself,” she nodded, drawing the mantilla under her chin
and moving away with her package of freely weighed codfish. He watched
her until she turned into the mouth of the Alley of the Moon, whereon
her lodgings looked, and the idea that she had put into his head took
deeper hold.

“Why not?” he asked the tub of olives at the door. “Is there a more
beautiful woman in America? It is settled. To-morrow I shall say to
her, ‘_Carissima_ Juno, when you are my wife I will send your picture
to Armando, that you may be the first bust.’”

He stood in the doorway gazing out on the park, assured now that she
must be his--for what greater honour could man show to woman?--when
his eye met the bronze presence of Italy’s liberator. A withered
wreath of laurel, with which the Italian societies had crowned their
hero on his last birthday, had dropped over the head and become a
lopsided necklace. Bertino saw the half-drawn sword, the bared arm, the
conquering air, and his promise to Armando came back:

“It shall be some one as great as Garibaldi.”

Thus it fell out that the following afternoon, when Juno came to the
shop for garlic and spaghetti, and told him that of all things she
would like to see herself in marble, he said: “No; it would be false to
my friend.”

“And you say you dream of me?”

“By night and by day.”

“And you love me?”

“Ah, _si_; Madonna knows.”

“Still you will not do me this favour?”

“But it is to be the bust of a man.”

“Bah! Why not a woman?”

“No, no; I can not. It would be treachery to Armando.”

None the less, she had spoken the words that sealed the fate of the
bust. “Why not a woman, indeed?” Bertino asked himself when she had
gone. “But it must be the greatest as well as the handsomest woman in
America.” He thought of the picture of the President’s wife that he had
seen one night at an illustrated Italian lecture in the Hudson Mission.
“By San Giorgio!” he exclaimed, astonished at the grandeur of his own
idea. “A bust of her Majesty, the First Lady of America! This is the
best thing I ever thought of.”

The next day was one of vast import. Not only did it witness the
purchase by Bertino in a Bowery store of a small photograph of the
President’s wife, warranted genuine, but it brought to the ears of Aunt
Carolina news that made her tremble for Casa Di Bello. From the market
place Angelica bore the gossip that was fast reaching every niche and
turn of Mulberry--the great tidings that Signor Di Bello and Juno the
Superb had been seen the night before in the Caffè of the Beautiful
Sicilian sitting at the same table eating a ragout of spiced pigskin.

“It must be stopped!” declared Carolina, setting her gold-patched
teeth. The old bugaboo of a wife arose, as it did with any woman to
whom the running voice of the colony linked her brother’s name. “He
shall never bring that Neapolitan baggage to Casa Di Bello.”

That night, after dinner, from which her brother was absent, she
hung long gold pendants in her ears, fastened her lace collar with
a large cameo brooch, and, her puce-coloured silk all arustle, went
to reconnoitre, as she always did when the sky of her dominion was
threatened with a wife. It was a rare sight to see Signorina Di Bello
abroad at night, afoot in the heart of Mulberry, and people stared in
wonder or bowed reverently as she passed by. A half-hour afterward,
when the Bay of Naples and smoking Vesuvius made way for Juno on the
stage of La Scala, three shoots of the Di Bello stock were intent
beholders--Giorgio in the box, Bertino on his bench under the gallery,
and Carolina in a seat directly overhead, where her brother could not
see her. With ears stopped, but eyes wide open, the priestly dame
surveyed with alarm the expansive glories of Juno, and regarded with
dismay the rhapsody of Signor Di Bello. If she knew her brother, and
she was confident that she did, here was a woman who could have him
for a husband. Thoughtfully she walked home, and thoughtfully she
sought her pillow.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the land of sleep there came no helpful message, and in the
morning she sat before her sanctum window still pondering what to
do. Over the forest of gray shafts that marked the sepulchres in
St. Patrick’s Churchyard she gazed sadly at the broad windows of
the rectory where she had lived those years of sweetest order and
tranquility, where husbands and wives had no part in life’s economy,
where marrying woman and wedlocking man jarred not the placid liturgy
of her days. Suddenly the door swung wide, and Angelica panted into
the room. As fast as her short legs could waddle she had come from the
market place with a basket full of fresh vegetables and a head full of
dewy scandal.

“O signorina! The shame!” she gasped. “Truly a disgrace tremendous!
Mulberry talks of naught else. I speak of what I know, for it comes
straight from the lips of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods, who had it
first from Simone the Snail Boiler.”

“What?”

“A grand shame! Signor Di Bello is betrothed to the Neapolitan singer!”

“Juno the Superb?”

“_Si, signorina._ Oh, the disgrace!”

“_Misericordia, Santa Maria!_”

“And the day is set. Luigia the Garlic Vender says it, and----”

“For when?”

“The Feast of Januarius.”

“The baggage!” said Carolina, her austere calm all gone. “That’s her
doing. A Genovese to be married on the Feast of St. Januarius! By the
mass, we shall see!”

Even as the bottled blood of Naples’s patron saint boils once a year,
so did the corked emotions of Carolina begin to bubble. Clearly the
hour for action had come. It was not the first time that a war cloud
of matrimony had darkened her sky, and she buckled for the onset with
a veteran heart. She plumed herself on having outwitted and driven to
retreat more than a dozen pretenders to her brother’s hand. Once it was
the daughter of Pescoli the Undertaker, a ripe maid of barn-owl face
and sinewy pattern, famed for settling disputes with the neighbours
_pugnis et calcibus_; but Carolina pitted brain against brawn, and this
terror bit the dust. Next came the red Milanese, widow of Baroni the
merchant in secondhand bread. In her hand she brought her husband’s
ten years’ savings for dowry, and on her apricot face, still fresh,
her everblooming smile; she, too, was outgeneralled by Carolina, as
were many other would-be wives as fast as they showed their heads. At
least, so it seemed to Carolina. That she held her place as mistress of
Casa Di Bello, she firmly believed, was due solely to the fact of her
never-flagging vigilance. But it may be guessed that her brother’s side
of the story would have dimmed her self-glory as a match-breaker. Once
he said to her, spicing the sentiment with a dry laugh:

“Do you think I can’t admire a fine woman without giving her a wedding
ring?”

But from the watchtower of her ever-present dread the petticoats that
she espied were always signals of real danger, however he might laugh
them to false alarms. Wherefore she felt that she must take up the
cudgels against Juno as she had raised them against other women, and
that without delay. The teeming line and colour of the Neapolitan were
clear in her memory, and she knew a stronger siege than ever had been
laid to her brother’s taste. Henceforth eternal alertness would be
the price of Signor Di Bello’s bachelorhood and her own reign, which
she took as a most serious matter. Alas! it was the same old battle.
Would the struggle never end? And this ever-returning necessity of
standing watch and ward, of fighting away aspirants for wedding rings,
rose before her now in an unwonted light, as a penance that ought not
to be laid upon her, as one that she would like to put off. She could
see herself all her days beating back would-be wives from the portals
of Casa Di Bello, and the troubled outlook weighted her spirit with
despair. A yearning for peace entered her soul, and with it came the
thought of a startling alternative for war--a voice telling her to do
the very thing that she had fought so long against her brother’s doing.
Take a wife! But her taking a wife, she mused smugly, should be quite a
different matter from his taking one. The maid of her choosing would be
no menace to the _status quo_ of Casa Di Bello. She would be a person
of right notions, not puffed with the foolish conceit of being able to
govern the household; a _ragazza_ with good sense enough to see that a
wife’s place under the connubial roof is far inferior to that of her
husband’s sister. Ah! the wife of her choice, she told herself fondly,
should be her creature, not a ruler; a subject, not a trampler, of her
parish-house laws. It never struck Carolina’s mind to seek her ideal
among the girls of New Italy; that would be calling for aid to the camp
of the enemy. Her fancy took wing over seas to old Italy, to Apennine
maids untinged of the craft and airs of Mulberry; to some maid of clay
that would shape easy in the mould of her wish. When Bertino came in at
noon from the shop, she began:

“You have a sister?”

“_Si_; Marianna.”

“Very well. What kind of a girl is she?”

“A fine girl.”

“Is she sound in health?”

“Ah, _si_; very sound.”

“How big is she?”

“Medium size.”

“Gentle and kind?”

“Yes, very gentle.”

“How old?”

“Let me think. She will be seventeen come the Feast of the Mother.”

“Any bad traits?”

“Not a single one, except that she eats too much molasses.”

“What work does she?”

“Straw-plaiting.”

“Do you think she would like to come to America?”

“Not unless--unless----”

“Well?”

“Not unless Armando came.”

“Armando? An _amante_, I suppose?”

“Yes, aunt; her _amante_.”

“Bah!” Her spinster mind did not count this a serious matter. “Perhaps
I shall send for her.”

“She wouldn’t leave Armando.”

“Then I might go and bring her.”

“What do you want of her?” ventured Bertino.

“Some day you shall see.”




CHAPTER VI

CAROLINA RESOLVES TO GO COURTING


UPON the facts brought out Carolina decided that Marianna would do
very well. But the leap was far too hazardous to be taken in the dark,
and the prudence that guided her in the selection of other household
belongings she would now bring to bear in choosing a wife. If needs be,
she would journey to Italy, and make sure by a close survey of Marianna
that hers was not a nature likely to attempt a ruling of the roost. To
the Jesuitry of her view, a wife of eighteen and a husband of gloaming
forty were well mated when their union would serve her own most
laudable purpose; and as for any trifling obstacle like a sweetheart,
that could be filliped away. Once upon the ground, and satisfied that
the girl would prove a wife of the desired brand, she had no doubt
of accomplishing the shipment of the goods. But there set in a fear
for the turn events might take during her absence. With the sentinel
gone from the gate, Juno might charge and carry the castle. Here was a
danger that must be offset.

Throwing a plaid shawl over her head and not stopping to change her
open-heeled house slippers, she set forth through the ruck of Mulberry
for the shop of her brother. It was a novel sight to behold her hopping
over curbstones in that unstately manner, and hot grew the scandalous
guesses as to the cause.

“Trouble, grand trouble in Casa Di Bello,” was the common voice.

As Carolina hurried forward she had no eye for the signs of opening
summer on every hand--the fire escapes abloom with potted verdure, the
blithe touch that glistening radishes gave to the vegetable stalls, the
moon face of Chiara the Basilican beaming from her bower of dandelion
leaves. Passing the schoolhouse, she received a reverent bow and a low
“_Buon giorno_” from the hokey-pokey man, who stood by his dazzling
cart, ready for the onslaught of boys and girls, who would soon be out
at recess clamouring for one-cent dabs of pink _sorbetto_ on strips of
brown paper. Little maidens decked in snowy frocks and veils walked
proudly to their first communion, all mindful of their skirts as they
passed the racks of Boccanegra the Macaroni Baker, whose new-made paste
hung drying in the sunshine; but of them Carolina took no heed, so
wrapped was she in her great project of courting a suitable wife.

At Bayard Street the sound of voices raised in a familiar anthem caught
her ear, and there swung into view from around the corner a handful of
marching men. They were members of the Genovese Society, garbed bravely
in the uniform of Italian infantry, out to celebrate the Feast of St.
George, of all holidays the dearest to Genoa. At sight of them the
cloud of anxiety that had shadowed her face lifted, and she smiled with
a shrewd content. The Feast of San Giorgio! Her brother’s birthday as
well as the day of the knight who carved the dragon. The alarm sounded
by Angelica concerning Juno had driven the fact from her head, but
there came back with it now a heartsome consciousness that it was a
day of rockribbed truth in her brother’s life. If at other times his
promises might have the frailty of spaghetti sticks, she knew that it
would not be so on this, his saint’s day. It had ever been so with the
men of Genoa. With renewed spirits she foresaw the success of her plan
to exact from him a pledge not to marry until she should return from
Italy. Such a promise or any other made to-day he would keep, though
all the maids and widows of Mulberry united to make him disregard it.

She found him alone at the shop, sprawled outside beneath the Wooden
Bunch in his curve-backed chair, bathing in the sunshine. Only on rare
and critical occasions did she visit the shop, and the sight of her
brought him quickly to his feet.

“_Governo ladro!_” he exclaimed. “What has happened?”

“I am going to Italy.”

“To Italy! What for?”

“It is twelve years since I heard the chimes of San Lorenzo.”

“Yes; I think so,” he said, going behind the counter, shaving off a
piece of Roman cheese and tossing it into his mouth. “When do you set
off?”

“As soon as possible.”

“There is a ship for Genoa to-morrow,” he said eagerly.

Looking him in the eye, she asked, “Are you betrothed to the
Napolitana?”

“Satan the crocodile!” he roared, pounding the counter. “This is too
much! Do you count me a simpleton?”

“Promise me, _caro fratello_, that you will not take a wife until I
return.”

“By the Egg, I will not promise! Do you think I don’t know this is my
birthday? Suppose the ship went down? I should have to live and die a
bachelor.”

“Promise at least that you will marry no one for three months.”

“_Ma che?_ What nonsense is this? Are you afraid of the Napolitana?
Bah! How foolish you are! A fine woman, yes. But do you think I don’t
know what I am about?”

“Promise for three months.”

“_Si, si_, if you wish it; but it is all grand nonsense.”

“Do you know what I am going to do in Italy?” she asked, with an essay
at archness that was a sorry failure.

“Hunt a husband?” he chuckled.

“No; a wife.”

“What shall you do with her?” he asked gravely, scenting the truth.

“Bring her to you, my brother.”

“To me! Excuse me; keep her for yourself. That is an affair I shall
attend to when the time comes.”

“But in Mulberry you can not get what I shall bring you from Italy.”

“What is that?”

“A wife that is good enough for you and Casa Di Bello.”

“Bah! What do you tell me?” he growled walking to the door. “Talk to me
about wives! They are as thick as the sparrows in Paradise, and just as
hungry. Good, fine wives, too.” He dropped into the chair, thrust his
hands into his pockets, and extended his little legs. “Who is she?” he
asked after a while, twirling his huge mustache.

“Marianna. Don’t you remember her? Bertino’s foster sister. A fine
young girl; no bad habits and sound in health.”

“What age?”

“Eighteen.”

“You’d better buy your passage ticket,” he said, “if you wish to go on
to-morrow’s ship.”




CHAPTER VII

A FLUTTER IN THE TOMATO BANK


WITH a step almost frisky Carolina took leave of her brother, well
content with the first fruit of her wooing. She had won the consent of
her husband elect to wait for her bride, and the rest of the courtship
seemed a matter of plain sailing; wherefore she hastened across the
Park to the steamship office and bank of Signor Tomato to secure her
passage for Genoa. The glow of triumph was upon her. She felt it a
certainty now that her will would prevail in match-making as it had
so many times in match-breaking; and this desirable condition, she
reflected, was merely as it should be--only the reward that the just
had a right to count upon receiving. Had she not eaten salted fish in
Lent and kept all fast days, while her brother had devoured flesh in
open shame and Angelica had been detected munching garlic _salame_ even
on Good Friday?

She paused before the mutilated but heroic figure of an American
Jack Tar who stood in wooden repose at the door of Signor Tomato. In
their palmy days the banks of Mulberry--then more numerous than the
colony’s midwives--had a trick of closing their doors when the amount
of deposits made it worth while, to the increase of the suicide rate
and the encouragement of stiletto practice upon the bankers who got
caught. After a while the Legislature did a little closing, and Signor
Tomato, one of the poor but honest caste, had to take his gruel along
with the others. He could not take any more deposits, but he kept on
with his money-exchange business, and when to this he decided to add
an agency for Mediterranean steamships he admitted the Jack Tar as a
silent partner. At the time they joined forces the sailor was young
and handsome. The tobacconist with whom he began his career had failed
after less than a year of ill fortune. But his youth and hardy physique
were no match for the climate of Mulberry, which soon proved as ruinous
to his manly beauty as it had to Signor Di Bello’s real bananas. First
one of his weather eyes disappeared, then the fine Greek nose took
leave, and in quick order both ears vanished; at length an arm and a
half melted away, soon followed by a whole foot. It all came of his
lounging on the sidewalk at hours when not even a respectable wooden
Indian is found out of doors. Signor Tomato would have insisted on his
coming in of nights, but there was not an inch of room to spare within
the bank, with his wife and three little Tomatoes all living there,
not to speak of the counter, the large dry-goods box that served for a
safe, the family chair, and the cook stove. Once he wheeled his silent
partner into the countingroom--just after the loss of his left ear--but
the door could not be closed, and out he had to go again into the
ravaging night.

It was not the long-suffering Jack Tar that arrested Carolina’s steps,
but this placard pendent from his neck:

  +---------------------------------+
  |        Per Genova Juno 1,       |
  |     Piroscafo Spartan King,     |
  |   Qui si Vendono Biglietti di   |
  | Passaggio a Prezzi d’Occasione. |
  +---------------------------------+

(For Genoa June 1, the Spartan King. Passage Tickets for sale here at
Bargain Prices.)

“Good-morning, Signorina Di Bello! You do me great honour to read my
poor placard.” It was the high-keyed voice of Signor Tomato, a little
Neapolitan of eagle beak and long brown whiskers. As he stepped lightly
from the bank, Bridget, his stout Irish wife, was behind him. She, too,
gave Carolina a loud greeting, but in a brogue that was touched with
Neapolitan dialect, and took up her stand in the narrow doorway. At the
same time three black, curly heads and bright faces peeped from behind
her gingham skirts. These intent observers were Pat, Mike, and Biddy,
small but weighty factors of the Tomato establishment. At the sound of
her husband’s voice the mother and her brood had come from a mysterious
corner at the back of the bank, which a nankeen sail concealed from the
eye. Carolina gave cold return to Signor Tomato’s salute, but his face
did not fall. “Perhaps the signorina is planning a voyage?” he said,
smiling broadly.

“Yes, I go to Genoa. What company is this?”

“What company!” he exclaimed, his face an image of deepest
amazement. “But pardon me, signorina; there is only one company in
the Mediterranean service, the Great Imperial International General
Navigation Company, which I have the honour to represent.”

“Father Nicodemo went last week on some other line--the Duke? That’s
it--the Duke Line.”

“O signorina!” All his faculties of expression united in a show of
disgust. “You remember the proverb, ‘Do what the priest says and not
what the priest does.’ My word of honour, those Duke boats, they are
for the beasts. But the Great Imperial International General Navigation
Company’s ships are extraordinary, stupendous! Every one is a floating
paradise. Shall I speak frankly and tell you what they are? Well, they
are boats for ladies and gentlemen. There now, you have it.”

“Arrah, _si_; for signorinies like yersilf and signories, sure.” In
business matters Bridget always aided her husband with a corroborant
note.

“Do you know what happened to a friend of mine who went on that other
line?” the banker continued. “He caught the grip. Why? Now, signorina,
your attention, and I will tell you. The Duke Line is not Italian, eh?
Well, what kind of food do you suppose he got from those Englishmen?
Bifsoup, bifsoup, bifsoup; rosbif, rosbif, rosbif. And not a grain of
cheese for the soup! For eighteen days he saw macaroni only once, and
then it was cooked without oil and had not even the tail of an anchovy
or a piece of kidney to flavour it. For eighteen long days he had not
so much as a smell of garlic or the sight of a pepper pod. Do you
wonder that he caught the grip?”

Carolina was impressed, and Bridget clinched the argument with “Arrah,
divvil a wonder!”

“Besides,” Signor Tomato went on, “that line is what we navigators call
uncertain, lame ships. The signorina will recall the proverb, ‘If you
go with the lame you learn to limp.’”

“I wish to sail to-morrow. Give me a second-class ticket.”

“To-morrow! Boiling blood of San Gennaro! But I will do it, signorina;
I will get the ticket.”

Instantly Banca Tomato became a scene of bustle and excitement. The
padrone sprang for the door, pushing aside Bridget and scattering her
brood. He darted behind the curtain and reappeared in a second with his
coat and hat.

“In ten minutes you shall know,” he said, making off in the direction
of Broadway, where there was a real agency of the line.

“Will ye sit down?” said Bridget, placing the family chair near
Carolina, at the foot of the Jack Tar. “Wisha! Black toimes it is for
bankers, and no babies comin’ to kape the wolf from the dure. It’s
mesilf that remimbers this day four years come Patrick’s mornin’ when
me Biddy first saw the light. Arrah, manny’s the family wanted me
thin for a wet nurse, and a fine pinny had they to pay, thim that got
Bridget Tomah-toe. Thin it was meat in the soup ivry day. And now phat
is it? Cabbage in a sup iv water, and secondhand cabbage, too, manny’s
the toime. But I’m after raisin’ the little darlints as good as anny
in Mulberry, and much better, should anny wan ax ye.”

“Who ask-a me? I’m know northeen ’bout dat,” said Carolina, whose
English scholarship had few equals in the colony.

“Iv coorse ye don’t. Sure the signorinies are not expected to, and they
be ould enough to vote ivry hour on ’lection day. It’s lucky y’are to
be goin’ back to the ould country. How long is it y’re out?”

“Ees twelf year dat I’m in deesa countree.”

“Twelve years! Howly Mother! And ye’re not married yet! Troth I was
Signory Tomah-toe the first year I landed.”

“What I’m care?” retorted Carolina. “You mague too moocha noise from de
mout. Ees better you goin’ keep-a still.”

Luckily for the cash interests of the bank, Signor Tomato appeared at
this point, for Bridget was not a woman to adopt any one’s suggestion
that she hold her tongue. Carolina got her steamship ticket, and the
banker pocketed the first commission he had received in a week.

There was meat in the Tomato soup that night, and on the way from the
butcher’s Bridget, with Pat, Mike, and Biddy at her apron hem, stopped
in the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian and bought each of them a green
cake out of the chromatic display in the window. While the youngsters
were all eyes and hands for the pastry, Bridget was all sight and mind
for a certain living picture that she beheld in the half gloom of the
_caffè’s_ innermost depth. Seated at a table were Bertino and Juno the
Superb. She was tipping pensively a glass of red wine, and he, with
paper and ink before him, writhed in the throes of pen-wielding.

“Ho, ho, me beauty!” said Bridget to herself on the way home. “I’m
thinkin’ the ould wan ud have a worrud to say about that. So the
nephew is afther her along wid the uncle, and she afther both fish
wid the wan hook. Well, I hope the gossoon gets her, and it’ll do him
anny good. Di Belly ought to be cut out, the ould divvil, wid his
winkin’ and blinkin’ and collyfoxin’ afther young gerruls. But it’s
noane iv my potaties, and I’ll not disgrace mesilf talkin’ iv it. If
who’s-this--Sara the Pepper Pod--iver got hold iv it though, wouldn’t
there be a whillihu in Mulberry! Thim ghinny wimmin do be good for
nothin’ but makin’ trouble wid their tongues. And phat am I sayin’,
annyway? Talkin’ iv the ghinnies! Faith I’m half ghinny mesilf.” When
she reached the bank she said to Signor Tomato, “There’s trouble
brewin’ in the Di Belly family.”

“Troub in de fam! Ees what for?” He took an ancient black pipe from
his mouth and stood up, all attention. She told him what she had seen
in the gloom of the _caffè_. “Ha, ha!” he cried, placing a forefinger
wisely beside his nose, as he always did when quoting his Neapolitan
saws, “the mouse dances a _tarantella_ when the cat takes a _siesta_.”

“True for ye, Dominick; and a jewel iv a dance ’twill be agin the ould
maid’s comin’ from Italy. Bad ’cess to her annyhow, and may the divvil
fly away wid her back hair! Tellin’ me to hould me tongue!”

When the boiling pot had filled the bank with its savour, she went to
the door and looked with pride on her raven-curled trio in the roadway
playing “duck on a tomato can.”

“Here, Pat, Mike, Biddy!” she called. “Come in and ate your soup.”

They romped in, playing tag on the way.




CHAPTER VIII

JUNO PERFORMS A MIRACLE


OF great import was the picture Bridget saw in the Caffè of the
Beautiful Sicilian. It was Bertino’s afternoon off from the shop, and
he had planned the meeting with Juno the preceding day while his uncle
fought again the battles of Garibaldi before an audience of admiring
comrades at the Three Gardens. The little _tête-à-tête_ meant that a
crisis had suddenly developed in the green fever of the grocery clerk.
His temperature had reached a degree where he swore _vendetta_. Yes,
to-day she must choose between life with him and death with his rival.
It all came of the Snail Boiler’s false report that Signor Di Bello
had betrothed himself to the Superb. But Juno eased matters by coming
to the tryst with consent on her lips. She would be his wife. It was
not Bertino’s hot breathings of revenge, however, that had melted the
handsome iceberg. Her change of poise was due to a pair of hard knocks
that life had playfully dealt her the night before. The first came from
the _impresario_, who told her, with tearful voice, that the affairs
of the theatre had gone so badly of late that he was obliged--how
much against his will Iddio knew--to dispense with her services. The
second blow came after the performance, when she was eating _polenta_
and birds with Signor Di Bello. She had broached the subject of a
wedding ring, only to have him dash her hopes with a roar of laughter
that shook the _caffè_. The rich husband failing and her stage career
closed, she decided to tide over present difficulties by accepting
Bertino’s offer of a situation as wife. Though he had promised her
a home in Casa Di Bello, she was too shrewd not to perceive that he
would find it a promise hard to make good. But there was another prize
whereon she had set her purpose.

She was madly addicted to the photograph habit. The only genuine
emotion of which her nature seemed capable was the one of delight she
evinced when beholding a picture of herself in some new pose. In Naples
a good part of her earnings as bottle-washer in a wine house had gone
for portraits; and the passion still clinging to her, she had begun to
mortgage her salary at the theatre to a Mulberry photographer. In two
days she had posed three times, and brought each set of the tintypes
to the grocery to show them to Bertino. At sight of them he rolled his
eyes, clasped his hands, and exclaimed:

“Ah, how beautiful! How sympathetic!”

“It would make a fine bust, _neh_?” she would add, but to this Bertino
always returned a decisive no. Once she showed him an old solar print
that was taken in Naples. It portrayed her in bare shoulders, with a
lace mantle over her head and eyes looking soulfully at the moon.
This was her favourite. “In America,” she declared, “they could not
make a _ritratto_ like that.” But with all her pictures there remained
a gnawing in the stomach of her vanity--a hunger that would not be
allayed since the moment that he told her about the bust. She wanted to
see herself in marble.

It was understood between them that at the meeting this afternoon
they would settle the marriage question once and for all; Bertino
told himself it would be settled for life or death. On his way to the
_caffè_ he encountered Carolina, and she stunned him with the news of
her coming departure for Italy.

“To-night I go aboard,” she said. “Thus I shall not miss the ship and
have to wait five weeks for another, as Father Nicodemo did.”

With thrift-prodding anxiety Bertino walked on, thinking out a plan for
turning her voyage to the advantage of himself and Armando. The letter
he meant to write, and its inclosure of a portrait of the President’s
wife, had assumed in his mind a boundless importance. It would be a
packet far too valuable for intrustment to the ordinary mail, and
registering letters to Europe he had found, on inquiry of Banker
Tomato, to be a costly business; nor was it any too safe, according to
the same authority. Aunt Carolina was going to Cardinali; why not send
it by her? With her own hands she could deliver the precious missive to
Armando. Nothing could be safer or cheaper. But there was not a moment
to lose if she went aboard to-night.

Thus it had come about that when Juno entered the _caffè_ she found
Bertino writhing in the travail of chirography. Before him on the table
lay a photograph of the First Lady of the Land. She checked an impulse
to catch it up and tear it to shreds.

Taking a chair by the table she watched him while he wrote. When he had
finished the letter he read it over slowly, then took up the picture
of the President’s wife to fold the written sheet around it and place
it in the envelope.

“Bah!” she said. “You talk of love. What love! Why don’t you send this
picture for the bust instead of that one? Am I not more beautiful?” She
drew from her skirt pocket her favourite portrait--the one that showed
her gazing wistfully at the moon.

“Anything but that,” he answered. “The next one shall be yours. I swear
it, if you will swear to be my wife. Ah, _mia preziosa_, in this letter
there is a fortune for me--for us both. Don’t you see the fine idea it
is to have a bust made of such a grand signora? It will make a _furore
tremendo_ in America.”

He had put the letter and the picture in the envelope, and in another
instant would have sealed it, but Juno sprang to her feet and pointed
to the door, crying:

“Quick! Go stop him! That man with the brown hat--my cousin! He has
just passed. I must see him. Quick, Bertino!”

He started for the door, but hardly had he reached it before she
snatched the envelope from the table, took out the photograph of the
President’s wife and put in the one of herself. Bertino ran back and
forth in search of the myth with the brown hat, and at length returned,
grumbling that no such person was in the street.

“Ah, what a pity!” she said. “I have not seen my cousin since the Feast
of the Madonna del Carmelo.”

Bertino licked the gum and sealed the envelope.

“And now, _carina_,” he said, regarding her tenderly, “the answer that
you promised to-day.”

“It is ready,” she said, her eye on the letter. “I will be your wife.”

“Joy!” he cried, and gave her a resonant kiss that startled two
chess-players from their absorption and evoked a sneer from the _caffè_
waitress.

       *       *       *       *       *

That night Bertino went with Aunt Carolina to the ship. Before saying
_buon viaggio_ he handed her the letter for the sculptor.

“May you guard it well, my aunt!” he said solemnly. “It is of great
value.”




CHAPTER IX

THE PERPETUA MEETS A BEAR


THE lookout had sighted Genoa, but to many eager eyes that peered from
the rail there lay naught in the northern distance save the imperial
sapphire sparkling to the clear and eternal blue. After a while, the
magic wand of proximity touching east and west, the great Mediterranean
gem revealed its setting; the Riviera di Levante lazily unfolded her
beauty to the eager men and women in the bow.

There was one passenger whose soul missed the enchantment. A matter of
greater import filled her mind and dimmed her vision--her mission to
secure a wife for Casa Di Bello. She did show an interest in the fairy
picture that was coming out all around, but not until the ship had
steamed so far shoreward that the hamlets of the slopes showed their
shining faces through the mountain greenery. Then she stood intently
regarding the land, her gaze set far above the white turrets and
flaring walls of the Sea City that took form out of the yellow summer
haze.

    “O Genova Superba!
    Qual Città te paragon?”

It was Cardinali that Carolina strained her eyes to discern, and at
last she beheld it--a weather-beaten little town perched high on a
crag of rock. Then she breathed content and awaited patiently the
time for landing. Within an hour after her well-shod feet had pressed
the soil she was snugly installed, trunk and handtraps, in a veteran
victoria drawn by a raw recruit of a horse, whose youthful antics kept
the driver busy. With her luggage safely at her side and the landing
accomplished without mishap, she settled back on the cushion and gave
herself up to ease and self-adoration. How much wiser and abler she
was than those excitable, nervous women whom she had left on the
quay, still fuming over their baggage and the customs examination!
Complacently she judged herself a very superior person, and never
before had she felt on better terms with herself. The raw recruit
trotted decorously enough past the monument of the Man that made an Egg
stand on End, and clattered under the marble arch, whereon St. George,
champion of Genoa, was trampling a dragon. Presently the city lay at
her back, and she began to breathe the good air of home in the white
dust of the highway, the pungent scent of the sage, the sweetness of
the honeysuckle and oleander.

They began the ascent of the winding causeway up which Armando had
toiled so sadly with his despised Juno and the Peacock. Long stretches
of wall bordered the route, which was rough in places and steep, and
not at all to the taste of the youngster in the traces. He grew cross
and nervous, and shied at such innocent things as a tuft of cowslips
on the roadside or an umbel of clematis on the wall.

“What kind of horse have you there?” asked Carolina, picking up a
valise that had been jolted from the seat several times.

“What kind of a horse?” repeated the _cocchiere_, as though unable
to credit his ears. “Ah, signora, there is none better in all Genoa;
only he is a little green and has had the staggers once. Verily a fine
beast.”

At the bight of a turning a Franciscan monk came in view suddenly from
behind a thicket of myrtle. He wore the brown robe, scanty cape and
hood on the shoulders, the girdle of knotted cord, the wooden sandals
of his order. The recruit struck up a dance, and would have caracoled
to the upsetting of the victoria, had not the monk run forward and
caught his head.

“I regret that I frightened your horse, signora,” said the friar; “but
I think he will go safely now.”

To the mind of Aunt Carolina, both the danger and its allayance had
sprung from an eminently proper source. To be put in peril by a holy
man was a distinction second only to being rescued by one. In thanking
her deliverer she made known with pride that she too had been a limb of
the Church.

“For eight years, father, was I _perpetua_ of the rectory in Mulberry.”

The monk crossed himself and trudged on.

They were not far now from the last squirm of the highway that
serpentined to Cardinali. The angle by the myrtle thicket doubled, they
entered upon a road that for half a mile was an almost level shelf on
the mountain side. On one hand yawned a precipice that grew deeper as
the road wore upward, and all that stood between an ungovernable horse
and his driver’s eternity was a low stone wall built along the margin.
Carolina would have descended from the vehicle and walked the rest of
the way but for the persuasive driver, who promised her upon his honour
that all would go well now they had reached a stretch of road that was
not steep. He could assure the signora that his horse was kind and
gentle at heart, but coming of a lordly stock he loved not the menial
task of hauling heavy loads uphill. A person of education like the
signora would understand that. Peril? Not a spark of it now that the
going was smooth and easy. See! he was behaving better already.

The horse was steadier, and all might have ended well, but for certain
dark objects that had appeared at this moment from behind the last bend
and were dimly visible far up the pass. As they drew near, the ears of
the recruit stiffened higher and higher, and a few short, wild snorts
gave further signal of danger. In the oncoming group was a tall and
sinewy mountaineer, bronze of face and shock-headed, who led a monkey
with one hand and with the other held the chain of a large cinnamon
bear. By his side, a little behind, tramped his wife in picturesque
rags and tinsel. She carried a brown baby, and half dragged along
a toddling boy with a tambourine. When only a dozen rods separated
them from the carriage, the mountebank, obeying business instinct,
commanded the bear to rise on his hind paws. With clumsy alacrity the
beast did so, while the master doffed his hat, and with the others
of the vagabond troop stood lined on the roadside ready to receive
Carolina’s bounty.

The huge brown shape risen so suddenly in his path was more than
the overwrought nerves of the lordling could stand, and away he
shot, bit and reins a cipher, bent upon turning out and flying past
the mysterious terror. The hubs of the victoria struck against the
low stone parapet, kept bumping hard and rapidly from one jagged
projection to another, and do his best the driver could not steer the
maddened animal clear of the rude masonry. Carolina’s first thought
was to leap into the road rather than be popped over the wall to sure
destruction. She did not wait for a second thought, but sprang, and
landed by a miracle clear of the wheels, at the feet of the astonished
bear. Another instant and the inquiring beast would have scratched
her face or combed her hair, but his master jerked him back with a
mighty tug at the chain, while the wife, setting down her baby, leaped
to Carolina’s aid. They carried her to the herbage that fringed the
highway. Then the mountebank set off at a run for the victoria, which
had come to a standstill at a point where the road assumed an abrupt
steepness. Horse, driver, and vehicle were faintly discernible through
the powdery clouds thrown up by hoof and wheel.

[Illustration: The bear-tamer’s wife.]

“_Presto!_ To Cardinali!” cried the bear-tamer, coming up with the
carriage, which the recruit was striving to back over the parapet. “A
doctor! The signora has broken her leg!”

“To Cardinali!” sneered the _cocchiere_. “Bah! The beast--woo-ah,
woo!--he will mount no higher--woo-ah, woo!--and by San Giorgio, I
blame him not.--There, now, ugly one, quiet, quiet.--No; if I go for
a doctor it must be downhill. And you and your bear!” he added with a
scowl at the showman. “A fine day’s work you have done. It is men and
bears like you two that I would send to prison. Look at those hubs. Who
will pay the damage? Not such as you, I warrant. Body of a whale! Why
did I ever come here?”

“You are a wild ass!” returned the mountebank. “Who but an ass would
try to drive such a horse? My jackanapes has more sense.”

“_Al diavolo_, rascal!”

“_All’inferno_, donkey!”

“Bah!”

“Bah!”

Without difficulty the driver turned his horse in the opposite
direction, and at a contented jog he started downhill toward the spot
where Carolina lay. The showman’s wife was supporting her head and
begging forgiveness for her husband and the bear. Presently Sebastiano
the Carrier reached the scene with his empty cart. Did he know the
lady? Some there were who forgot faces, but not he. Signorina Di Bello.
It was many years since she went away, but he knew her. Had the sun
overcome her? A broken leg! _Dio Santo!_

[Illustration: “A broken leg! _Dio Santo!_”]

After much vehement talk and excited gesture the baggage was taken from
the victoria and the injured woman placed, none too tenderly, in the
donkey cart, that being deemed the only safe course. It was the same
springless wain that had carried Armando’s Juno and the Peacock on
their fruitless pilgrimage to Genoa. For Carolina it was simply a car
of torture. By the time it rolled under the arched gate of Cardinali
she was no longer sensible of pain.

It was the most stupendous event the village had ever known--this
return of Carolina Di Bello after an absence of twelve years, and
bumping along over the cobbles in old Sebastiano’s cart. Every house
that the terrible ambulance passed was straightway emptied of its
inmates, who fell in behind the cart, clamouring for a view of its
unconscious occupant. She lay as though lifeless, her head propped
by a travelling bag, her face exposed to the glare of the sun. No one
thought of covering her face, so eager were they all to gaze at it and
compare her looks with what they were twelve years before when she
departed for America. The women discussed her gown and foot gear, and
pronounced them both very _signora_. Sebastiano drew up at a flight of
broken stone steps that zigzagged to a porch shaded by a gnarled fig
tree, whereunder a cow-faced woman stood patiently stirring a copper
vessel of steaming corn-meal mush. The donkey gave a bray of approval
at the calling of a halt, and the woman, in response to a general cry,
clattered down to the cart.

“Cousin Carolina! _Misericordia!_ What has happened? Where did she come
from?”

The new actor on the scene was Serafina Digrandi, aunt of the maid for
whose wiving Carolina had made the disastrous journey; and, following
the mountain usage, she would have flung herself weeping upon the
moveless figure of her relative, but the village doctor broke through
the crowd in time to hold her back and declare the patient still alive.
At this Serafina dried her tears and began a bustling preparation of
the best room in the house.




CHAPTER X

BIRTH OF THE LAST LADY


WHEN the fractured shin bone had been set by a surgeon from Genoa, and
Carolina had passed a day and a night in sullen rebellion at fate, she
asked for Marianna.

“She is at the mill, dear cousin,” answered Serafina.

“What mill?”

“The straw mill, where she is a plaiter.”

“Let her leave it and come to me.”

“But she gains ten _soldi_ a day. How shall we live if we give up our
work?”

“I will make up the ten _soldi_. Bid her come.”

So the next dawn did not find Marianna hastening with lunch hamper down
the path through the fir thicket toward the mill in the gorge. But
Armando was at the spot where he met her every morning on her way to
work. And while he watched and worried under the alders, whose boles
the torrent splashed, Marianna stood at the bedside of Aunt Carolina.
At daybreak she had entered the room softly, and found the woman from
America awake.

“I have been waiting for you,” she said faintly. “In the night I
remembered a packet that Bertino gave me for some one in Cardinali--a
Signor Corrini. It is there, in the bag. Take it out, and deliver it to
whom it belongs.”

“Signor Corrini! Armando!” cried the girl. “I will carry it to him at
once.” She started for the door.

“Armando is your _amante_?”

“_Si_, aunt.” She blushed, and left the room, closing the door gently.

“And I the bearer of a message to him! O Maria! what penance more? All
fasts kept, aves and paternosters said faithfully, and my reward--a
broken leg!”

Marianna lost no time in delivering the precious missive to Armando,
whom she found waiting in the gorge at the wonted place. Without
stopping to answer his anxious inquiries, she placed the fateful packet
in his hands.

“From Bertino,” she said.

“Ah, joy!” he cried, tearing open the envelope. “What I have waited for
so long! Surely it is the model for my great work, for the bust that
shall make me famous in America. Bones of St. George!”

He had taken out the portrait of Juno, and stood glaring at it.

“She has a nose,” Marianna remarked.

“True,” said Armando thoughtfully. “I wonder if this is American
beauty.”

Then he began reading the letter aloud. At the part that told him it
was a portrait of the wife of the President of the United States he
leaped for gladness, and Marianna started away to tell all the village.
Armando caught her arm.

“Not a word!” he said; “not a word until the work is done--nay, until
it is delivered to her Majesty La Presidentessa.”

And a great secret it remained for many months, during which Armando
toiled by day and night, releasing from the block of marble the
supposed First Lady of the Land. Marianna saw little of him. When
she ventured to look in at the shop where he worked, her visit never
seemed welcome. He returned short answers to her questions, and showed
petulance because of the interruption; and the dreadful truth was borne
in upon her that he had given himself heart and soul to the woman who
took shape from the marble. One day, when the bust was almost finished,
she said timidly:

“Armando, don’t you love me any more?”

“What a question! Of course I do,” and he gave her a hasty kiss. Then
he went on chipping at Juno’s snub nose.

Not at all reassured, Marianna went back to Aunt Carolina, whose
convalescence had met with a serious setback; but she was out of bed
now, and talking about returning to Mulberry by the next ship.

“Sit by my side, _carina_,” she said. “I have something to say to you.
Soon I shall go to America. Do you know what a fine country that is?
Well, you shall see. Aunt Serafina permits it, and I will bear the
expense--and it is decided that you may go with me. Ah, how happy you
must be to hear this! How many girls would like to go, and how few have
the chance!”

“But Armando!”

“The _amante_!” said Carolina scornfully. “Bah! he is nothing.”

“True enough,” sneered Aunt Serafina. “All Cardinali knows what he is.
A good-for-naught who will starve when the money that old Daniello the
Image Maker left him is eaten up.”

“He is no good-for-naught,” said the girl. “He is a sculptor.”

She could not help defending him then, but none the less that night
she went to bed with serious thoughts in her head of accepting Aunt
Carolina’s offer. It was the month of the finished bust, and with the
sense that Armando no longer cared for her was mingled a feeling of
resentment, which she vaguely fancied could be expressed most potently
by forsaking him--leaving him alone with the stony woman who had robbed
her of his heart. Of course, this would not have weighed against the
love that was only wounded, had not the tone of her two aunts taken a
ring of command, instead of solicitation, as the day drew nearer for
Carolina’s departure. Thus it came to pass that on the very morning
that the bust was carried down the winding road to Genoa and put aboard
a ship for New York, Marianna said to Armando:

“In three weeks I go to America.”

“You?”

“Yes; with Aunt Carolina.”

“Why?”

“She wants me, and you do not love me.”

“_Dio!_ How can you say that?”

“You love her better.”

“Her? _Santa Maria!_ who?”

“I know.”

“Speak!”

“You love the marble woman.”

He caught her in a frenzied embrace, and imprinted kisses upon her
hair, her glowing cheeks, her lips, and her long, brown eyelashes.

“_Mia vita!_” he gasped. “Do you know what you will do if you talk so?
You will drive me mad! I swear that I love you better than life. I
would die with you, my angel of God. With every breath I love you, love
you, love you!”

“O Madonna, _che peccato!_ It is too late! She has the _biglietto_ for
the ship. They say I must go now.”

“Then, by the sword of the saint, I will go too!”

And go he did on the ship that carried Carolina and Marianna, though
it was not love alone that drew him after her. In America his fame was
to be erected, and for some time he had been thinking that it would
be well for him to be on the spot, and give Bertino a hand with the
architecture.

The white towers of Genoa were still visible when Carolina came face
to face in the companion way with the _amante_, from whom she was
felicitating herself she had separated Marianna forever.

“What is he doing on this ship?” she demanded of the girl.

“Going to America.”

“Bah! I know that. Is he following you?”

“Yes, signora.”

Of course she tried to keep them apart, and of course failed drearily
every day of the voyage. While she hunted the vessel over for them,
they would be enjoying a quiet exchange of confidences in one of
the secret nooks known only to lovers on shipboard. One day Armando
confessed to a hopeless state of pocket. It had taken well-nigh every
_soldo_ he could raise to pay his passage. What he should do to
support himself in America was, he owned, a knotty problem, but one
that could remain unsolved only until his bust should be seen, admired,
and purchased by the First Lady of the Land. It had been shipped three
weeks before; already it was in America, and, oh, glorious thought!
perhaps at that very moment standing upon a costly pedestal in the
White House. Even if her Majesty the Presidentessa had not found it
convenient as yet to receive it, she would do so in a fortnight at the
longest. Great people like that always took their time. Meanwhile had
he not Bertino, his bosom friend and commercial representative in the
American market, to stand by him? With this golden view Marianna was in
full accord, and his twenty years and her seventeen could see nothing
to worry about in the New World.




CHAPTER XI

A RACE TO THE SWIFT


THE morning that Carolina sailed for Genoa, Signor Di Bello began
to reconsider the roar of derision with which he had treated Juno’s
matrimonial aims, and before the day was out he had made up his mind
to possess her as his wife. To be sure, he had promised Carolina not
to marry for three months, and this pledge, given on his saint’s day,
was of course inviolable; but he reasoned that there would be no
breach of faith in offering Juno his hand, and having the nuptials set
three months to a day from the Feast of St. George. He sat in the shop
thinking over the great matter, when the sunlit floor was darkened by
the shadow of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods.

“_Buon giorno_, Signor Di Bello,” she said, in a tone that gave promise
sure of more to follow.

“O Signora Sara, _buon giorno_.”

“Two cents’ worth of salt, if you please. _Ahimè!_ Truly these are days
of much expense. Never did I fry peppers that required so much salt.”

“Ah, _si_; much expense,” said Signor Di Bello, yawning and handing her
out a two-cent bag.

From a deep pocket of her skirt she drew a begrimed canvas money pouch,
and untied a long string with which it was closed at the top and wound
about many times. Dipping in, she brought forth a handful of coppers,
and selected two. These she laid on the counter with a sigh, first
feeling of the bag to make sure that it was packed hard with salt. She
looked about the shop, and stood a moment moving a red-stockinged foot
in and out at the open heel of her wooden-soled slipper.

“Your nephew not here?” she remarked, and then with a chuckle, “With
the singer, _neh_?”

“What singer?” asked Di Bello.

“Juno.”

“What has he to do with La Superba?”

“More than you think,” returned the yellow-visaged beldame, nodding her
head mysteriously, while her long gold earrings jingled. “Listen, and
it is I that will tell you something. Go to the Caffè of the Beautiful
Sicilian if you would know with whom he spends his time.”

“What do you mean?”

“There it is that he meets the _cantatrice_.”

“Juno?”

“_Si_, signore.”

“Satan the Pig! Bah! What are you saying?”

“The truth, signore; the truth, I assure you. I have it on the word of
Lavinia the waitress. Only yesterday she saw them kiss.”

The gloating eyes of Sara were fixed upon him, and Di Bello did
something very unusual for him--he dissembled his feelings.

“What of it?” he said with an air of unconcern. “Why should he not kiss
her? It is no affair of mine.”

Though a good piece of acting, it did not gammon the keen wits of Sara
the Frier of Pepper Pods. Taking up her bag of salt, she clattered from
the shop, and before long stood the voluble centre of a group of eager
women, into whose ears she poured the tidings of rival loves in Casa Di
Bello. Meantime the grocer, waiting for Bertino, fanned his wrath. When
the young man turned up at the shop this was his greeting:

“Satan the Pig!”

“Why?” asked Bertino.

“And you have the courage to ask? Very innocent for one who tries to
rob me of the woman I love. O traitor!”

Bertino stood speechless with amazement and dismay. His good-natured,
easy-going uncle prancing about the place in a fit of passion was a
sight that took his breath away.

“By the Egg of Columbus!” Di Bello continued, raising his clinched fist
and fixing his eyes upon the loops of dried sausage suspended from the
ceiling--“by the Egg, I swear it, if you don’t keep away from that
woman I’ll turn you from my door--I’ll have your heart’s blood!”

“What woman?” Bertino asked gingerly, and with a feint of ignorance
that was not convincing.

“Bah! Don’t play the fool. I know all. Remember what I tell you--keep
away from her.”

Bertino went behind the counter, put on an apron, and held his tongue.
By degrees the padrone’s ire cooled, until he became so tranquil as to
take a chair.

“Listen, my nephew,” he said, sprawling his legs and thrusting his
hands in his pockets. “I will tell you a secret. This woman is to be my
wife.”

“Your what?” gasped Bertino.

“My wife. Three months from yesterday she will be Signora Di Bello. I
would marry her this very day but I promised--donkey that I was!--I
promised not to take a wife for three months; a pledge that I can’t
break, for it was given on San Giorgio’s Day. Oh, what a donkey!”

Bertino did not dare ask any questions, but he resolved that something
should be done at once to head off his uncle; not another day, nay, not
a single hour, must pass until he and Juno should be man and wife. He
found an excuse to leave the shop, and went to Juno’s humble abode.

“Come with me at once, _carissima_!” he cried. “Come to the Church
of San Loretto. It is open to-day for masses, and Father Bernardo is
there. We shall be married this very hour.”

“Why such haste?” she asked.

“Ah, my angel, can you ask? I wish to make sure of you--to know that
you are really mine.”

Together they made their way through Mulberry, walking with step rapid
and resolute. As they entered Elizabeth Street and approached the
portals of San Loretto, Bertino recollected with a tremor of fear the
threat of his uncle: “If you don’t keep away from that woman I’ll turn
you from my door--I’ll have your heart’s blood!” They were about to
ascend the church steps when he caught Juno by the arm and drew back.

“Come away from here,” he said hoarsely.

“What is the matter?”

“Come away! We must go to some other church. Here it is that the pigs
of Sicilians get married. It is no place for a Genovese like me or a
fine Neapolitan like you. Come, we shall find another priest.”

In secrecy he saw his one chance of saving himself for the present from
the consequences of openly defying Signor Di Bello. To be married at
the altar of San Loretto, to which dozens of sharp eyes and gossiping
tongues were always directed in prayer, would be to proclaim the
nuptials to all Mulberry before vesper bells should be rung that day.

He led her through Houston Street and across the Bowery to a rectory in
lower Second Avenue, a quarter that lies only a few blocks beyond the
frontier of Mulberry, but with a life as remote and distinct from that
of the Italian colony as though a hundred leagues of sea divided them.
A brief mumbling in a little parlour, and they were man and wife.

Neither bride nor bridegroom looked joyous as they came forth into
the street and moved slowly toward Mulberry. Bertino’s face was
particularly long. He was in a black study. Throughout his persistent
courtship he had promised Juno that she should have a home in Casa Di
Bello if she became his wife. Now he found himself cracking his wits
to contrive a good excuse for keeping her out of his uncle’s sight.
If they met she would be sure to tell him of the marriage, whereupon
_inferno_ would kindle. With a wife on his hands, he would find
himself homeless and out of employment, even if Di Bello’s _vendetta_
did not remove the need of earning a living. He dared not make a
confidante of his wife, for to do so meant disclosure of the ugly truth
that he had cheated her of the richest husband in Mulberry--of a prize
which he knew she had been eager to win. His heart sank at thought
of the terrible _vendetta_ that _she_ might take. He believed her
capable of forsaking him and setting their union at naught. Silent of
tongue and sore bestead, he moved along slowly, while passers-by eyed
the majestic woman at his side. When they had reached St. Patrick’s
Graveyard, and her glance fell on Casa Di Bello, she said:

“Now that we are married, let us go to your uncle and tell him, so that
I may move in over there. When that is done we can have the marriage
before the mayor, and the wedding feast.”

“Not yet,” he said; “not yet, for the love of Dio!”

“Why?” she demanded. “I am as good as any one in that house.”

“Oh, my precious one, it is not that; not that. Listen. There is my
uncle--a good man, but strange, strange. When I told him I should take
a wife he called me fool and got very angry. He said I would not do my
work so well if I took a wife. But you--ah, you, my angel!--I would
not give you up for all the uncles and shops in New York--yes, in all
America.”

“You talk nonsense,” said Juno. “Tell me why I should not live in Casa
Di Bello.”

“Well, it is for this, _carissima_, only this: I am afraid to tell him
just now that I am married, because he said he would put me out--do you
understand?--said he would put me out of the shop and Casa Di Bello if
I got married. In a few weeks----”

“Bah!” she said, waving a forefinger in Neapolitan fashion, meaning
that she was not to be taken in. “I never believed you when you talked
of Casa Di Bello. Do you think it was for that I married you?”

“Wait, wait, my Juno. _Pazienza._ The day will come when you will be
_padrona_ of that house.”

“Enough,” she said. “I am tired of this nonsense. What are you going to
do?”

“Listen,” said Bertino, delighted at the success of his garbled version
of Di Bello’s threat. “This is my idea: You do not like Mulberry too
well, nor do I. Moreover, rents are very high here, because these
animals find it hard to get in anywhere else, and the landlords rob
them. But with us it is different. We, for example, are signori, are we
not?”

“Ah, yes; I am a signora.”

“Very well. Now I will tell you the rest: In the upper city there
are apartments, small and fine, that we could take. You know Giacomo
Goldoni, the cornetist at La Scala? Well, he lives in a place like
that, he and his wife, just like Americans.”

“Where is it?”

“In One Hundred and Eleventh Street of the East. Do you know where that
is? Well, you can find it. To-day you shall go and choose the place.
Here is money, the first that you have received from your husband. Do
you think I have been fool enough to give the money I brought from
Italy to the pothouses? Not I. When I need money I go to the Bank of
Risparmio. See what kind of a husband you have! Neither you nor any
one else knows how much I have in the bank. I will tell _you_. Before
drawing this five yesterday I had fifty-three dollars.”

Juno expressed her contempt in a glance, but she closed her fingers on
the greenback.

“Very well. I go to look for the apartment. This evening we meet.
Where? At the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian?”

“No, no; not there!” said Bertino. “You must not come to Mulberry.”

“Why?” she demanded, eying him closely.

He made the only answer that could have satisfied her:

“It is no place for such a signora as you.”

They appointed another meeting place--one that lay beyond the zone of
Signor Di Bello’s nightly revels, and with a wave of the hand Juno
took leave of her husband. He watched her proudly as her stately
figure moved toward the Bowery. She carried her head with the dignity
of the ladies she had seen driving in the Chiaja of Naples on a sunny
afternoon.

Bertino returned to the shop in Paradise Park. As he picked his way
through the swarms of children on the sidewalk he thought of his uncle
sitting in the sunlight, all unwary that the prize he coveted had
passed to another. And the elation of the conqueror gave a spring to
his step, and a swagger, until he turned a corner and beheld the sign
of the Wooden Bunch. Then misgiving filled his soul and restored his
trudging pace, his peasant gait--misgiving that the vanquished one
might exact an accounting.

“Soul of a lobster!” cried Di Bello, springing from his chair, when the
young man appeared at the door. “Where the crocodile have you been?
Animal! To keep me waiting like this, and a grand game of _bastoni_ to
be played at the Three Gardens. By the Dragon, you are going too far!”

He flung out of the shop, not waiting to hear Bertino’s lame excuse.

That evening, after the shop was closed, Bertino and Juno visited
a large instalment house in the Bowery and made their selection of
furniture.

“We shall not need much,” he said, mindful of his balance in the bank,
“for in a little while we shall live in Casa Di Bello.”

“Casa Di Bello!” sneered Juno. “Do you think I am a fool?”

Nevertheless, when two months of living in the little dark flat had
brought her no nearer the inside of the Di Bello house, where her
husband continued to live in order to avert suspicion, she became
impatient, disgusted. The few hours a week that he could steal from the
shop to visit her were not the happiest in his life. She grew sullen
and entertained him with fault-finding. Of his poverty she never lost
an opportunity to twit him, and called him a cheat for marrying her.
At last she declared that she would not stay there alone any longer.
If a man took a wife and could not live with her and support her like
a Christian he had better give her up. And he talked of money! Why did
he not bring her good things from the grocery? For two months she had
lived on bread and _salame_ half the time, with an occasional feast of
lupine beans and veal that he brought her from Mulberry. And what veal!
In Naples it would not be permitted to sell such young meat. Perhaps it
was good enough for the wives of the Mulberry cattle, but it would not
do for her to live that way. She had been a fool to put up with it as
long as she had--a woman like her!--when she could go on the stage and
live as a signora should. Yes, she could get a place on the stage, and
it would not be an Italian theatre either. Goldoni the cornetist had
left La Scala and was playing in the orchestra of a Broadway theatre,
the great Titania. The other day she met him, and she did not let on
that she was married. See how well she could keep a secret!--but she
was a fool for doing so. Well, Goldoni was a man. He said that he
could get her a place in the Titania without any trouble. In fact, the
_impresario_ would be glad to engage her. She would be the finest shape
in the company. It would be twelve dollars a week sure for a figure
such as hers, Signor Goldoni had assured her. Why, then, should she
remain at home nights waiting for a good-for-nothing of a husband, who
never brought her anything better than bob veal?

Bertino pleaded with her to be patient and all would end well. By the
Feast of San Giovanni, if not before, it would be safe to reveal the
secret of his marriage, when, he could promise her, his good-tempered
uncle would forgive him, and invite them both to make their home in
Casa Di Bello. As for his aunt, she would not be here to interfere.

“Your aunt will not be here?” asked Juno, who recognised in Carolina
her bitterest foe.

“No. She has broken her leg, and will not return to America for a long
time. The news came yesterday.”

       *       *       *       *       *

When Bertino pressed the bell button of the flat a week afterward the
electric lock of the street door did not click its customary “come in.”
For several minutes he kept up a serenade. At length a thunderous voice
sounded through the speaking tube:

“She’s out. Get out!”

It was Juno’s first night on the stage of the Titania. She had taken
the engagement without deeming it worth while to inform her husband.
Bertino returned to Mulberry, at first greatly alarmed for her safety,
but in turn filled with most dreadful imaginings as to the cause of
her absence. The following night he got a similar response to his
_sonata_ on the bell, but, instead of going away in a half-distracted
state of mind, he lingered in the doorway, or paced to and fro before
the house. To-night he was not merely a husband worried because his
wife was missing. His alert eye and grimly patient air bespoke a more
serious matter. Whether walking, standing, or sitting on the steps he
was careful not to take one of his hands--the right--out of his coat
pocket. It was after midnight when he caught sight of her. The white
glare of an electric light brought her suddenly into view as she turned
the corner. He tightened his grip on the thing in his pocket, but as
she drew near and it was certain that she had no companion save a small
valise, he came forth from the shadow in which he had crouched when the
purpose of dealing her a deadly thrust was full upon him. She started
back, but quickly regained her frigid calm.

“You’ve had a fine wait,” she said.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, for the first time speaking to her
in a tone that smacked of authority.

“Working and earning money,” she answered--“money that you ought to
give me.”

“Working? Where?”

“In the theatre--the great Titania. Bah! You never even heard of it. Do
you know where Broadway is?”

He did not resent her scornful words. The motive for killing her having
passed, he was again her blind worshipper. Producing her latchkey she
opened the door.

“Come in,” she said. “I have something to say to you.” And when they
had entered the flat: “You must come to the theatre and walk home with
me every night after the representation. At the stage door you must
wait. There are beasts who will not let a woman be when she is alone at
night. I have been annoyed enough.”

“Who has annoyed you?” said Bertino, springing up and putting his hand
in the stiletto pocket, now as eager to slay the offender as he had
been to knife her a few minutes before.

“No matter. To-morrow night and every night you be there at the stage
door.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Signor Di Bello sought in vain to get a trace of Juno. The _impresario_
of La Scala could not give him any clew. He visited all the concert
halls and singing _caffès_ of Mulberry, as well as the Italian theatres
of Little Italy in the Upper East End. Not a soul knew anything about
her. One day he said to Bertino:

“That woman Juno has flown like the bluebird that used to light on the
Garibaldi statue. Do you know where she is?”

“How should I know? You threaten to kill me if I do not keep away from
her, and then ask me where she is!”

“It is a grand mystery,” mused Di Bello, throwing out his legs and
lying back in his chair. “Just when I am ready to marry her she takes
wing.”

“Ah, _si_,” said Bertino meditatively--“a grand mystery.”




CHAPTER XII

THE PEACE PRESERVED


AFTER Juno’s sudden disappearance the theatre and the _caffès_ of
Mulberry lost their charm for Signor Di Bello. He began to roam
abroad evenings in quest of amusement. There came to him a newborn
desire to explore the region of American life that lay beyond the
colony’s border. For twelve years he had dwelt in its heart and felt
the throb of the big city; but never before had it struck his mind
to know more of this _terra misteriosa_ than he could learn from the
morning _Araldo_ and the evening _Bolletino_, two local scions of the
corybantic press, which bawled the news of Mulberry in double-column
scares, but only whispered in paragraphs of the affairs of New York.
With sixty thousand others Mulberry was his world. He had never
sought acquaintance with the great American monster whose roar filled
the surrounding air by day and whose million eyes at night gave the
northern sky a dim, false dawn.

From visiting Bowery shows he became a patron of the vaudeville
theatres farther up town. At length he discovered the Tenderloin, with
its dazzling electric displays at the doors of theatres and drinking
places, its phantom gaiety. Resolved to sound the depths of this ocean
of lights, he went along with a current that flowed to the box office
of the Titania, where the glittering Aztec spectacle, “Zapeaca” was the
magnet, charged with “one hundred American beauties.”

“By Cristoforo Colombo, it is she!” the grocer exclaimed, as the woman
he had hunted in a cityful marched across the stage, bringing up the
rear of a long column of high-heeled warriors. Though disguised in a
tin spear, a pasteboard shield, and a sheening helmet set jauntily
upon her bounteous raven mane, he knew her at first sight. No mistaking
that snub nose, that grand carriage, the plethora of her line, the
Eastern warmth of her colour.

“_Brava!_” he cried out, from his seat near the footlights whenever the
row of beauties to which she belonged showed themselves in marching
order. It was a renewal of the transport into which her presence had
thrown him when in solitary pride she held the stage of La Scala and
bleated “Santa Lucia.” To the jeers of the people about him he paid no
heed, but gave wild, vociferous expression to his delight at finding
her and feasting his eyes upon her, as she stood there in all the truth
of the ballet’s scant drapery.

After the performance he waited in front of the theatre until the
lights were extinguished and the big doors slammed in his face. Well it
was for the public peace that his education did not include a knowledge
of the stage door, for had he gone round the corner to that entrance
not only would he have encountered Juno, but he would have witnessed
the infuriating afterpiece of Bertino taking her arm and carrying her
off toward the East side. It is not unlikely that one steel blade at
least would have gleamed in the half light of that by-street. But his
innocence as to the right door at which to await a lady of the ballet
caused a postponement of the tragedy. When at last he sought the advice
of a cabman and was directed to the proper place it was too late.

“_Satana porco!_” he growled as he started homeward. “I am a grand
donkey. This is Saturday. To-morrow is _festa_. Two whole days must I
go without seeing her. But on Monday night we shall meet, and then she
shall be my promised wife.”

At the same time Juno was telling Bertino of her determination to go
with the “Zapeaca” company in a tour of the country. They talked as
they moved along on foot toward the Third Avenue Elevated. “It is only
ten dollars a week,” she said, “with all expenses save the railroad to
pay; but what would you have? Is it not better than living here the way
you support me? Perhaps you think I will spend my money. Not even in
a dream! A woman expects her husband to support her. To-morrow night,
then, I go.”

“How long shall you be absent?” asked Bertino humbly.

“Goldoni says six months anyway; perhaps longer.”

“You will come back to me?”

“Yes”--and after a pause--“when you can support me like a signora.”

“In six months!” said Bertino exultantly. “Ha! then I shall be my own
_padrone_. Then you shall see what a man your husband is.”

“Why?”

“Armando’s bust will be here. Don’t you remember? The bust that shall
bring us both fortune. Patience, patience, my precious. Mark what I
say: With the grand marble of the First Lady of the Land once in my
hands I shall quickly put my uncle in a sack. In his face I will snap
my fingers and say, ‘I beg to inform you, signore, that Juno is my
wife.’”

She made no answer, and Bertino went on building airy mansions of the
golden harvest to follow the sale of the sculpture then under way
as well as that to be reaped from other marbles to be turned out of
Armando’s far-off workshop. His words affected Juno in a manner that
he little kenned. She had given herself only a fugitive thought as
to what might happen when the bust should arrive and Bertino should
find it an image of his own wife instead of the wife of the President
of the United States. When the critical moment came, when the fruit
of her roguery stood unveiled, she felt that she should be equal to
it--that she could shrug her shoulders and meet Bertino’s suspicions
with a simple plea of ignorance, and trust to his believing that he
himself sent the wrong photograph by mistake. Now she perceived that
it behooved her to keep friends with him, to guile him with affection,
else his suspicion when he should discover the fraud might take the
cast of sullen conviction, and in Mulberry who can tell what a husband
may do with a false wife, whatever the shade of her duplicity may be?
Moreover, she wanted the bust. Her rude self-conceit thirsted for that
effigy in stone of her own dear self. To lose it would be to miss the
prize on which she had set her desire when she said “Yes” that day in
the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian.

“Ah, yes,” she replied when they stood on the Elevated platform. “We
shall put your uncle in a sack and get along well together when the
bust is here.”

“_Brava_, my wife!” said Bertino, and they entered the train.

       *       *       *       *       *

Next day being the Feast of Sunday, Bertino and his uncle met at the
noon repast in Casa Di Bello, as they had done every Sunday since
Carolina’s absence. The grocer was in jubilant spirits, unable to
contain his joy over the finding of Juno.

“Ah, nephew mine,” he said, when Angelica had set a large bowl of
steaming chestnut soup on the board and retired to her listening place.
“Not many days, _caro mio_, and we shall have a fine woman at table
with us. Yes, a woman truly magnificent.”

“Who is she?”

“The woman who is to be my wife. I told you once. Can you not divine?”

“No.”

“Well, I will tell you, though it is a great secret: Juno the Superb.”

A spoonful of soup that Bertino was in the act of swallowing took the
wrong course and choked him, while Angelica was thrown from her balance
at the head of the kitchen stairs and almost fell to the bottom. When
Bertino had stopped coughing he gasped:

“Juno the Superb?”

“Yes. Is it not famous?”

“Your wife?”

“Yes. Ah, what joy!”

“But it is impossible!”

“Not at all, nephew mine. I have found her. I saw her last night
for the first time since the Feast of San Giorgio. Ah, how I had
searched! It was in the theatre that I saw her--at the Titania, a
grand spectacle. So many women, and beautiful! But not one was the
equal of Juno. My word of honour for that. Well, I waited after the
representation, but did not see her. To-morrow night, though, I shall
say to her: ‘Juno, be my wife. In three months come to my house, to
Casa Di Bello.’ These words will I say to her, and I shall wait at the
stage door until she comes out.”

“You will wait many months, then,” said Bertino to himself with a
smothered chuckle as he fell upon a patty of codfish that Angelica had
just brought in.

“Grand trouble, grand trouble,” sighed Angelica, as she prepared the
after-dinner _zabaglioni_[B] for her master. “If the signorina were
here he would not dare bring her to the house. And when she comes and
finds the singer has been in Casa Di Bello! O Maria--_grandissimo_
trouble!”

[Footnote B: An Italian eggnog, served hot.]

In the evening Bertino accompanied Juno to the Grand Central Depot,
whence she left for Buffalo with the rest of the hundred American
beauties of the “Zapeaca” aggregation.

       *       *       *       *       *

On Tuesday morning Bertino regarded his uncle quizzically across the
breakfast table, but of his second fruitless visit to the Titania’s
stage door the signore was as silent as the figure of San Patrizio that
looked down upon Casa Di Bello from the architrave of the church on the
opposite side of Mulberry Street. And for many a day thereafter not a
word did he utter concerning any magnificent woman that was to become
his wife.




CHAPTER XIII

THE PEACE DISTURBED


THE bluebird came again to perch on Garibaldi’s cap, the baby maples
put forth their leaves, and Signor Di Bello told Bertino it was time to
give the Wooden Bunch a new coat of yellow. Once more the fire-escapes
on either side of Corso di Mulberry bloomed with potted geraniums;
glistening radishes lent their vernal blush to the vegetable stalls,
and the thoughts of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods turned to summer
profits. The building trades had set the winter idlers to work, and
the Alley of the Moon resounded no longer with the wild shouts of
_mora_ players. The hokey-pokey man, tiding over the cold months
with an ancient hand organ, yearned to put away The Blue Danube and
The Marseillaise, and wheel out his gorgeous ice-cream cart. The old
gondolier, selling pine-cone seeds at the foot of China Hill, could
leave his toe-toaster at home now, and let the May sunshine economize
the charcoal.

Bertino mixed the paint, selected a cheap brush from the stock of the
shop, and set to work on the Bunch. It is doubtful that he heard the
swish, swish of the brush. His thoughts were of Juno. Her absence had
extended long over the six months, and for more than thirty days he had
not heard from her. There was no excuse for this neglect, he reasoned,
since her education had been so liberal that she could spell and write
as well as any woman in Mulberry. Of the few letters received from her,
each had contained a tale of woe--the woe of a ballet lady striving to
live on the road with a salary of ten dollars a week. The missives,
rich in terms of endearment, always touched his pocket as well as his
heart, and by return mail he never failed to send her a dollar or two.
But why had she been silent this last month of the tour, instead of
writing to tell him where to meet her when she should reach the city?
Already she ought to be here. What if she never came back--if she
forsook him? In the shock of this terrible thought he upset the pail of
yellow just as Signor Di Bello stepped out of the shop.

“Soul of a cat!” exclaimed the grocer, the toe of one of his black
shoes tipped with the paint. “What the rhinoceros are you about? _Gran
Dio_, what stupendous stupidity!”

Re-entering the shop, he cleaned off the paint, fuming the while and
growling. Then he flew out, scowling at Bertino as he passed, and made
straight for the Caffè of the Three Gardens.

“The monkey!” said Bertino to himself. “When the bust arrives I’ll be
rid of him.”

A moment afterward the letter carrier handed him a large envelope
addressed in a big, round hand to “Bertino Manconi, Esq.” It was
from a customhouse agent, announcing the arrival of the bust, and
offering to attend to the business of clearing it. To this end it
would be necessary for Bertino to forward the amount of the duty, a
hundred and forty dollars. He put the letter in his pocket, filled with
apprehension of trouble, for his English was so weak that he could not
make out the meaning of the part about the duty, though he suspected
that the sum of a hundred and forty dollars was in some way required of
him. That evening, after he had lugged in the Wooden Bunch and locked
the shop door, he took the mysterious paper to Signor Tomato, who told
him the awful truth.

“It must be a great work of art,” said the banker; “very valuable.”

“Valuable!” said Bertino. “Ah, _caro mio_, if you only knew! Well, I
will tell you. It is a bust of her Majesty the Presidentessa.”

“What Presidentessa?”

“Of the United States.”

“St. Januarius! Is it possible?”

One hundred and forty dollars! The sum rose like an impassable mountain
between Bertino and the hopes he had cherished so long and fervidly.
As well have been forty thousand. He could not pay the duty. Marriage
had eaten up the savings brought from Italy and what he had earned
since. When Signor Tomato told him that the Government would retain
the marble until the impost were paid, he blotted out the poor lad’s
fondest anticipations--his dreams of release from Signor Di Bello and
the misery of his secret marriage, the freedom to say to his uncle,
“Juno is my wife.” To the bust he had looked forward as to a loyal
friend, who should come some day to lift him to the plane whereon a
man ought to stand. But now that the friend was near, some power which
he comprehended but vaguely had clapped her in a prison, from which
the future held no promise of letting her go. There came over him the
terrible throbbing of blood and the fire of brain that he felt the
night he crouched, burning with suspicion, in the doorway with a ready
knife waiting for Juno. He could not have answered if asked just now
whom he wished to kill. Some infernal prank was playing at his expense,
and the time had come to end it. A strange calm possessed him as he
began to cast about for the joker. He had been walking in Mulberry
Street. At the corner of Spring Street he entered the Caffè of the
Three Gardens. Dropping into a chair near the door, he ordered a glass
of Marsala; but before the waiter had returned with the wine, Bertino
sprang up and darted out of the place. At a table in the _caffè’s_
depth he had seen Juno and Signor Di Bello with their heads together!
Holy blood of the angels!

No need of looking further for the joker. His wife returns after six
months, does not let her husband know, and goes first to meet another.
Yes, the prank has gone far enough.

It was only a block to Casa Di Bello. In a few minutes he was there and
in his room. When he came into the street again he had his right hand
in his coat pocket.

       *       *       *       *       *

The meeting of Juno and Signor Di Bello came about in this manner: The
signore was walking in Mulberry Street, on his way to the _caffè_ to
smoke an after-dinner Cavour, and help some good comrades empty a flask
of Chianti. Suddenly he stopped, stood still, his eyes staring and his
mouth a gulf of astonishment.

“By the Egg of Columbus!” he exclaimed. “It is she, or I am dreaming!”

There she was, moving toward him on the same side of the street,
dressed no better than when he last came face to face with her, but her
grand air not a whit impaired.

“At last, at last I find you!” he cried, catching up her hand and
kissing it with a loud smack. “Ah! the good God knows how I have hunted
for you. But joy, joy! I find you! I see you! My eyes look into yours!
Come, away from here! Ah, the Three Gardens! Let us enter. I have
something to say--something very important.”

He drew her into the _caffè_, and sought a table far from the door.

“What do you want to say to me?” asked Juno. She had responded not at
all to Signor Di Bello’s passionate greeting.

“Ah, my angel! I want to say to you what I would have said long ago if
I had found you. The hunt I have had! And once when I caught sight of
you, it was only to have you vanish again like a wine bubble. Where
have you been? How beautiful you are! Oh, the grand hunt!”

“Why have you hunted for me?” she said, releasing her hand from his,
and moving her chair.

“To offer you what you demanded--a wedding ring.”

“You wish to make me your wife?”

“Yes. Before the Madonna, it is true! Months and months ago I was
ready.”

For a moment Juno was silent, contemplative. Then she said, eying him
steadily:

“Would you have married me before I left Mulberry?”

“Yes; _Dio_ my witness.”

“Why did you not come to me and say so?”

“But I could not find you. My nephew, Bertino, will tell you that I
speak truth. I told him that I intended to make you my wife.”

“When did you tell him that?” she asked quickly, leaning forward and
awaiting the answer eagerly, while Signor Di Bello strove to recollect.

“Ah, yes, now I have it,” he said at length. “I remember because it was
the day after my sister Carolina sailed for Genova--two days after the
Feast of San Giorgio, my saint.”

The recollection rose clear to Juno that it was on the day following
Carolina’s departure that she and Bertino went to the little rectory
in Second Avenue. And equally vivid to her consciousness stood forth
the inflaming truth that Bertino, with full knowledge of Signor Di
Bello’s purpose to take her for wife, had hastened their union in order
to checkmate his rival. So this moneyless clerk had tricked her into
marriage, and cheated her of a rich husband!

“_Maledetto!_” she said in a half-stifled voice. At the same instant
there flashed in her brain a resolve to rid herself of Bertino.

“Why _maledetto_?” asked the signore. “Do you not accept my offer?”

“Another time I will give you my answer,” she said, rising. “I must go.”

They stood outside, he holding her hand and looking up into her face
with worshipful eyes. Suddenly she drew back, and without a parting
word took herself off. A face that she had seen in a near-by doorway
made her eager to end the interview. She had gone but a few paces when
Bertino was by her side.

“So you are here, and putting horns on your husband?” he said, gripping
her arm. “Welcome, signora, welcome!” A smile of hellish mockery played
on his livid face.

“No, I am not,” she pleaded, a tremor in her voice, because she knew
her race.

He laughed, and gripped her arm tighter.

“I know,” he said. “You want a rich man.” Then, with his lips close to
her ear: “Do you think you will live?”

“It is not my fault,” she said, still pleading. “What can a woman do
when a man plays the fool and annoys her?”

“He annoys you?”

“Yes,” she answered, seizing her chance. “If you were a man you would
make him leave me alone. I do not want him.”

“I will kill the dog!” said Bertino, letting go of her arm. A moment he
regarded her with the old tenderness, but a black look settled again on
his face, and he asked slowly, “Why did you not let me know you were
back?”

“I have not been in the city an hour. The shop was closed. Luigia the
Garlic Woman will tell you that I asked her if she knew where you had
gone. I was going to send a note to Casa Di Bello. We met in the
street and--he annoyed me.” She thought now only of saving herself.

“By the heart of Mary!” he said, “this shall stop. I will go to him and
tell him you are my wife.”

“No, no! Don’t do that. Wait--wait until you are rid of him--until you
are your own _padrone_--until the bust is here and you have sold it and
are a free man.”

“The bust?” he said hopelessly. “It is here, but as well might it have
remained in Armando’s studio.”

“What?” she said. “It is here? Where? Let me see it.”

“No; I can not. The Government has it, and will keep it until I pay one
hundred and forty dollars. Seven hundred _lire_! _Gesù Bambino!_ Where
shall I get them?”

As they walked on he recounted the distress that had overtaken the
supposed First Lady of the Land; her captivity in the hands of revenue
officials, and his inability to pay the kingly ransom demanded. This
news was a cut and thrust at the hope whereon Juno’s crude self-love
had fed for many a month, and it killed the solitary motive that
made her hold to Bertino. By neither word nor sign, however, did she
betray her disgust and anger; she even feigned sympathy, and bade
him be of good cheer, saying tenderly that ill fortune would not dog
them forever; that by luck or pluck they should get possession of the
bust, and carry out his plan for money-making. These were the first
heartening words she had ever spoken to him--the first kindness he
could recall as coming from her lips. Despite the black cloud that had
risen so suddenly from behind the customhouse, a sweet rapture filled
his soul. What mattered it all?--his wife loved him. Their joys and
griefs were one. The loneliness that had burdened his spirit since the
day of his marriage departed, and his heart lost its bitterness.

“True, my precious,” he said, pressing her hand, “we love each other,
and shall know how to manage in spite of the Government.”

At the same time Juno said to herself, “How can I get rid of the fool
and marry his uncle?”

They came to a halt at the mouth of the Alley of the Moon, a wide
passage between two tenements that led to a rear court heaped with
push-carts laid up for the night. Halfway up the alley a large gas lamp
with a sputtering light hung over a doorway. On its green glass showed
the words, Restaurant of Santa Lucia. In three dingy rooms above,
Luigia the Garlic Woman lived with a lodger known to the public of
Mulberry as Chiara the Hair Comber. The latter had her shop and living
apartment in the “front” room, looking on the alley, and directly
over the green light, which shed its rays on her sign, Hair Combing
in Signora Style, Two Cents. The remaining room of the trio had been
engaged that day by Juno, who had merely fibbed when she told Bertino
that she had been in town only an hour. It was the same humble chamber
she had occupied during her brief career of starhood on the stage of La
Scala.

“I have come here because it costs only twenty _soldi_ a day,” she said
to Bertino, “and here I shall remain until--until we can do better.
Good night, my dear husband. Courage. Be _allegro_, and our fortune
will sing.”

“Ah, yes; _allegro_ I will be. Good night, my precious wife. Until
to-morrow.”

In the solitude of her dreary little coop, while the hoarse shouts
of _mora_ players in the restaurant below sounded in her ears, Juno
set her wits calmly to the knotty puzzle that the day had brought
forth: How to get rid of her husband that she might accept Signor Di
Bello’s offer of marriage? A few grains of poison dropped in wine for
Bertino to drink would accomplish the needful state of widowhood, but
this method, she discerned, had its faults. It was likely to bring
man-hunters from the Central Office about one’s head, and detectives
were given to putting awkward questions. Moreover, they had a trick of
locking up persons whose answers did not suit them. No; in a strictly
private matter of this kind it would never do to have the police
meddling. That might spoil all. She thought of other plans of removal
that she had heard talked about in the Porto quarter of Naples. And
while she considered these there darted into her mind one of those
mystic shafts of memory that come unbidden by cognate suggestion. It
was a Sunday afternoon, and she and Bertino, walking in the suburbs,
stood upon Washington Bridge. From the height of the great span she
looked down again on the slopes of the Harlem Valley beautiful in the
gold and flame of autumn; the sedge marshes that waved to the temperate
wind, and far below, growing narrow in the distance, the silvery ribbon
of water that glimmered yet faintly in the gloam of sunset. It was
one of those Sundays that Bertino brought her a package of bob veal,
and she recalled the desire that had seized her to throw him over the
parapet. Had she done so in the darkness that soon fell not a soul
would have known. What she could have done then she could do now.
By this method there would be no police knocking at one’s door and
prying into secrets. The quicker he were out of the way the better,
and next Sunday, if no moon shone, the thing could be done. With deep
satisfaction she viewed her brawny arms and stalwart frame and felt
sure of the strength needful to execute the task without bungling. Then
she went to bed and slept soundly.

But the morrow had in its teeth a fine marplot for her little tragedy.
It happened in the evening in this wise: The shutters of the shop put
up, Bertino hastened to the Restaurant of Santa Lucia, where Juno had
promised to await him. He opened the door, and what he saw caused him
to pause on the threshold, but for only a moment. She was not alone.
Seated by her side on the rough wooden bench that flanked the long
oil-clothed table was Signor Di Bello. Their backs were turned to the
door, but Bertino knew both at first glance. On the opposite side
of the board the gaslight fell upon a row of dusky faces, into the
caverns of which large quantities of spaghetti coiled about forks were
being despatched. In other parts of the low-ceiled room, muggy with
smoke of two-cent cigars, coatless men, engaged in furious combats at
cards, shouted and rained sledge-hammer blows on the tables. Before any
one had seen him enter, Bertino sprang across the floor like a jaguar
and snatched from his uncle’s hand a knife with which he was in the act
of conveying a bit of sheep’s-milk cheese to his mouth. Then without
ado the gudgeon who believed that his wife was annoyed fell to the
performance of a husband’s duty. It was a wild thrust, but well enough
aimed to have found a mortal course had the tool been of the standard
pattern used in Mulberry for odd jobs of this kind--the long thin
steel, fine tempered, and needlelike of point. As it chanced, Signor
Di Bello’s left shoulder blade was stabbed flesh deep, and a second
lunge only slit his coat sleeve, because he dropped sidewise out of
harm’s way just as Bertino brought down the knife again. Every eye
in the restaurant had witnessed the second blow and the fall of Signor
Di Bello from the end of the bench, so the conclusion was instant and
general that the odd job had been finished.

[Illustration: It was a wild thrust.]

“Fly!” they cried, one and all, rising and pointing to the door. “Your
work is done.”

Bertino stood a moment, grasping the knife and looking at Juno; then
he flung it down and made for the door. One of the card players held
it open for him as he passed out; for the _vendetta_ is a man’s sacred
right--a strictly private matter to be settled by him in his own way,
free of outside interference. Enough that he use the genteel knife and
not the clumsy pistol, which is seldom sure of its mark, and brings the
police to make trouble for one’s friends.




CHAPTER XIV

YELLOW BOOTS AND ORANGE BLOSSOMS


NEVER had a knife-play produced such general commotion in Mulberry.
Though the motive for a removal was an affair wherewith outsiders
seldom concerned themselves, the whole colony thirsted in this
distinguished instance to know the wherefore of Bertino’s desire to
have his uncle’s life. This was a tidal wave of opportunity for Sara
the Frier of Pepper Pods, and splendidly she rode upon it to renewed
fortune. For months she had eaten the wormwood of a dishonoured oracle.
She had told the people that rival loves dwelt beneath the roof of Casa
Di Bello, and that some day grand trouble would be the fruit; but as
time wore on and the volcano gave no hint of eruption Sara’s patrons
flung the prophecy in her teeth and bought their fried pepper pods of
an upstart competitor from the Porta del Carmine of Naples. Now she
was able to brush the under side of her chin with the back of her hand
when the aforetime scoffers passed, and ask triumphantly, “Who was
it, my stupid one, that foretold grand trouble in Casa Di Bello?” No
longer could her soothsaying power be doubted, and the morning after
the letting of Signor Di Bello’s blood many an old customer, eager for
news, returned to Sara’s frying pan, which sizzled all day with the
steady rush of trade. In the singsong staccato of Avelino she told all
and much to boot of what she knew touching the great scandal. Who but
she had gone to Signor Di Bello and told him how Bertino had been seen
to kiss the singer, and who but she had seen the stiletto that her
words had caused to gleam in his eye? “But it was the other that played
the knife,” her listeners would observe, critically. This was Sara’s
cue to nod her head mysteriously, say “No matter,” and look wiser than
the plaster cast of Dante that brooded, yellow with age and dusty, in
the window of Signor Sereno the Undertaker. And no more light could
any one in Mulberry shed on the matter, for Juno and Bertino had made
excellent work of guarding the secret of their marriage.

Public interest in the episode declined when, after one day of closure,
the shutters were taken down and business went on as usual at the Sign
of the Wooden Bunch. A new assistant, to take the place of the fugitive
Bertino, was on hand; so was Signor Di Bello, who looked not a hair the
worse for the inexpert carving of which he had been the subject. While
the patrons came and went he sat near the entrance, sprawled in his
low chair, preoccupied, but answering with a grunt the many inquiries
about his health. The etiquette of Mulberry permits no closer reference
than this to removal matters. A subject of vast import and demanding
the grocer’s instant attention had sprouted that morning. It was in a
letter received from Carolina. He had just reached a conclusion--a
fact he betokened by dealing himself a smart slap on the knee--when the
form of Juno appeared between him and the sunshine that poured in at
the shop door.

“Welcome, welcome, my angel!” he cried, springing up, but quickly
pulling a grimace of pain as the wound in the shoulder gave a twinge.
“Ah! what good fortune! You are here, and so am I. See what kind of
a man is Signor Di Bello! To me a knife in the shoulder is a trifle.
Already I am well enough to go with you to the church. Are you ready,
_mia vita_?”

“Wait a few days,” she said, with her frigid calm, “then I will tell
you.”

“_Porco Diavolo!_ Wait, wait! Always wait. I tell you I can not wait.”

“Why?”

“I have my reason.”

“What is it?”

“Ah! _carina_, don’t you know? Well, it is because I can not live
without you.” He said it with his upturned eyes pouring forth a sea
of adoration. Still it was only half the truth. Had he disclosed the
other half he would have told of his sister’s letter saying that she
intended to sail for New York within a week. His spirit had quaked at
the thought of bringing a wife to Casa Di Bello when the redoubtable
Carolina should be on the ground, and the conviction grew upon him that
when the moment came he should not be able to muster the courage needed
for such an enterprise. Wherefore he resolved to wed Juno and plant her
in Casa Di Bello in advance of Carolina’s re-entrance upon the scene.

“You have your reason for not waiting,” she said, impressed not at all
by his amatory demonstration. “Good. I have my reason for waiting.”

She walked out of the shop without saying more, leaving him wondering
if, after all, he were going to lose her. As she made her way through
the hordes of Mulberry she was the target of every eye and tongue. Men
gazed at her in admiration and women pelted her with scornful darts,
because of her proud bearing as well as her coquetry that had set blood
against blood.

“A rogue of a woman,” said a brown daughter of Sicily, fanning the
flies from her naked babe.

“Rather. Who knows what she is or where she came from?”

To all of this and much more Juno moved on in haughty disregard. At the
mouth of the Alley of the Moon she was greeted with profit-receiving
deference by her landlady, Luigia the Garlic Woman, who handed her a
letter. Bertino’s writing! Seated on the bed in her darkling cubicle
upstairs, she read the missive, which was postmarked Jamaica, Long
Island:

 CARA JUNO: Did I kill him? Address Post Office, Jamaica, Long Island.
                                             B.

For a moment she sat staring at but not seeing a gaudy print of the
Sistine Madonna that hung in a faint shaft of light. Then she sprang
up and hurried down the narrow staircase to the restaurant. Seated in
the place on the long bench that Signor Di Bello occupied when Bertino
broke up their little meeting, she called for writing materials and
penned these lines:

 CARO BERTINO: Your uncle is very low. Will write soon.
                                             J.

As she carried the letter to the red box on the corner her stoical face
gave no token of satisfaction felt by reason of the simple but clean
solution of a vexed problem which Bertino’s letter had supplied. Ten
minutes later she stood in the doorway of Signor Di Bello’s shop.

“Ah, _angelo mio_, welcome again!” was his greeting. Then with an air
of secrecy: “But sh----! sh----! Not a word here. That boy! His ears
are very large and his tongue is long. Every word we said before he
heard. Come, let us go for a promenade.”

They crossed to Paradise Park and mounted the broad staircase to the
pavilion where the band plays, and took seats in a corner apart from
the gabbling women and their swarms of yellow children. Without ado she
came to the point:

“My answer is ready. I will be your wife.”

“Joy!” he cried. “But it must be at once. Within the week. The next
Feast of Sunday.”

“The Feast of Sunday.”

“Ah, what a wedding it shall be! The finest ever seen in Mulberry.
Listen, _mia diletta_, and I will give you my idea. In an open
carriage, with white and purple plumes in the horses’ heads, we shall
go to the Church of San Patrizio. Shall it be San Patrizio or San
Loretto? For me San Patrizio is most agreeable.”

“For me too,” said Juno. “At San Loretto one finds too many Sicilian
pigs.”

“You are right. In the afternoon, then, you wait in the restaurant of
Santa Lucia, all ready in your white gown and orange blossoms. Ah, how
magnificent you will----”

“Bah!” she interrupted. “White gown and orange blossoms! Where do you
think I am to get them? Let me tell you something, signore: I am poor.”

“By the chains of Colombo, then, I am not!” he exclaimed jubilantly.
“You shall have them, and the finest in all Grand Street. Here, see
what kind of a man your promised spouse is!”

From an inside pocket of his waistcoat he drew a large calfskin wallet
bound about many times with stout cord, and took from the plenteous
store therein one ten-dollar note. This he handed to Juno with a proud
“There my angel.”

“Thank you,” she said faintly, turning over the bill.

“And yellow boots you shall have,” he went on; “just like the ones
Signorina Crotelli had last Sunday. I saw them when she and Pietro went
up the church steps. Which do you like best, yellow or white boots?”

“I think yellow boots for a bride are very sympathetic,” she answered,
folding the bank note and tying it in a corner of her handkerchief. And
without a moment’s delay she set off for Grand Street, where the flower
of Mulberry does its shopping.

Two hours afterward, her arms heaped with bundles, and every cent of
the ten dollars gone, she appeared in the kitchen of her landlady and
shocked her with tidings of the nuptials so near at hand.

“Body of the Serpent!” remarked the Garlic Woman. “In the morning you
are a woman without hope, and in the evening you come back the promised
wife of a rich signore.”

While she shook her head in doubt and suspicion, Juno spread out many
yards of purple satin, white lace and pink lining, a wreath of muslin
orange blossoms that should give no poisonous odour, a pair of white
stockings, and--the sympathetic yellow boots. As the bent crone gazed
at the finery her zincky visage lost the hard cast put upon it by a
lifetime of penny-splitting bargain and sale. A tender light filled
her eye, and she lived again in the sweet days of her youth. Where
was the soldier boy that her girlish heart loved? Where the dashing
_Bersagliere_ that led her to church in the mountain village? A great
mound in northern Africa--the tomb of a whole regiment--could answer.
Across the mind of Juno there flashed a thought of her husband and
the crime upon which she was about to enter, but the next instant
it perished as she snatched up the purple satin to preserve it from
danger, for old Luigia had stained it with a tear.

They plied their needles early and late, and when the Feast of Sunday
dawned Juno was ready for the church. All Mulberry knew of the great
event in preparation, and made high store of attending the ceremony
at the altar; but only the first families of the Torinesi, Milanesi,
and Genovesi, and the upper lights of the Calabriani, the Siciliani,
and the Napolitani were bidden to the feast at Casa Di Bello. When
Angelica received the command to make ready this feast, she declared
to Signor Di Bello that a malediction had fallen on the house. To this
he returned only a stout guffaw. It was a terrible blow to the cook,
who was in full accord with Carolina’s policy of a closed door to
wives. Many months she had longed for the return of her mistress, lest
this very calamity might betide during her absence. O poor Signorina
Carolina! To come back just too late to keep out the Napolitana--the
baggage above all others against whom she wished to close the door.
She knew it, she knew it! In her dreams she had seen Juno the Superb
queening it over her in the kitchen, ordering more garlic in this, more
red pepper in that, and making everything fit only for Neapolitan pigs
to eat. Maria have mercy, but she must obey. So, taking up her big
basket, she had gone forth to market, with face long and voice doleful,
and poured into the eager ears of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods and the
group of raven heads always about her, the story of the dreadful rush
going on to plant in Casa Di Bello the woman whom Carolina had crossed
the seas to keep out.

Though a stone of composure in all the other turns that her adventuring
course had taken, Juno lost her calm a little in the haste and flurry
of constructing the nuptial gown. As an effect she failed until the
last moment to discharge a duty very needful to the success of her
plans. The oversight did not occur to her until Sunday afternoon, at
the moment when she was seated in the chair of Chiara the Hair Comber,
receiving the marvellous wedding _coiffure_ for which that artist was
famous. The hair dressing accomplished, Juno lost no time in going to
the restaurant and penning these words, taking great care with the
spelling, and making sure that the address, “Post Office, Jamaica, Long
Island,” should be correct:

 DEAR BERTINO: Your uncle died to-day. Fly from America. The
 man-hunters are after you!
                                             J.

Then she put on the gorgeous purple gown, and called the Garlic Woman to
button the yellow boots. And while the bells of San Patrizio pealed,
and the people, dressed in their Sunday clothes, moved toward the
church gates, Juno waited--waited for the open carriage with its plumed
horses that should bear her to the altar with Signor Di Bello.




CHAPTER XV

FAILURE OF BANCA TOMATO


THE banking house and steamship office of Signor Tomato had reached
the border of a crisis. Inch by inch the despairing padrone had seen
his well of profit dry up. No longer did labour contractors come to
him for men, and for more than a year he had not taken in a _soldo_
of commission on wages. Even Anselmo the baker, who for two loyal
years had bought a four-dollar draft on Naples, took his business to
an upstart rival, and people sneered at the sham packages of Italian
currency exposed in the little window. The slow but ever-crumbling
wreck had left him at last with only the steamship tickets to cling to;
but even this spar of hope failed one day when a ship of the Great
Imperial International General Navigation Company was stabbed to death
off the Banks, and a half dozen of Signor Tomato’s clients returned
to Mulberry minus their tin pans, mattresses, and other baggage, but
well charged with denunciation of the agent who sold them the trouble.
Thereafter it would have been as easy to get home-goers to take passage
in a balloon as to book them for the G. I. I. G. N. C. line.

Crushing as it was, this disaster might have been tided over had not
a long season of domestic reverses added to the difficulty. For three
years there had been no christening party in the tiny parlour back of
the nankeen sail, and during that period the bank’s advertisement in the
_Progresso_ had appeared without the famous foot line, “Also a baby
will be taken to nurse.” The first families of Mulberry had always bid
high for Bridget’s offices, and the advent of a new Tomato had never
failed to mark an era of prosperity in the bank’s history. Bridget’s
vogue was greatest among the Neapolitan mothers, who do not hold with
the American dairy wife that it is seldom the biggest kine that yield
the richest quarts. But psychological reasons were not lacking for the
favour in which the rugged Irish woman was held. In the minds of her
patrons was rooted the conviction that for a child of Italy, destined
to fight out the battle of life in New York, there could be no better
start than the “inflooence” of a nurse of Bridget’s race.

The brave figure she presented at these stages! How all Mulberry stood
dazzled as she passed, splendid in the time-honoured costume of the
Neapolitan _balia_! Tradition demanded a deep-plaited vesture of blue
silk or crimson satin, which could be hired of any midwife. Bridget
always rejoiced when her employer said crimson satin, for that was her
favourite as well as Signor Tomato’s. But there were other points of
the outfit that gave her little delight. These were the smoothing and
shining with pomatum of her crow-black hair, and the sweetening of
it with cologne; a gilded comb in her topknot, and pendent therefrom
long broad ribbons to match her gown; rosettes in her ears, silver or
pearly beads wound in double strings circling her ample neck; rings
galore on her chubby fingers. And the skirt! Short enough to show her
insteps, white-stockinged in low-cut shoes. Seen from a distance,
moving not without pride across Paradise Park, she resembled a huge
macaw or other bird of tropical plumage.

[Illustration: Bridget in _balia_ array.]

“Troth, it’s the divvil’s own ghinny I am now, and no misthake,” she
had told herself more than once when a new engagement found her in
_balia_ array. “Phat they’d be sayin’ at home to the loikes iv me I
don’ knaw, and may I niver hear. Musha, mother darlint, did y’ iver
drame they’d make a daygoe iv yer colleen Biddy? Niver moind, it’s an
honest pinny I’m layin’ up agin the rainy day whin there’s not a cint
comin’ to the bank.”

But the rainy days had been too many, and the fruits of those golden
times were always eaten up. Since the loss of the Great Imperial
Company’s ship the tide of prejudice had submerged Signor Tomato.
People would not go to him even to exchange a ten-lire note for
American coin. Public sentiment vented itself also against the Jack
Tar, that steadfast emblem of the bank’s steamship connection which
had stood at the door day and night for half a decade. The hand of
juvenile Mulberry had ever been against the old sailor, but now he was
an infuriating mark, an object of fiercest hatred to the relatives
and friends of the passengers who lost their tin pans and mattresses.
Passing by, they would draw their knives and slash at his neck, or
thrust the point at his heart. Every night brought fresh attacks upon
his weather-beaten person with axes and clubs until the banker found
his silent partner’s occiput lying in the gutter one morning. This was
the last fragment of the head that he had been losing for weeks. Signor
Tomato took the incident as an omen of blackest import. An hour later
he said to Bridget:

“Guess ees-a come de end-a now. Doan’ know what ees-a goin’ do
everybodee. All-a black, so black. What-a good I am? Tell-a me dat.
Tink I’m better goin’ put myself off de Bridge. I’m do it, you bet, if
I’m not-a love you and lil Pat and Mike and Biddy.”

“That’ll do ye, now,” said Bridget, putting her arm around the little
man, who pulled at a black pipe. “That’ll do ye, Dominick Tomah-toe.
Off the Bridge is ut? Not while yer own wife’s here to kape hould iv
yer coat-tails. Phat’s that sayin’ ye have about the clouds with the
silver insides? Sure, I know it in Eetalyun when I hear it, but I can’t
say it in English. Phat is it, annyhow?”

He shook his head gravely. “To-day I not-a tink of _proverbi_. My poor
wife, you not-a know how moocha granda troub’ have your Domenico.”

“Arrah, do I not? Mebbe it’s mesilf that knows betther than ye. But
don’t be talkin’ iv the Bridge, Dominick dear, whin ye have so many iv
thim that love ye. Look at us now, will ye? Here’s mesilf, and”--she
went to the door and called--“Pat, Mike, Biddy! Here to your fatther
this minute, and show him the frinds he has.”

Three tousled black heads and bright faces came trooping into the bank.
Signor and Signora Tomato caught them up and covered them with caresses.

“What’s the matter, mah?” asked Mike, the oldest, looking up into his
mother’s tearful eyes.

“Nothin’ at all, Mickey darlint; nothin’ but the warrum weather. Sure
yer fatther’s always downhareted wid the hate, and it’s mesilf that do
be shweatin’ around the eyes. Away wid yez now; back to yer play, me
jewels, but kape forninst the shop.”

“I can’t play any good,” said Mike glumly.

“And why not?”

“’Cause Paddy’s got the roller-skate.”

Bridget swallowed the lump in her throat, and could not help thinking
of the affluent past when the babies “was comin’,” and there was a
whole pair of roller-skates in the family.

“Never moind, laddie,” she said, “be a good bye, and ye’ll have the
handle iv the feather duster to play cat with.”

Mike danced for glee, for here was a joy hitherto tasted only in
dreams. Ever since its detachment from the worn-out feathers the handle
of the duster had been used as a rod of correction, often raised in
warning but rarely brought down upon a naughty Tomato.

“Me want somethin’,” said little Biddy, an eloquent plea in her big
black-walnut eyes, while Mike made off with the precious stick.

“Iv coorse ye do, me ruby, and somethin’ foine ye’ll have, be the Lord
Alexander! Here, take ye this, and go beyandt to Signory Foli and buy
the best bit iv wathermelyun she has on the boord. Moind ye get it
ripe, and tell the signory if she gives ye annything else I’ll be down
there and pull the false wig off her. Away wid ye now, and come back
with the rind.”

She had reached in the window and taken from a very small collection
of coins one cent. Her husband witnessed the act of rash extravagance
without even a look of reproach, which argued that the crisis in the
bank’s affairs had driven him to an unwonted mood. Presently Biddy
bounded into the room bearing a thin watermelon rind on which scarcely
a trace of the red remained. Bridget took it, and while her offspring
stood as though used to the treatment, rubbed it over her face with
loving care, thus affirming the Neapolitan tenet that the watermelon
is thrice blessed among fruits, for with it one eats, drinks, and
washes the face. The maternal apron applied as a towel, Biddy broke
away and made for Paradise Park, where she was soon romping with other
tangle-haired youngsters around the band stand.

After a brief silence, during which Pat had shot by the door on the
roller skate, Signor Tomato remarked, jerking his thumb toward the
headless Jack Tar:

“To-day I am feel lik-a him--no head, no northeen. For God sague, me,
I’m go crezzy.”

“Bad luck to the hoodoo, annyhow,” said Bridget, shaking her red fist
at the mutilated relic of a once noble though wooden manhood. “It’s the
Jonah iv a sailor y’are iver since we bought ye from the Dootchman,
sorra the day. Phat am I at all at all, that I didn’t take the axe t’ye
long ago? Be the powers, it’s not too late yit, and I’ll do it this
minute. Betther the day betther the deed, for there’s not a shtick in
the house agin the fire for the dinner soup.”

In rough-and-tumble wrestling fashion she seized the sailor, laid him
low, and dragged him over the curb to the roadway. Then she bustled
into the bank, and quickly reappeared armed with a rusty axe of long
handle. And while Signor Tomato looked on, his face a picture of rising
doubt and fluttering hope, and passing women set down loaded baskets
from their heads to gaze in voluble wonder, Bridget brought the Jack
Tar’s long-suffering career to an ignoble end.

“Mike, Pat, Biddy!” she cried, resting on the axe when the task was
finished. “Come you here and carry in the wood.”

She had left no part of the structure intact save the platform and
wheels. These she kept for Pat to play with. “It’ll do him for a
wagon,” she reflected; “then Mike can have the shkate all to himsilf.”

The banker’s spirit was utterly broken, else he would never have
permitted without verbal protest at least this outrage upon his old
silent partner.

“Ees-a one old friend no more,” he mused sadly, looking at his wife
and shaking his head. “I’m don’ know eef-a you do right.” Then in his
native patter he quoted the Neapolitan saw: “Who breaks pays, but the
fragments are his.”

[Illustration: Jack Tar’s ignoble end.]

“Glory be!” shouted Bridget. “Sure ye’re betther already. It’s the
furst provairb I’m afther havin’ from yer this day. Arrah, don’t
bother about that owld divvil iv a wooden man. No friend iv the family
was he, Dominick dear, and it’s mesilf that knows it. Not a sup iv good
luck had we from him in the five year he stood forninst the dure. Wisht
now, lave us look for betther toimes now that his bones bes blazin’
under the black pot.”

Scarcely had she finished speaking when the postman stepped up and put
a letter in Signor Tomato’s hand--a message that heralded an instant
change of fortunes. The banker’s eyes bulged and he grew more and more
excited as he read. “Phat is it, annyhow?” asked Bridget, but he was
too absorbed to answer. Not till he had come to the end did he tell her
the contents. The letter bore the postmark of Jamaica, Long Island, and
was dated two days after Bertino’s flight and a week before the day set
for the wedding of Juno and Signor Di Bello:

 EMINENT SIGNOR TOMATO: You remember what I told you touching the bust
 of the Presidentessa. Well, it is still in Dogana [customhouse]. I
 send another letter in this, the letter of my friend the sculptor. Oh,
 I am so sorry! On his letter I have written that they shall give it
 to you. This will make them give it to you if you want it. I can not
 pay the tax, and my friend must not wait so long for nothing, because
 I think it will be a long time before I shall take it, and I have so
 much trouble, such grand disturbances. He is as fine a sculptor as
 any in Italy, my word of honour. Now, you take the bust from Dogana
 and you make money with it, to become his agent in America, like I
 intended. You do right by my friend and you will not lose. He will
 make more busts and you can sell them. He is Armando Corrini, of
 Cardinali, province of Genoa. If you do not reclaim the bust from
 Dogana, write it to him, because I will not write again to you, and
 neither you nor any one else will know where I am.
                                              BERTINO MANCONI.

“_Bravissimo!_” cried Signor Tomato, the grand possibilities of the
writer’s suggestion unfolding before his mind. “My dear wife, I’m blief
you right for chop-a de Jack-a Tar. You know de proverbio: When ees-a
cast out de devil ees-a come down de angelo.”

“And where’s the angel, I dunno?” asked Bridget.

“Ah, you no see northeen. Ees here, in de lettera. Angel ees-a Bertino
Manconi. He send-a good news.”

“Ho-ho! The laddybuck that putt the knife in his uncle. Sure it’s the
furst toime iver I knew angels carried stilettos.”

“Wha’ differenza dat mague?” Fired with a new purpose, the banker was
himself again, and spoke with spirit. “Maybe he goin’ know wha’ he’s
about. For me dat ees-a northeen. Ees-a de statua--de Presidentessa
I’m tink about. You know wha’ dat ees? Guess-a not. Well, I’m tell-a
you. Ees-a var fine, I’m know. Dees-a Bertino he ees-a been show me
de lettera from de Dogana. It say he moost-a pay one hoon-dred and
forty dollar. Ah, moost-a be sometheen stupendo. Tink I’m goin’ mague
moocha mun by dees-a statua, and de next-a one he mague ees de King of
Tammany Hall. How moocha you tink I’m sell-a him? Ah! fine, fine! De
Presidentessa, maybe I’m sell-a her to de Presidente. Who know? Guess-a
Signor Tomato he ees-a rich-a mahn, he sell-a so many statua to de
grandi signori of America.”

The more his eager fancy played about the bust the bigger grew the
fortune to which it seemed the stepping stone. From its siren lips
there flowed a far-off subtile song, which bade him do and dare, go
forth and possess, and by that token end his long night of poverty in
a glorious dawn of riches. And with gaining allure came the oft-sung
refrain: “The devil cast out, an angel descends; the devil cast out,
an angel descends.” Surely it was a fulfilment of that fine proverb,
so wise with the wisdom of Naples’s centuries. No eye could see, no
ear catch, a plainer truth. The Jack Tar, devil of bad luck, not only
cast out, but, grace to the strong arm and inspired axe of Bridget,
dead for evermore. And the bust was the descending angel. Yes; he
would obey the voice of Heaven’s courier and take the Presidentessa
from the customhouse, though it asked every _soldo_ in the window. La
Presidentessa! The First Lady of the Land? _Dio magnifico!_ And to him,
Domenico Tomato, had fallen the matchless honour of presenting this
great work of art to the American people! Not an hour must be lost. To
the Dogana at once and release the angel of wealth.

Bridget had the best of reasons for lacking faith in her husband’s
business projects, so she set her face and tongue stoutly against this
proposed adventure into the field of fine art. To her bread-and-butter
view it meant a leap into starvation. She knew he could not meet the
customs demand of a hundred and forty dollars save by paying out every
piece of money that was on exhibition in the window--by parting
with the bank’s entire capital. In stirring figures she pictured the
distress and ruin that he was going to court. But to no purpose. From
the outset it was clear that her Hibernian substance would not prevail
against his Italian shadow. Even while she begged him for the sake
of the “childer” to desist, he went about gathering up the money. He
untied the sham packages, and from the top of each picked off the one
real bank note and threw the sheaf of blank slips under the little
counter. Then into a chamois bag he swept the large heaps of coppers,
the small heap of silver, and the very few gold coins that were in the
collection. “Who nothing dares, nothing does,” he quoted grandly, as he
pocketed the money, and made for the door.

“The howly Patrick forgive ye,” said Bridget, following him to the
street. “Ivry cint betune yer family and the wolf! Worra, worra,
Dominick Tomah-toe, ye’ll rue this day whin they’re singin’ at yer
wake.”

“Oh, ees-a better you goin’ shut up,” returned the banker, in a tone
meant to be gentle and reassuring. “Ees-a whad for you mague so moocha
troub? I’m tell-a you ees-a better you goin’ shut up. Why? ’Cause you
not understand de beautiful art-a. Good-a by, my dear wife. When I’m
com-a back I’m show you sometheen var fine.”

He went to a rival banker and turned all his Italian money into
American. Then he borrowed a push-cart and worked his way at great
peril among the trucks and cable cars to the seat of customs. It took
all day to unwind the red tape that bound the bust, and the clerks
counted it a capital joke to watch the half-frantic little Italian
tearing from one window to another in search of the proper authority.
Darkness had fallen when, with the big case on his cart, he pushed
into Mulberry and stopped before the broken bank. At the door sat
Bridget with her knitting, and Pat, Mike, and Biddy were romping on the
sidewalk.

“Ees-a var heavy de Presidentessa,” he said, tapping the box. Bridget
sprang up and lent him the aid of her sinewy arms. Full of wonder, the
children followed them with their burden into the bank. With a finger
on his lip, Signor Tomato turned the key in the lock and covered the
window so that outsiders might not look in.

“Ees-a grand secret-a,” he whispered; “moost-a see nobodee.”

By the dim light of an oil lamp he set to work with cold chisel and
hammer ripping off the lid of the case. When he had lifted out the
precious one, removed the wrapping paper from her face, and set her up
on the counter, he stepped back to feast his eyes.

In the first moment of the awful disillusion, it seemed to Bridget
that her little man had lost his reason. He had seen portraits of the
President’s wife, and after looking steadily a moment the desolate
truth darted upon his consciousness that the bust was not of her. It
possessed not a single point of likeness. To the turn-up nose of Juno
the sculptor had granted no touch of poetry, and it stood forth in
all the cruel realism of coldest marble. While the terrified children
clung to their mother’s skirts, Signor Tomato thrashed about the shop,
beating his temples with loosely closed fists and crying, “Woe is me,
woe is me!” He would not be comforted, nor could Bridget quiet him to
the degree of telling her the cause of his mad goings-on until she
caught him by the arm and commanded that he be a man and tell her his
trouble. God had gone back on him, he said, and the world had reached
its end. To-morrow there would be no Domenico Tomato.

“Look-a, look-a!” he cried, pointing to the bust tragically. “Dat-a
face! O, for God sague! Dat ees-a not de Presidentessa!”

“What! It’s not the Furst Lady iv the Land?”

“No, no; ees-a de last lady, I’m tink. Ees-a lost evrytheen.
_Misericordia!_ What I’m do now?”

Bridget thought bitterly of the proverb about the angel descending when
the devil is out, but she had no heart just then to twit her husband by
a sarcastic recital of it, although the tempter put the words on her
tongue. But she could not hold back an angry thrust at Bertino, who
rose now in black relief as the author of their present and greatest
trouble. At sound of his betrayer’s name the banker became calm. He
stood silent a moment, and then, with upraised fists tightly clinched,
swore that Bertino’s blood should answer. Then he took up again his
wild lamentation, railing against heaven and earth. He went over the
whole catalogue of his disasters, and closed with the news to Bridget
that for three months not a nickel of shop rent had been paid. He had
staked his all on the Presidentessa, and now that she had proved false
they had no place to lay their heads.

Bridget treated herself to a flood of tears, and the children kept
her company. All at once Signor Tomato stopped wailing, and startled
her by saying resolutely that they must all leave Mulberry--right
away, that very night. His dear wife need give herself no care as to
their destination. Enough that her loving husband, with an eye on
the trickster Fate, had always kept a refuge in the country--a place
of shelter for his family whereof he had never spoken. It was not
far. They could load their household stuff on the push-cart still at
the door, and be off under cover of the night. In the sweet country
perhaps their fortune would change. After all, it was good to fly from
Mulberry, out to the free meadows, amid trees and flowers, where birds
sang, and one could see the big gold moon hanging over the fields for
hours and hours. Some picture of his fatherland had flashed in his
vision, and Bridget, catching the buoyancy of it, offered a “Glory be!”
for the chain of events that was to lift her out of “Ghinnytown.”

“Arrah,” said she meditatively, “maybe it was an angel, afther all.”

“Ah, yes; who knows?” he said in Neapolitan, and she knew a proverb was
coming: “Chance is the anchor of hope and the tree of abundance.”

Their poverty brought its blessing in the fact that they were able to
crowd all their worldly holdings--not forgetting the bust and Mike
and Pat and Biddy--into a single load of the push-cart. The puzzle
of bestowing the children so that they might be comfortable enough
to sleep during the long journey at hand was a teasing one. But
the Tomatoes were equal to it, though it called out all the genius
for _multum in parvo_ of which experience had made them masters.
What bedding they owned was spread on the bottom of the cart, and
the furniture so stacked as to form a low arch, beneath which the
youngsters crept with shouts of glee. A bed not made up on the floor
had played no part in their happy lives, and this sally abroad in the
darkness and open air seemed a much better thing than huddling in the
cote back of the nankeen sail, where Bridget kept her doves at night.
While the parents moved back and forth, carrying the remaining odds and
ends and finding a place for them on the cart, anxious treble voices
issued from the load:

“Mah, did yer put in the skate?”

“Don’t fergit der duster handle.”

“Where’s der Jack Tar wagon?”

“Say, Biddy’s gone ter sleep.”

At last Domenico locked the door, and with Bridget by his side at the
shafts, began the exodus from Mulberry, first stopping to shake his
fist at the scene of his downfall and observe:

“I’m no dead-a yet, you bet-a!”

“Dead is it?” said Bridget, as she put her strength to the crossbar.
“Sure it’s yersilf’ll live manny a day to wink at the undertaker.”

It was smooth going over the asphalt of Bayard and Mulberry Streets,
and silently the strange caravan trundled along. San Patrizio tolled a
late hour for that quarter of early-rising toilers--eleven o’clock--and
the sidewalks, which had swarmed with buzzing life earlier in the
night, now gave back the echo of but a few heavy footfalls. From
Paradise Park the wooing children of Italy had departed to their homes,
leaving the benches to all-night lodgers of other climes. Passing the
Caffè Good Appetite, the Tomatoes were startled by a mighty chorus of
“bravoes” and “vivas,” followed by the clink of wineglasses. It was
Signor Di Bello and his boon comrades. The merchant had just announced
his betrothal and coming marriage to Juno.




CHAPTER XVI

THE LAST LADY UNMASKED


DAWN began to show the shapes of things an hour after the Tomato outfit
had left the environs of Jamaica and struck into a gravel-strewn byway
that followed the Long Island Railroad. All night the banker and his
faithful helpmeet had pushed the cart through a country sparsely
settled in places, but always with a good road under the wheels. Now
they had reached the last stage of their journey, and the little
passengers, who had fallen asleep on the ferryboat crossing the East
River, began to open their eyes. Mike was first to crawl out from under
the furniture, and Pat and Biddy appeared soon afterward. They were
allowed to get down and stretch their legs, which they did by frisking
ahead of the cart and dancing for pure joy at finding themselves in
a new and beautiful world. Never before had they seen a piece of
Nature larger than the lawn of Paradise. In the delight and wonder of
beholding the gloried east they almost forgot to be hungry, but did
not, and presently set up a cry for breakfast. Bridget told them they
would have to wait until the villa was reached, which would be in a
little while, her husband said. Their route now lay directly over the
pipe line of the Brooklyn aqueduct, the manhole caps of which projected
from the ground at intervals of a hundred yards. To the north and east
stretched a level countryside, covered in spots with oaks of scrubby
growth. From the low thicket a quail now and then blew his shrill
whistle, to the deep bewilderment of the gamins of Mulberry. They would
scamper after the mystery and thrash the bushes for it, only to hear
the piercing note elsewhere, when the bird had flown away.

At last Signor Tomato, who had been peering anxiously into the
distance, pointed ahead and exclaimed:

“Be praised de Madonna! Ees-a dere! ees-a dere! Now ees-a all right
evrytheen.”

“Phat’s there?”

“De villa Tomato. Ees-a var fine. You not see?”

“Upon me sowl I see nothin’ but two big black things that do look like
whales.”

Domenico put on a grin and said:

“Ah, my dear wife, moosta tell you de trut honesta. I’m been mague lill
fun. Deesa villa she no ees-a joosta der same lika de housa. Ees-a not
mague of wood; but you wait-a, some time I’m show you how ees-a nice
and cool-a de iron when ees-a cover wit leaves. Pietro Sardoni he been
liv-a here, and he lik-a var mooch, I’m blief.”

“Phat d’yer mane at all at all? Is it not a house ye’re takin’ us to,
thin? What is it, annyway? Howly wafer! Pipes!”

They had drawn near enough for her to distinguish two black iron pipes
of the largest size used for underground conduits. Though they seemed
much smaller from that distance, each was twelve feet long with an
interior diameter of five feet. They lay side by side, as they had been
left by the builders of the aqueduct.

“Moosha, moosha,” she went on, but not relaxing her effort at the
shafts, “it’s far down in the worruld y’are now, Bridget O’Kelly, and
yer father’s own third cousin coachman to the Lord Mayor iv Dublin!”

“My dear wife, moosta forgive your husband; ees-a got northeen better.
De proverbio he say: One who is contented has enough.”

The strip of green that crowned the margin of the railroad cut was
spangled with bright yellow, and, his eye lighting on it, Signor Tomato
said, by way of a comforting crumb to Bridget:

“Look! Guess-a we goin’ mague plenta mon here pickin’ dandelion salad.”

One of the youngsters had heard the talk about the pipes, and, telling
the others, all three ran ahead to investigate. After a peep into one
of the huge tubes they came trooping back in a state of fright.

“Somebody in our pipe, pah!” said Mike.

“A big man; guess he’s dead,” from Pat.

It had never struck Domenico’s fancy that the water pipes whereon he
had counted for a final refuge might become a château in Spain because
of some rival claimant to their shelter.

“_Gran Dio!_ More trouble!” he whined, and bundled through the grass to
see for himself, while Bridget trudged on with the cart, the children
close at her heels. Stooping, he peered into one of the pipes, rose
again quickly, threw up his arms, brandished his open hands, bent
again, and put his head into the mouth of the iron cavern. Then he
sprang up and shrieked:

“It is he! By the blood of St. Januarius, _his_ blood shall pay!”

From the deep pocket of his threadbare coat he drew a heavy-bladed
clasp knife, jerked it open, and the next instant would have tried its
steel on the awakened figure in the pipe but for Bridget, who caught
both his arms from behind and pinioned them in able style.

“Is it bloody murther yer’d be addin’ to all the rest, Dominick
Tomah-toe,” said she, tightening her grip, while the little man
struggled and profaned the canonized host. “Phat the divil’s the manin’
iv it, annyhow?”

“Let-a go! You hear? Let-a go, I’m tell-a you! Look in de pipa and you
see ees-a what for. Guess-a you goin’ want kill too.”

At this point a well-thatched head stuck out of the pipe, and the
drowsy eyes of a man on his knees looked up wonderingly at the group of
Tomatoes. It was the face of Bertino Manconi.

“Ah-ha! Now you see what for I’m go kill. Let-a go, I’m tell-a you!”

“Aisy now, me darlint. No, no; I’ll not lave you go yit awhile; not
till that ghinny fire in ye has burnt out a bit. Will ye give me the
knife? Here, lave go iv it--there y’are. Now ye can use yer fists in
Donnybrook shtyle, and not a worrud from Bridget O’Kelly.”

She had captured the knife. Bertino was on his feet. Tomato moved
toward him with claws outspread.

“See what you have done,” he snarled in the Naples patter. “Famous
joke, _neh_? To rob a poor man of his last cent, that you might have
a bust of your _amorosa_--some good-for-naught of a woman! A-h-h! A
famous joke! But you shall pay. Oh, woman, give me that knife.”

“Phat ails yer fists?”

“You are a fool,” broke out Bertino, and the banker jumped at him, but
did not strike. “A fool, I say. You talk much and say nothing. What is
it about the bust? Tell me. Can’t you see I am hungry to know? What has
become of it? Is it a fine likeness of the Presidentessa?”

“Presidentessa!” sneered the banker, and Bridget echoed the word in
like contempt.

“Yes. Beautiful, _neh_?”

The banker waved the back of his hand beneath his chin in token that
he was not to be fooled. “You are a great innocent. Yes; but you can’t
play off on me. You know it is not the First Lady of the Land.”

“Not the Presidentessa?”

“No, you thief!”

“For the love of the bright Saints, who is it?”

“Bah! You know.”

“I swear I do not. It was a picture of the Presidentessa that I sent to
the sculptor. Maria! Has Armando made the wrong woman? Where is it?”

“Here.”

In a jiffy the furniture atop of it was removed and the boxed marble
set on the ground. When the paper had been torn off and the face of
Juno stood revealed in the morning’s first flush Bertino was on hands
and knees before it.

“Holy Madonna of Grace!” he shrieked, and got up covering his eyes and
turning away. “It is too much, too much!”

“Who is it?” asked Bridget and Domenico in concert.

“My wife!”

“Arrah, now I know the mug iv it!” cried Bridget in triumph. “Sure that
pug nose has been dancin’ in me brain like a nightmare since iver I
seen it in the bank. She’s noane other than the singer I seen in the
Caffè of the Bella Siciliana the day ye was writin’ at the table. Do ye
moind?”

She spoke in Signor Tomato’s jargon, tinctured freely with dashes of
her mother brogue.

“Yes,” Bertino answered; “it was on that day she promised to be my
wife, and that day I wrote the letter to Armando and put in a picture
of the First Lady.”

“Be the same token, ye did nothin’ iv the koind, for it’s mesilf that
remimbers seein’ her take out that pictoor when ye ran to the dure at
her biddin’, and putt another wan in its place. Then it was she putt in
her own ugly mug and ruined the hull iv us. Sure anny blind man can
see it now wid half an eye. Worra, worra, why didn’t I know what it
mint at the toime!”

“I will kill her,” Bertino said in a low voice, and Signor Tomato
dropped wearily on the ground. It was the moment for a soul-thrilling
proverb, but the apt one would not come, and he eased his feelings with
the poor makeshift, “He who goes slow goes safe” (_Chi va piano va
sano_).

No impolite questions were put to Bertino concerning the affair that
had necessitated his sudden exit from Mulberry, nor did Bertino
give any hint of his belief, inspired by Juno’s ruse, that Signor
Di Bello had been laid low. Had not the ethics of Mulberry rendered
the knife-play and the names of all concerned a forbidden subject,
they could have told him that his uncle was up and about and cracking
walnuts in his usual form. But the _vendetta_ is sacred, and Bridget,
itching as she was to discuss the murderous attempt, was too much
Italianized to venture upon that hallowed ground. Aided by their
knowledge of Signor Di Bello’s admiration for Juno, however, the
Tomatoes were easily able to understand why Bertino had risen to the
assertion of a husband’s rights under the law of the stiletto.

When Bertino told them he had slept in the pipe every night since his
hasty departure from the city, the banker, with an expansive grace that
atoned handsomely for the insult of attempting to slay him, begged him
to remain a guest at Villa Tomato. They were not quite settled in their
summer home, to be sure, but in a few minutes they would be prepared to
serve breakfast. The formality ended here, for one and all they fell to
the task of putting their house in order. First the clamour of Mike,
Pat, and Biddy was silenced by issuing to each a large chunk of coarse
bread, with the command that they go at once and gather dry twigs for
firewood. The urchins returned quickly with the stock of bread greatly
diminished, but the store of firewood not much increased. Meantime
Signor Tomato and Bertino had set up the stove, and fitted a sheet-iron
chimney to the end of the pipe that was to serve as kitchen and
parlour. Bridget soon had a fire crackling, though it tried her back
somewhat stooping as she moved from the parlour door to the kitchen.
But she did not grumble. Her heart warmed with womanly response to the
blessing of a home, lowly as it was, and she stirred inside and out of
the pipe with a jollity of temper that bespoke the halcyon days of the
babies.

The Last Lady, as they now called the wicked bust, had swallowed all
but a dollar or two of the bank’s capital, but for what remained
to give them a new start Bridget was full of thanksgiving. She had
rationed the outfit with a small supply of codfish, with which to make
the indispensable Neapolitan _baccalà_; a generous measure of the cheap
but enduring lupine beans, some bacon, red onions, and a half dozen
loaves of secondhand bread. So well had she managed the finances that
a balance of forty-seven cents was left in the treasury. Soon after the
blue smoke began writhing from the chimney she had a pot of soup on
the stove, and hungrily Domenico and Bertino busied themselves in the
current of its gustful odour. They brought leafy boughs from the scrub
oaks and fashioned them thickly atop and beside both wings of the iron
villa to shield it from the sun’s fire. They made it look like a mound
of the plain grown with tangled greenery and pierced by two grottoes
straight and smooth as arrow shafts. Of the pipe not used as a kitchen
they devised a dormitory, and placed therein the Last Lady, first
swathing her tenderly in paper and putting her back in the casing of
pine wood. For doors the nankeen sail was made to serve a new turn, but
not without a throe of sorrow did the banker cut it in parts and fasten
them to the ends of the pipes.

The first meal cooked in the villa scullery was a triumph for
Bridget’s art. Never in all her Mulberry days had she produced a
better _minestrone_. Bertino was asked to a seat at the table, which
consisted of a piece of oilcloth spread on the ground. While they sat
like tailors in a circle spooning their thick soup from tin plates and
munching the secondhand bread, a bobolink and his wife, drawn by the
human habitation, dashed above them, weighing the question of becoming
neighbours:

            “...Now they rise and now they fly;
    They cross and turn, and in and out, and down the middle
         and wheel about,
    With a ’phew, shew, Wodolincon; listen to me, Bobolincon!”

At length they dropped in the high grass not many yards away, and
began laying the foundation for their house, undaunted by the trio of
natural nest burglars whose wondering eyes and ears had taken them in.
But Mike, Pat, and Biddy never discovered the pale-blue egg that soon
lay there; and in the days that followed, when the other Tomatoes and
Bertino were afield gathering dandelion leaves, and Bridget sat with
her knitting at the kitchen door, the rollicking song of these trustful
neighbours was often the only sound that enlivened the desolate moor.

When Saturday morning came, and the push-cart was heaped high with the
esculent herbs, Signor Tomato said to Bridget:

“Guess ees-a better I’m goin’ to de cit for sell-a de salata. See how
moocha! Moosta have tree dollar for dat.”

“Sure,” said Bridget, and away he started with their first load of
produce for market. Bertino helped him push as far as Jamaica; then
he went to the post office to inquire for the letter that Juno had
promised to write telling him the result of his uncle’s wound. There
was no letter for him. He had made up his mind to get away from America
somehow should the death of Signor Di Bello make him a murderer, but
he thirsted for an accounting with Juno in the matter of the bust. His
wife had deceived him, and the canons of _vendetta_ left him only one
course. At the same time he saw that he was in Juno’s power, and for
the present must do naught to fan her wrath. She knew his hiding place,
and could deliver him to the man-hunters of the Central Office. What
a simpleton he had been to tell her! Had his heart not warned him all
along that she did not love him? Well, he was blind no more. He would
wait, and if his uncle died, Australia or any other land would do for a
refuge, but he would not quit America until he had collected from Juno
the debt she owed him and the poor sculptor whom her treachery would be
sure to send to a madhouse.

As he trudged back to the pipes it occurred to him that there would
be fine lyric justice in a measure of vitriol well thrown at the face
that poor Armando’s marble so faithfully depicted. But to this form of
payment he quickly said no; smooth, lean steel, tried and true, was the
best friend of the _vendetta_.

When Signor Tomato reached Mulberry the day was spent, and the market
minstrels had begun their songs. It was no easy work for him to find
a place at the curbstone wherein he could squeeze and join the long
line of Saturday-night venders who filled the air with their ditties.
In the weary solitude of his journey from Jamaica he had had ample time
to plagiarize an ancient market couplet, so that when he began to offer
his wares he was able to do so in the manner of a veteran:

    “Dandelion, tra-la-la, dandelion, tra-la-lee;
    Buy him and eat him, and lusty you’ll be!”

The people marvelled at beholding the banker in his new rôle, but they
bought of his stock, and the first venture of Villa Tomato in the world
of commerce was a resplendent success.




CHAPTER XVII

THE FALCON SAVES THE DOVE


“MARIANNA!”

It was the austere voice of Carolina, and a love scene behind the
second-cabin smoking room came to an abrupt close. Though it was not
the first stolen meeting with Armando that she had broken up during
the voyage, Carolina had never told the girl that she must shun other
suitors because of a husband already chosen for her in New York.
Profiting by her experience as a meddler in the love affairs of others,
she had deemed best to conceal her matrimonial plans for Casa Di Bello
until it should be too late for Marianna to defy her wishes. Not until
the final day of the passage, therefore, did she let out the cat. Then
she pictured to the girl the splendid future prepared for her as the
wife of Signor Di Bello, the merchant prince of Mulberry.

“But I am promised to Armando,” said Marianna. “How can I marry any one
else?”

“Bah! A poor devil whom you would have to feed. You will never see
him again. In America he will soon forget you and find another
_amorosa_. With my brother for a husband you will be a signora--as fine
a lady as any in America. We have many pigs in Mulberry. With this
good-for-naught sculptor you would soon be one of them.”

“He is as good as any one else--even your brother. Anyhow, I love him.”

The hour had come for Carolina to assert her power. “Love him!” she
snapped. “What if you do? Will love put meat in your soup? You are
_matta_ [crazy]. Perhaps I shall find a way to give you reason. Do you
think you would like to be homeless in that?”

The ship was nearing the Battery, and Carolina pointed toward the New
York shore. With deep satisfaction she perceived that the girl’s spirit
quailed before the awful vastness of the city. Presently Marianna
caught sight of Armando coming from the companion way with his poor
little valise, which she knew contained all his worldly goods. What if
she defied her aunt, and cast her fortunes at once with him? No. She
could not add to his burden. But need she do so? Could she not rather
be a help? Toil had been ever her lot. She could not remember when she
had not worked away her days--until, until Aunt Carolina had taken
her up, had provided her with fine clothes, and made her live like a
signora. No matter; she would rather be poor and work for Armando. But
New York! That great monster crouching there in its Sunday nap, and
sending lazy curls of steaming breath from its thousands of snouts! It
was that they would have to dare--to fight that!

“You are a ninny to stand there in doubt--to think of doing anything
but what I say,” Carolina went on. “See the clothes I have bought you.
Do you know what I paid in Genova for that dress, that hat, those
shoes? Well, I paid sixty _lire_, not counting the buttons and lining.
But what can one expect from a silly girl? I buy you fine clothes, I
bring you to America in second class like a signora. I offer you a
signore for a husband, with a beautiful house to live in. But you, the
goose, say you like better to dress in rags, to have a beggar for a
husband, to starve, to live in the streets; for into the streets you
go, remember, if you continue to play the fool.”

Carolina was no stranger to the lotus that gives languor of conscience
toward means when the end cries for attainment. Moreover, her present
mood was bordering desperation. The mishap that laid her low for so
many months had worn off her veneer of placidity, and she returned to
America much the same galvanic Italian that she was the day she first
set foot in Castle Garden--the Carolina of pre-churchly days, who
flared up and left her brother’s roof after a quarrel over watermelons,
and put herself under holy orders. Unluckily for her peace of mind,
while she lay a prisoner in the mountains waiting for broken bones to
knit, she had received advices regularly concerning affairs at Casa Di
Bello--especially affairs matrimonial. The letters were in the fine
hand of the public writer of Mulberry, but the message they bore came
from Carolina’s faithful ally, Angelica. In her zeal to serve, the cook
only added wormwood to her mistress’s cup of gall, for her missives
always told darkly of some would-be wife threatening the castle. The
last letter had spoken with maddening vagueness of a crisis surely at
hand, and Carolina’s instinct told her that the crisis was Juno. For
this reason she had sailed a week before the day given her brother as
the one of her intended departure. How could she remain supine in Genoa
when Casa Di Bello stood menaced with an invasion that meant ruin
to her fond designs? With Juno driven back, Carolina saw the battle
won, for she had no doubt at all of her power to mould the will of a
lovelorn maid. She was guilefully confident that there would arise no
balk to her plans through Marianna’s refusal to be wived by Di Bello,
for, with a subtilty deep set in her nature, she had counted from the
outset, other arguments failing, that she should persuade the damsel
in the end by the homely device of threatening to turn her adrift.
Wherefore, having begun the assault, and observing that this line of
tactics had melted Marianna to a thoughtful silence, she followed it
up while they crossed the ferry from Hoboken, seated in a cab, their
luggage on top. As they rolled over the cobbles of the lower East
Side and the warm breath of May entered the window, Carolina gave
her picture of a girl homeless and starving in the big city many a
convincing touch. At Broadway, chance came to her aid with an object
lesson. There was a cable-car blockade, and while the cab waited,
a haggard woman, young but aged by vice and want, put her open hand
into the window. Carolina drove her away with an angry word and a
contemptuous stare.

“You see how one treats beggars in New York,” she said to Marianna,
whose colour had all gone. “You would be like that if I shut the door
on you. Who do you think would feed you if I turned you out?”

Marianna looked upon the strange faces that passed by, and something
she saw there--or the lack of something--in the eyes of her
fellow-beings struck fresh terror to her soul, and the tears came. “Oh,
where is Armando?” she asked herself, sobbing. Why had he left the ship
without her? It was all his fault. He should have taken her with him.
He did not love her, and would not care if she did marry Signor Di
Bello. If they had only stayed in Italy--in the mountains, where she
had been so happy! She would have remained if Armando had. She knew
she would, in _spite_ of Carolina. But he, too, was a fool. All was
lost now--their love, their happiness. But for the bust he would have
stayed at home, perhaps--yes, it was the bust! Maledictions upon it and
the First Lady of the Land!

The cab dashed under the roar of an Elevated train. Carolina lay
back in the seat and regarded her charge complacently, with drooping
eyelids. As they turned into Mulberry her face was a symbol of smug
content. She felt certain now of a manageable wife for Casa Di Bello.
But the imperious tug she gave the brass bell handle of Casa Di Bello
sounded the knell of her vivid hopes. The door opened, and she looked
into the awe-struck face of Angelica. With difficulty the cook found
speech for the terrible news: Signor Di Bello gone to church to be
married--and to Juno the Superb! Yes, yes; the Neapolitan pig! At that
very moment they must be standing at the altar of San Patrizio! Oh, the
grand feast that awaited them! See, there was the table all laid! Ah,
such wine, such fruit! All there under the fine white cloth! Soon they
would be back from the church, and the house would be full of guests
eating and drinking, for he had invited the first families of the
Torinesi, Milanesi, and Genovesi, besides many swine from the south.
And all for a Neapolitan pig! _Santissima Vergine!_

Marianna felt that she would like to throw herself at this pig’s feet
and kiss them in the joy of her deliverance, while Carolina gave play
to her rage in a storm of anathema against her brother and the singer.
In the thick of her onset--all rituals of conduct torn to shreds--the
door bell jingled tragically. With bated breath, Angelica turned the
knob, and Carolina struck a pose of disdain in the hallway. As the door
opened a chorus of greetings and happy auguries came from a group of
men and women at the threshold, all in their sprucest Sunday array.
They were the first lot of invited guests, and would have swarmed in,
but Carolina ordered them back.

“We have come to the wedding feast,” they protested. “Signor Di Bello
has bidden us.”

“Begone, you ragabash and bobtail!” said Carolina, and she slammed the
door in their faces.




CHAPTER XVIII

AT THE ALTAR OF SAN PATRIZIO


NEVER did wedding barouche so gorgeous roll over the asphalt of
Mulberry as the one in which Signor Di Bello and his bride rode to
church; and never had the people beheld such an illustrious couple
in nuptial parade. With an overdone mimicry of the princesses and
duchesses she had watched so often driving in the Chiaja of Naples,
Juno sat erect and grand of mien, deigning scarcely a glance to right
or left. Now and then she did smile with a feigned grace, or bow with
mock condescension in response to some wild salvo of “bravoes” shot as
they passed by a _caffè_ from the throats of Signor Di Bello’s boon
comrades. Nor did these salutes meet with a less dignified return from
the bridegroom. His old friends wondered, and avowed that the bubbling
merchant was not himself to-day. And, in truth, for the first time
in his life the signore had put on an air of loftiness and gravity.
No one could say that the radiant creature in purple by his side
surpassed him in grandeur. Perhaps it was the example of Juno, perhaps
the witchery of his looking-glass. An hour before, arrayed in evening
clothes spick and span from the tailor, who had worked overtime, Signor
Di Bello had viewed his mirrored self with much approval and delight.
It was his first dress suit, and the round brow, the bushy hair, and
the King Humbert mustache showed above the broad field of shirt front
in bolder relief and a light that was new to their owner. His facial
likeness to the monarch of Italy had ever been a spring of secret
pride, but not until to-day, when he beheld himself in royal raiment,
had the similitude played him any mental pranks. Fondly he gazed in
the mirror’s verge, and said to himself: “Ah! that is the head of the
king, and the head is on my shoulders.” And it was because the king had
got into that head so badly that Signor Di Bello rode to his wedding
with the stateliness of a royal chief.

At length the plumed steeds turned into the Sicilian quarter, and the
bridal pair could see the Gothic façade of San Patrizio a block away.
At this stage the march lost its triumphal flavour. They had entered
the enemy’s country. Here the dusky women at windows breathed no
auguries of good fortune, and the white-shirted men on the sidewalk,
idling in their Sunday best, had no “bravo” for the distinguished
bridegroom. For about half the distance the Genovese and his Neapolitan
were permitted to pass in respect if not in love. Doubtless this silent
show of bad blood would have continued unbroken till the church portals
were reached, but for the act of a certain earringed fellow who stood
on a low balcony. In the long ago his eyes had seen Humbert, and now
he was struck so hard with the resemblance borne him by the man in the
carriage that, in a voice ringing sharp to a hundred ears, he shouted:

“Long live the king!” (“_Evviva il re!_”)

All within earshot laughed as they saw the aptness of the gibe, and,
while the barouche moved along slowly, a dozen tongues by turns
re-echoed the cry with derisive resonance:

“Long live the king!”

It would have been difficult to tell from the faces of Juno and Signor
Di Bello whether they were pleased or offended.

Among the few who cried out was a young man in black velveteen coat and
flowing cravat. His pallid face was serious, had a puzzled look, and
_his_ “Long live the king!” did not smack of mockery. He fell in beside
the carriage, and kept up with it, though with one hand he lugged a
large valise. Twice he tripped and almost fell in his effort to follow
without taking his eyes off Juno. When the carriage stopped he stood
at the curbstone as though enchained, fascinated by the sight of her,
and stared half in bewilderment as Signor Di Bello with a grand,
knightly grace, helped her to alight. Then he ran ahead, set down his
valise, and stood at the church door. As they passed in, his gaze still
fixed upon her and his hands clasped ecstatically, he exclaimed in a
voice that all could hear;

“O beautiful signora! How happy I am! The marble does not lie!”

“Soul of an ostrich!” gasped Signor Di Bello, clutching the little
silver-tipped horn against the evil eye which he had added to his watch
chain that morning. “What the kangaroo does he mean?”

Juno gave no answer. In the vestibule a mincing sacristan, low of bow
and smiling, came forward to meet the rich merchant and his bride and
conduct them at once to the altar. Already a frail girl in pink and
a hulking fellow clad in new jeans and fumbling his hat were at the
rail receiving a wedlock yoke. In the rear pews sat other wedding
parties, awaiting their turns at the altar--solemn-faced brides and
listless grooms, bridesmaids in gayest feather, best men with red
neckties, aged fathers and mothers half asleep. A stream of opal light
from the clerestory windows fell upon these waiting groups, touching
their coarse faces with a ghastly hue, but adding a mellow beauty to
their cheap finery. It was an hour of silent prayer, yet none the
less a season when marrying and giving in marriage is in full tide
at San Patrizio. Save where the mating couples and their trains were
assembled, every pew contained a row of bowed heads that were covered
with shawls or gaudy kerchiefs--the heads of gaunt-cheeked age whose
lips never ceased moving in prayer, and who looked up at passers-by
with the eyes of a dying dog, side by side with the gleaming teeth and
flashing eyes of swarthy youth. The hush was broken when the priest
asked the names of the pairing men and women. Then his voice was
audible only in the foremost seats. Wedding parties kept arriving.
Always a sacristan met them at the holy-water font, and, with a
monitory finger on his lips, led them to a rear pew. These were the
commoners of Mulberry--the toilers with hod or sweat-shop needle--who
in funereal soberness had come to the church on foot. They could wait.
But for Signor Di Bello and Juno there was no delay. As they passed
up the aisle Juno’s purple satin brushed the rough-shod feet of women
at prayer, prostrate on the floor. A pew had been reserved for them
on the gospel side. When the priest caught sight of Signor Di Bello,
he bustled into the sacristy to put on a different robe. At the same
moment the man of the black velveteen moved up the aisle with quick,
smooth step, and dropped into a pew on the epistle side, well forward,
from which he could turn and watch Juno. Again he fastened upon her the
stare that never flinched. For the first time since she had entered
upon her bigamous adventure she felt a twinge of misgiving. Who was
this fellow with his big eyes always upon her? Some friend of Bertino
aware that she was already a wife? The priest beckoned them before him,
and as they approached the velveteen coat slipped into a seat nearer
the communion rail.

“What is your name?” asked the priest of the bridegroom.

“Giorgio Di Bello.”

“And yours?” of the bride.

“Juno Castagna.”

“A lie! She is the Presidentessa!” It was the staring man. His voice,
loud and high pitched, resounded through the church and brought up
every row of bowed heads. As he spoke the words he arose and left the
pew, and stood close to the three at the balustrade. “She can not be
that,” he went on, heedless of the priest’s upraised hands. “She must
be the Presidentessa.”

Signor Di Bello seemed ready to fall upon the intruder, and the
sacerdotal hand restrained him. Two sacristans hurried up the aisle,
but without danger to praying women, for these were all on their feet
now.

“The Presidentessa, I tell you--I that know so well.” He pointed his
finger at the bride. Juno had winced at first, but now she understood
it all, and knew she was safe for the present. “Did I not make every
line of that face out of the marble? Don’t believe it, father. She is
the Presidentessa. Juno! Oh, no, no! Child of the Mother, not that!
Where is the peacock, if she is Juno?”

By this time the assistants, each holding an arm, had led Armando to
the sacristy, and closing the door, smothered the last part of his
frantic outburst. The priest went on with the ceremony, but every bowed
head in the pews had been lifted and every eye and ear was now alert.

“Giorgio Di Bello, wilt thou take this woman to be thy wife----”

“Stop! In the name of the good God, stop!”

The words were shouted from the rear of the church by Signor Tomato,
who hurried up the aisle, while the three at the altar stood silent,
astounded.

“That woman is already a wife,” the banker continued, puffing as though
he had had a hard run for it. “I swear it by the Madonna of Mount
Carmel. Her husband is alive. Only yesterday I saw him, and you know
what the proverb says: Once a----”

“Silence!” commanded the priest. “This is no place for oaths
or--proverbs.”

“Bah!” Signor Di Bello broke out. “The dog is crazy.”

The priest eyed Juno a moment. “Well, what do you say, signorina?”

“Don’t believe him, padre,” she answered. Then, turning to the banker:
“Stupid one, you do not know what you are saying. It is some other
woman.”

The banker chuckled grimly and nodded his head in mock concurrence.
“Ah, yes; you are right. I do not know you. It was some other woman.
Oh that it had been! But alas! it was you--you, the last lady, and I,
poor wretch, thought you the First Lady--the Presidentessa!”

“The Presidentessa again?” said the priest, bewildered.

“Yes, padre. So it was she tricked us--me and her husband. Some other
woman! _Anima mia!_ Does a man forget the face that has robbed him?
In marble I first saw it, and never has it left me, day or night. Ah,
the trouble, grand trouble it has brought me! Seven hundred liras! All
gone.--But you, Signor Di Bello, are rich. You will pay it back. You
will be grateful; for have I not saved you from this woman? She has
deceived me, she has deceived her husband; but see, I do not let her
deceive you.”

“Go away and mind your own affairs,” said Signor Di Bello, pushing the
banker aside. At the same moment the assistants appeared and would have
thrown the second intruder into the sacristy with the first, but for
the priest. He made a sign for them to desist; then he ordered them
to drive back and out of the church the women, girls, and men who were
crowding before the altar. When at last the doors were closed and the
hubbub without had become a faint murmur, the priest said:

“You must wait for a week, Signor Di Bello. Then, if I find that all is
well, you may come back and I will marry you.”

“Bravo!” cried the banker.

“Silence! Come to me Tuesday with the man you say is this woman’s
husband.”

“_Si_, padre,” said the banker. “I shall be here.”

Juno took the happening more seriously than Signor Di Bello did. “What
matters it if two crazy donkeys do wag their tongues?” he said, on
the way down the aisle to the door. “You are mine, and nothing else
matters. In a week we shall laugh at these meddlers--the priest as
well.” But Juno knew that the disclosures which the signore did not
believe meant the collapse of her reckless scheme. Plainly the banker
and Bertino had met, and the history of the bust as well as the secret
of their marriage had come out. And they would meet again before
Bertino should receive her letter warning him to fly from the imaginary
danger. In a few hours her husband would know that his uncle not only
lived, but had sought to appropriate his wife. What firebrands of
_vendetta_! Now it was she who should have to fly, else feel the temper
of Bertino’s knife. What a blockhead she had been to put off so long
the writing of that letter! Had she sent it two or three days ago, he
would be far from New York now, perhaps out of America.

When the doors opened for them to pass into the street they found the
church steps thronged with the populace of Mulberry. Word of the doings
at the altar had gone abroad, and the appearance of the brideless
groom and the groomless bride was the signal for a shower of jeers and
derisive greetings. But the signore mustered a bold front and proved
himself worthy of his royal resemblance.

“We shall go to Casa Di Bello,” he said as they entered the carriage,
“and have the wedding feast just as though that noodle of a priest had
not refused to marry you. And why not? It will only be observing the
event a week in advance; for next Sunday the priest will see that these
meddlers have made a fool of him, and he will be glad to marry you to
Signor Di Bello. Now for the diversions of the feast of the marriage.”

He threw off the lid of a large pasteboard box that the driver handed
down and took out a handful of candy beans of many colors, the size
of limas. With them he pelted the people in front of the church, who
put up their hands for protection, and quickly returned wishes of good
luck, for this hail of sweets always comes after the church rites. The
people thought they had been married, after all, which was just the
effect that Signor Di Bello was willing his joke should have. As they
passed the churchyard the signore shouted to a man perched on the wall
to let the nuptial birds go. Next moment there arose three pigeons with
white streamers attached to their legs to insure their recapture; it is
an ill omen for one to gain its freedom. This was a Neapolitan rite in
reverence of the Madonna and the Padre Eterno which Juno had asked for.

They could have turned the corner and driven one block to Casa Di
Bello, whose dormer windows were visible over the monuments of the
graveyard; but the signore, determined that the observance should be
in every respect like that for a genuine wedding, ordered the coachman
to make a tour of Mulberry. Up and down they drove, he showering the
hard and heavy sweets and receiving noisy felicitations all along the
way. He had dropped his regal bearing and was all a-smile now. His old
comrades rejoiced to see that he was himself again.

“See what marriage does for one,” remarked Cavalliere Bruno, the wit of
Caffè Good Appetite. “Our comrade goes forth to the altar like a king,
and comes back like a gentleman.”

But the broad smiles vanished from the signore’s face when they drew
near to Casa Di Bello. Before the door stood a cab on whose top lay
a trunk of ancient pattern that he knew too well. On the sidewalk,
gesturing madly, were the leading families of the Torinesi, the
Milanesi, and the Genovesi, with a scant sprinkling of southern tribes.
They surrounded the barouche and shook their fists at the occupants.
A fine trick, indeed! A joke, perhaps, but not the joke of a signore.
Ask people to a wedding feast, and then have the door slammed in their
faces!

“Oh, misery is mine!” groaned Signor Di Bello, but for a reason more
terrible than the tumult of the barred-out guests. That trunk on the
cab had told him the withering truth. “She is here,” he whimpered, his
courage all gone, and cold despair leaving his arms limp at his side.

“What is amiss?” asked Juno, and the others stopped their hullabaloo.

“You must go to your lodging,” he said.--“Coachman, drive to the
Restaurant of Santa Lucia.--My friends, the wedding feast is postponed
until next Sunday.”

The carriage wheeled about and dashed away, leaving the first families
aching with mystification.




CHAPTER XIX

EVENTS WAIT UPON THE DANDELIONS


IN the quiet of the sacristy the priest listened to the stories
of Armando and the banker, and gained a clear knowledge of Juno’s
fantastic plot to secure a marble portrait and a rich husband. So true
did it all ring that Father Nicodemo saw no pressing need to search
the records of the city’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. He told Signor
Tomato it would be enough that he bring the husband in evidence, and
he, the priest, would see to it that the woman was confronted with
him and the truth drawn from her own lips. The holy man saw in their
timely interruption an act of Providence that had saved San Patrizio
from being the scene of a horrid sin. But to Armando the situation had
nothing to offer of comfort. The work of his life had come to naught.
The bust that was to make him a high figure in the American market had
been turned with cruel suddenness to a bit of unvalued stone. Oh, the
mockery of it! Instead of the First Lady of the Land, he had given his
heart and hand and brain to what?--the Last Lady of Mulberry! To the
sculptor’s plaint the banker added his, and the priest, feeling for
them warmly, and knowing no deed that could help, offered them the
anodyne of words. Fellows in misery, they left the church together,
after Armando had searched for and recovered the valise that he had
flung down, he knew not where, when he followed Juno to the altar. Side
by side they walked through Mulberry, exchanging doleful tales. They
were passing before Casa Di Bello, when Signor Tomato halted abruptly
and said:

“Behold, comrade, the root of all our woe! She wanted to get into that
house. Bertino has told me all. But Fate has beaten her as well as us.
’Twixt the wish and the prize high mountains arise.”

They stood a moment looking up at the windows, when the massive door
swung open, and Marianna, clearing the steps at a bound, threw herself
into the arms of Armando, who, by the lucky chance of having just set
down his burdensome valise, was ready to receive her with equal fervour.

“Joy! Grand joy!” she cried. “He is married, and we are saved.”

“Excuse me,” said the banker. “I will go. _Addio_, my friend; we shall
meet again.”

Muttering a proverb, he made off for the Caffè of the Three Gardens,
where he intended to put up for the night in order to be on hand for
the early morning market and dispose of his remaining dandelions.

“Saved?” said Armando in mournful wonder. “Glory to the Splendid Name,
I have found you--you are left to me, my precious, but all else is
lost. You remember my Juno and the Peacock?”

“The hogs of Genoa had no eyes for its beauty,” she answered.

“Well, I have made another Juno.”

“_Dio!_ What do you mean?”

“The Presidentessa is a Juno.”

They seated themselves on the top stair of the stoop, and dolefully
Armando went over the episode at the church. In a voice that took
flights of passion and with gestures theatric he gave again the cries
of “Long live the king!” that resounded in the Sicilian quarter, and
re-enacted the drama at the altar. Bitterly he told of his delusion
that the haughty woman in the carriage was the Presidentessa, and how
the spell lasted until the sacristans broke it by gripping his arms. He
made known to her a secret that the banker had disclosed to the priest
but had guarded in the presence of Signor Di Bello: Juno’s husband was
Bertino!

So wrapped was Armando in the telling and Marianna in the listening
that neither heard the soft footfall of Aunt Carolina, who had drawn
near and stood at the open door drinking in the delicious narrative.
When he said that the priest had put off the marriage for a week so
that the banker might have time to present his proofs she could repress
her exultation no longer. With an outcry of delight she startled the
young people to their feet.

“Sanctified be the name of Father Nicodemo, and Maria the Spotless
preserve Bertino forever!”

Marianna and Armando stood abashed because detected in the crime of
being together on land after all Carolina’s pains to keep them apart on
shipboard. To his further confusion, she put forth her hand and bade
him enter the house. She would know more of Signor Tomato, this man
who had Bertino in his keeping. Whither had he removed the bust? Where
was Bertino to be found? Armando was able to answer both questions;
also to recite the facts about Bertino’s harmless knife-play upon his
uncle’s shoulder, his flight from the city, and the finding of him by
the banker asleep in a water pipe.

While Armando’s message gave Carolina the elation of promised triumph,
it brought gloom to Marianna. Well the girl read the soul of her
guardian. Surely this sudden revival of Carolina’s spirits had but one
meaning--a return to the scheme of uniting her in marriage with Signor
Di Bello. But the horrid prospect did not strike so much terror to her
soul now, for there dwelt a sweet assurance in the face of Armando,
who was by her side. He would stand between her and this nuptial
danger. She felt a strength equal to a firm repulse of Carolina--a
strength that was lacking two hours before in that awful drive from the
steamship.

For the first time the gristly heart of Carolina pulsed almost warmly
for Bertino. Now he stood forth in white light as the blessed agent who
had kept Juno out of that house--the knight who had slain the dragon
of a threatening wife by marrying her. For once the truth burned into
her consciousness that marriage was a crowning success. Only one more
union--that of her brother and Marianna--and the strife would be over,
her power firmly embedded. She would go to Bertino at once and lend him
the aid he needed; at the same time she would gratify her thirst to
make sure that all was as Armando had recounted.

“To-morrow,” Armando said, “I am going to Jamaica with Signor Tomato.
The signorina could accompany us. Then we shall see poor Bertino
and--my poor marble.”

“Perhaps it shall not prove such a poor marble,” she said, with a look
and nodding of the head that suggested some future act of gratitude for
the helpful service to her cause which the bust had rendered. “When
shall you set off for Jamaica?”

“As soon as Signor Tomato has sold out his dandelions.”

He promised to inform her directly that urgent purpose should be
accomplished and attend her on the journey to Jamaica. But where was
Signor Di Bello? A shuddering dread showed itself in Carolina’s face
as she asked the question, which no one could answer. Had he gone
elsewhere for a priest, and would he return after all with the singer
and that mob of Calabriani, Siciliani, and Napolitani pigs?

At that particular moment her brother was quaffing a glass of his
favourite _barbera_ in the Caffè of the Three Gardens, whither he had
driven to buttress his nerve after setting down Juno at her lodgings.
The ordeal of facing Carolina and explaining matters was one that he
shrank from meeting without due consideration and the aid of vinous
fortitude.

“Courage, my angel,” he had said, as he handed Juno from the carriage.
“On the Feast of Sunday next all will be well. Father Nicodemo will
find that he has been the plaything of idiots, and you shall go with me
to Casa Di Bello.”

Lifting her purple skirts clear of the sidewalk, and taking care that
they did not brush the shabby staircase, Juno climbed to the door of
Luigia the Garlic Woman. To the astonished landlady she observed calmly:

“Signora, I shall need the room for another week.”

“But how is this? You go to church to be married, and you return
without a husband. Body of an elephant! Brides did not so in my day.”

Without making reply Juno went to her little dark room and, removing
the wedding finery, folded the dress with great care, put it in the
trunk, with the yellow boots on top, and closed the lid.

“Maybe I shall need them, after all,” she told herself.

The recollection that her trump card had not been played gave back her
hope of yet entering Casa Di Bello.

The presence of Signor Di Bello, alone and long of face, at the Three
Gardens brought upon his head a rain of banter from a dozen boon
comrades. When the storm of gibes and rib-tickling surmises as to the
cause of his wifeless state had reached its height the form of the
banker darkened the door. Signor Di Bello jumped to his feet, and,
taking the middle of the smoky room, brandished his finger dramatically
at the newcomer.

“There, signori!” he cried, bulging with fury, “there is the dog that
barked away my bride! A meddler, a numskull! He comes from Satan
knows where with a cock-and-bull tale about somebody--Heaven knows
whom--somebody who is the husband of my promised bride. A simpleton of
a priest swallows his story like a forkful of spaghetti, and, presto!
my wedding is put off for a week! By the Egg of Columbus, a fine team
of donkeys!”

“_Infame! infame!_” came from the men at the tables, which resounded
with the blows of their horny fists.

Bridget would have been proud of her Tomato could she have seen him
at this crucial moment. Fine was the scorn with which he looked from
face to face, and, smiling in imperial contempt of the whole company,
dropped into a chair.

“There is a proverb, signori,” he said, “which comes to me at this
moment: Some men heave a sigh when the sun shows his eye.”

“Bah!” roared Signor Di Bello. “Did I not tell you, my friends, that
his head is filled with _polenta_?” (corn-meal mush.)

“And yours has not even _polenta_ in it!” retorted the banker, rising
and clapping his hands close to Signor Di Bello’s face. “If it were not
empty, do you know what you would do? You would thank me for what I
have done to-day. Would you have me tell the name of this husband whom
nobody knows, who comes from Satan knows where? Would you?”

“The name! The name!” from Signor Di Bello and the others.

“Well, his name is Bertino Manconi. Do you know him? No? I will tell
you: he is your nephew. He comes from Genoa. Do you know where that is?
He once put a knife into your shoulder because he caught you playing
the fool with his wife. Do you remember that?”

“Where is Bertino?” asked Signor Di Bello, his voice grave and husky,
every other tongue in the room silenced.

“At my villa in the country. To-morrow you shall see him if you come
with me.”

“I will go with you.”

“Very good. When my dandelions are sold out I shall be at your
disposal.”

It was long past the dinner hour when Aunt Carolina heard the sound
of her brother’s latch-key in the lock. She was in the hall when he
entered. He did not feign surprise at seeing her. They embraced, and
kissed each other on both cheeks.

“You are home a week before I expected you,” he said.

“Yes; I could not leave you alone any longer. Ah! my dear brother, San
Giorgio has watched over us this day.”

“Why?” he asked, though aware that she, like all Mulberry, knew of his
disappointment, and meant his deliverance from Juno.

Carolina answered, pointing to the untouched wedding feast: “We have
many sweets that will not keep. They will be of use to Father Nicodemo
for his poor.”

She could not resist sounding a stealthy note of triumph. A few hours
before he would have answered, “The sweets will keep a week, and then I
shall need them for my wedding feast.” But since the bout with Tomato
his hope had waned steadily, just as the conviction had grown stronger
that the banker’s case against Juno would be proved. Morose of spirit
he sought his bed, sighing as he reflected how ruthlessly the events of
the day had shattered his long-fondled dreams.




CHAPTER XX

A HOUSE DIVIDED


A TRAIN for Jamaica next morning carried four anxious souls from
Mulberry. In one car were Signori Di Bello and Tomato, in another
Carolina and Armando. The banker had agreed to meet Armando at the
country station; but the sculptor had given no hint that he would have
Carolina in company, nor did either of the latter dream of finding
Signor Di Bello with the banker. They all met on the station platform.
At sight of Carolina her brother divined her state of mind. He knew
that her presence meant the first advance of a revived era of meddling
in his love affairs, and with the perversity of the ripe-aged swain he
resented it as stoutly as though his own judgment about woman had not
just been caught soundly napping.

“You have come to see the husband of your brother’s bride, I suppose,”
he said. “You are glad to be near to see me made a fool of, _neh_?”

“No,” she answered; “I seek only the proofs that Casa Di Bello is not
to be disgraced.”

They climbed into a creaky, swaying stage that the banker hired to
convey them to the iron villa.

“It was you that said she was the Presidentessa,” broke out the
signore, eying Armando on the opposite seat. “What the porcupine did
you mean?”

As the decrepit stage squeaked through the village, plunging and
tossing on its feeble springs like a boat in a choppy sea, Armando gave
the history of the Last Lady--the jugglery of the photographs, of which
the banker had told him; his months of fruitless toil on the second
Juno following a year lost on the first.

“Ah, signore,” he added, yielding to a blank sense of desolation,
“surely the evil eye has fallen upon me and I am doomed to fiasco.”

“Body of a rhinoceros!” was Signor Di Bello’s first comment. Then he
added, after an apparent mental struggle with the stubborn truth: “Yes;
she has made grand trouble for you, but you shall not suffer. I will
buy your Juno and the Peacock and--the other Juno, if only to smash it
in a thousand pieces!”

“Will you pay me back the Dogana, signore?” put in the banker, striking
the hot iron. “I too have been ruined by the Last Lady.”

“Excuse me, signore; you are old enough to know better.”

“And so are you,” chirped Tomato, whereat Signor Di Bello held his
tongue.

They had left the village street behind and were tottering over a rude
wagon trail that threaded the thicket of dwarf oaks on whose margin
crouched the dwelling of the Tomatoes. The site of the iron villa was
not far distant, and from its kitchen chimney a spiral of ascending
smoke showed plainly in the sunlight that bathed the flat landscape.
From the railroad cut the muffled roar of a passing train lent a basso
undertone to the squeak and clack of the voluble stage. At length they
struck into the road that borders the railway, and the banker leaned
out of the vehicle and peered ahead, wondering if all were well with
Bridget and the youngsters. As he drew nearer, the deeper became a look
of horror that had come upon his face.

“_Diavolo!_” he exclaimed at last. “A new calamity!”

“What is it?”

“Half of my house is gone.”

One woe-begone pipe was all that he could see of the imposing
double-tubed villa that reclined there so proudly two days before.
Stripped of the foliage that had shielded it and its mate from the
burning sun, it loomed black in ominous nakedness.

Had further evidence of disaster been needful, the countenance of
Bridget would have supplied it abundantly. Like a feminine Marius, she
sat amid the ruins of the Tomato Carthage. Strewn about her in wild
disorder were the twigs of oak that had been so carefully fashioned
over the pipes, mingled with the bedclothes and boxes that had
furnished the interior of the dormitory. The little garden of tomato
plants that had been set out at the back doors bore the vandal marks of
hobnailed boots and was slashed with the tracks of heavy wheels.

“Where’s the other pipe?” shrieked the banker before the stage came to
a stop.

“Howly shamrock, Domenico, is it yersilf? Sure I thought they was
comin’ for the rest iv the house. Where aire ye these two days, and the
worruld comin’ to an ind all around us?”

“No ees-a maka differenza where I’m goin’ be,” he said, jumping down,
followed by Signor Di Bello, Carolina, and Armando. “I ask-a you where
ees-a de oder pipa?”

“Ax the divvil and he’ll tell yer betther, for the ground has opened
and shwalleyed it.”

There was a chorus of whoops at the edge of the brush, and the trio of
juvenile Tomatoes came trooping toward their father.

“What-a kind talk you call-a dees-a?” he said, glaring at Bridget and
pushing away the children fiercely. “I ask-a you, where ees-a de pipa?”

“And I answer that I don’t knaw, Dominick Tomah-toe! Me and the childer
was away beyandt there, pickin’ dandelie-yuns, d’ye moind! Be the sun,
I’m thinkin’ we was gone two hours. Well, whin we got back only the wan
pipe was there, and a cushibaloo made iv the place as ye see it now.”

“And Bertino, where ees-a?”

“Gone wid the pipe.”

“Goin’ weet de pipa?” echoed the others.

“Didn’t I say it?”

“And de bust-a, ees-a where?” asked Signor Di Bello.

“Gone wid the pipe.”

“Bravo!” cried the grocer, who saw the case against Juno crumbling.
Locking his hands behind him, he began to whistle cheerfully, his eyes
on the moving pictures of the sky.

“Shame to you, my brother!” broke out Carolina. Then she took the
witness in hand. “When you have seen-a Bertino--de last-a time, ees-a
when?”

“Airly this mornin’ whin we wint for the dandelie-yuns, me and the
childer here.”

“And he no more coma back?”

“Divvil a hair iv him.”

“Bravo!” again from the grocer, the last barrier between him and Juno
levelled.

“Where he say he go?” asked Carolina.

“Well, mum, if I understud his dog Italian and his hog English, he said
he was goin’ to Jamaiky to ax at the post arface was there a letter
from somebody in Mulberry.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Signor Di Bello returned to New York in high spirits. Whether the
proofs of Juno’s attempted bigamy were and always had been myths of
Tomato’s fancy was not the question that seemed to him of most import
now. What towered above all else was the monolithic fact that the
proofs were missing, and Juno might be his, after all. As the wish
gained firmer hold on the thought, he began to view the doings of the
past two days as moves in a miscarried plot of his sister’s to cheat
him of the woman who challenged his taste.

In the train he sat apart from Carolina and Armando and nursed his
delight. They could see that he was gloating over the events that had
cast them into hopeless gloom. And while they brooded, Signor Di Bello
replanned his wedding. Arrived in Mulberry, he made straight for the
Restaurant of Santa Lucia and caroled the triumphant tidings to Juno.

“Did I not tell you they were a flock of geese?” he said, passing the
bottle of _barbera_. “There was no bust, and, of course, no husband.
But there will be a husband on the Feast of Sunday, my very sympathetic
one,” he cooed.

“Ah! Bertino has received my letter and fled,” she mused under her
fallen eyelids as she tipped the glass.

That evening Signor Di Bello observed to Carolina:

“There will be a wedding in this house next Sunday. The priest will not
be the harebrained Father Nicodemo. I shall invite many of my Genovese
friends, some Milanesi, some Torinesi, and a few of the first families
of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani, for I am a man
above race prejudice.”

It was what she had dreaded since the moment Bridget made known
the fact of Bertino’s melting away. Convinced--without proof,
however--that Juno was his wife, she had resolved never to live under
a bigamous roof, though she might, with a wife of her own selection,
endure life in a monogamous household. Wherefore she would secede from
Casa Di Bello--embrace again the rubric peace of the anagamous rectory.
Father Nicodemo had given her repeated assurance that the latchstring
was always hanging out; that the spaghetti sauces had never been proper
since she left; that they had despaired of having a palatable dish of
boiled snails fricasseed with pepper pods.

“Very well, my brother,” she returned frostily; “when that Neapolitan
baggage comes in, I go out.”

“Ah, you will enter the Church again, I suppose,” he taunted. “Have I
not said it truly--once a priest always a priest?”

“You will have the police in the house,” was her last word.




CHAPTER XXI

THE FEAST OF SPRINGTIDE


INSTEAD of the arrogant negative that he had returned to Bertino’s
anxious inquiry day after day, the postmaster of Jamaica this morning
threw out a yellow-enveloped letter.

“Your uncle died to-day.”

He did not stay to read further, but thrust the paper into his pocket,
fearful that some one might be looking over his shoulder. The blind
terror of the hunted murderer was full upon him. At first he moved away
almost on a run, but checked himself suddenly to a dawdling swing, and
put on a comic air of unconcern. Not until he was far beyond the town,
crossing the brushwood solitude, did he take out the writing and read
Juno’s wily admonition: “Fly from America. The man-hunters are after
you!”

With sharper stride he pressed on, unmindful whither his course lay if
only he widened the distance between him and the city. He had walked
to the post office twice a day for a week, and from habit now he took
the wagon track that zigzagged toward the iron villa. The green bower
forming the roof of that matchless dwelling rose to view as he turned
into the road by the railway track. A few yards onward the penetrating
whistle of a quail startled him, and a flash of his affrighted fancy
revealed police rising from ambush on every side and closing in. For
the first time since leaving the town he turned about, and beheld what
he had not dared look behind for dread of seeing--men coming after him.
There were six or seven of them, all in a group, and gliding along so
strangely. _Gran Dio!_ his wife’s warning had come too late. Why had
she waited until the hounds were fairly sniffing at his heels? What
giants his pursuers were! He could see their heads and shoulders
above the quivering foliage. Now the ears of two horses showed, and
the rumble of wheels reached him. Ah! thus it was these men could
glide after him without moving their bodies. Courage! Maybe they were
not man-hunters at all. He would see if they kept on in his track, or
turned the opposite way at the corner. Yes; they had struck into the
road by the railway and were galloping after him. Idiot that he was to
stand so long! But he would elude them. He knew the trails and secret
hollows in the bush that would cover his flight and shelter him until
they should give up the search. What a fool he had been to run! Now
they must know he was the murderer! On he sped past the iron villa, not
even glancing to see if Bridget and the children were there. He reached
the point on the edge of the thicket where he intended to plunge into
its shielding labyrinth, but a look behind told him that this was
needless, for the two-horse truck had come to a halt at the villa,
and the men were moving about the pipes, some kneeling and looking in.
The wind bore to him their shouts of laughter and inarticulate talk.
Screened by the dwarf oaks he crept nearer, until the confusion of
human voices became the dialect of Sicily.

That the men were all Italians did not drive away his fear of them. His
racial faith in the sanctity of the _vendetta_ was not blind enough
to make the Genovese trust himself to the Siciliani, although the
knowledge that they were no emissaries of the Questura of Police was
somewhat of relief.

The gang stripped both pipes of their green mantle, and tore out the
bedding and soap-box furniture of the dormitory tube. Full of wonder,
Bertino looked on. He did not know that the letters “D. P. W.” painted
boldly on the truck stood for Department of Public Works, and that New
York was merely gathering up its half-forgotten property. In his wrath
at this desecration of the Tomato domicile he would have sprung from
his concealment and protested, but the thought that he was a murderer
held him back. He lurked at such close range now that he recognised
two of the men as residents of Mulberry. One, the foreman of the gang,
he knew for a distinguished political captain of a Sicilian election
district, and a prominent figure in the social life of that quarter.
So Bertino dared not show himself even when they dragged forth the box
containing the Last Lady.

“Beautiful!” said the foreman.

“Beautiful!” was the united echo.

“Listen, Andrea,” the foreman went on, addressing the other man whom
Bertino knew, “I find this thing on the city’s property, and I shall
keep it. To Mulberry you will carry it, my friend, for I have a famous
idea for the Feast of Springtide.”

With block and tackle and much hauling of ropes and singing of hee-hoo!
they loaded the pipe on the truck. Then the foreman and Andrea lifted
on the bust, and before Bertino’s eyes the Last Lady was abducted.

He did not rise from his covert until the truck, its big horses
straining at the traces and the wheels glucking under their heavy
burden, had gone a quarter of a mile. Then he started after it, keeping
a safe distance between himself and the men who might recognise him at
closer range. Only a vague sense had he at first of the purpose that
impelled him onward; he could not bear to see his friend’s precious
work of months, upon which he had built his very life hope, thus
carried away without doing something, and that something, whatever it
pleased Fate to provide, could not be done unless he kept the bust in
sight. Later the clearer design came to him of following the Last Lady
to her destination, and letting the banker know, so that he might go
forward and reclaim her from the abductors.

Over dusty roads of the burning plains, through woodland passes, in
village streets, and on the crazy pavements of Long Island City he
kept in her wake. With a feeling of relief he saw the truck drive into
a gateway, and while he waited to make sure that she was to lodge
there for the night Andrea came out with a push-cart, and on it the
well-known pine box. Again he took up the pursuit, which led this
time to the ferry and across to New York. For a moment he shrank from
trailing on through the city, which his fancy filled with man-hunters
peering into every face to find the murderer of Signor Di Bello. But an
impulse of fidelity to Armando conquered his fears, and, turning up his
coat collar and drawing his soft hat over his eyes, he went on, dogging
the push-cart in all its fits and starts through the lighted highways
that he was sure teemed with detectives.

At Bleecker Street and the Bowery Andrea turned, and with a sinking of
courage Bertino guessed that the Last Lady was bound for the very heart
of Mulberry. Here every man and woman would know him for a murderer,
and not a doorway or alley that would not have a law-hound in its
shadow! But it was too late to falter. If the bust were lost now he
could never again look Armando in the face. Bah! he knew a trick that
would fool the police. He tied his gingham handkerchief over his mouth
and struck forth, wholly confident that his disguise was impenetrable.

Another turn into Elizabeth Street, where the tribes of Sicily
forgather, and Bertino found himself amid the boisterous throng in
the flare of light and colour that of ages belong to the Feast of
Springtide. The New World memory of the Sicilians’ agricultural
festival was in the last of its three days and nights of fantastic
gaiety. All the colony was out of doors. On both sides of the way the
house fronts were lost in a jungle of American and Italian flags. In
drooping garlands that reached from window to window across the street,
dim-burning lights in red and purple glasses gave the barbaric scene a
strange, sombre note. Men as dark as Parsees, and their women decked
with paper flowers, and little girls in white frocks crowned with real
and make-believe blossoms, stood about, each bearing a lighted candle,
waiting eagerly to march in the procession that would go singing
through Mulberry. Here and there, apart from the gabbling collection,
was the face of a silent, pensive one who looked on at the doings of
these wage slaves of the sweat-shop, building scaffold, river tunnel.
Did he see a thorn on the rose of their festivity--a plaintive satire
of Fate in this clinging to the poetic shadows of their native vineyard
and field after the substance had been despised and forsaken?

The foreman had come to town by rail, swelling with the political
significance of his find in the pipe. First he sounded a few comrades
in the wine-shop, and their approving “bravoes” told him that his idea
for a queen of the feast would hit the bull’s-eye of public opinion.
Then with inflated chest he proclaimed that he, the leader of the
election district, had not only an idea but its marble embodiment as
well. Yes, a beautiful bust, the masterpiece of a renowned sculptor,
who had been induced, at vast expense to him, the leader of the
election district, to do this high honour to the brave Sicilian voters.
From tongue to tongue the news flew, and when Andrea appeared with his
push-cart the expectant people, to whom symbolism were ever precious,
shouted a delighted welcome all along the line.

[Illustration: The Last Lady as Queen of the Feast.]

“Long live the Queen of Springtide!”

By the time the procession was ready to start, the Last Lady had
been lifted out and set upon a flower-strewn throne made of a large
packing-case that rested on the push-cart. Then a crown of tinsel,
typing the sovereign power of the season over bread and wine, was
lowered from the wire whereon it had hung above the middle of the
street--somewhat oversized for the brow of her stony majesty, but
held in place by a padding of paper roses. The brass band blared, and
the pageant advanced, to the cock-a-hoop strain of Italy’s national
quickstep.

Bertino had looked on silently during the metamorphosis of the bust,
and when the long column of candle-bearers moved he kept abreast of the
head. At length they wheeled into Mulberry Street and passed by Casa Di
Bello. He had expected to see his uncle’s home in darkness and crape
on the door. But the windows showed light, and, standing on the stoop
to see the procession, like all the populace of Mulberry, were Aunt
Carolina and--he pushed the hat from his brow at the risk of liberty
and life, to make sure that his eyes did not beguile him--yes, Marianna
and Armando! All in America! What did it mean? Surely this was no house
of mourning. And these jeers of the paraders, who jerked their thumbs
at Casa Di Bello:

“A bridegroom without a bride!”

“Ha! Signor Di Bello must hunt another wife!”

“He’d better ask her first if she has a husband!”

“The stable of the Genovese donkey!”

No, no; even these Sicilian pigs could not be making game of a dead
man. Pulling the handkerchief from his mouth, he dashed across the
street, breaking through the ranks and exploding a volley of hisses and
wrathful epithets from marchers and bystanders.

“Aunt Carolina! Marianna! Armando!”

“Bertino!”

They all tried to hug and kiss him at once.

“Are you Juno’s husband?” were the first coherent words.

“Yes; miserable that I am!”

“Bravo!” exulted Carolina. “The Napolitana shall not enter.”

“And my uncle? He lives?”

“Lives! By the mass! He is too much alive.”

“_Grazie a Dio!_ I thought I had killed him. She told me he was dead;
to fly, that the police were after me.” The others did not understand
just then.

“And the bust?” breathed Armando.

“It is here.”

The band had relapsed into silence, and the air was filled with the
drone of a weird island chant that lacked only the tom-tom to perfect
its Hindu cadence. The lips of the marchers scarcely moved as they gave
forth their hymn of praise to the Genius of Spring. And there was the
Queen, wabbling along in her push-cart chariot, the idol of Mulberry’s
rabble--the “Presidentessa” whom her creator had dreamed--oh, so
trustfully!--to see enthroned upon a porphyry pedestal in the White
House, admired of the rich and great. Armando would have dived into the
_cortège_, pushed aside the candle-bearers who guarded the Queen, and
striven to reclaim his own, but the grip of Carolina’s hands on his arm
held him back. She had guessed his death-courting purpose. A picture of
knife-blades gleaming in the candlelight flashed in her mind, and she
put all her strength in her grasp.

“Let go!” he cried, tugging hard, but Bertino clutched his other arm at
the command of Carolina. “Magnificent God! Am I to stand here and see
them carry it away?”

“Fool!” said Carolina. “Do you think they will let you take their
Queen? A hundred knives would stop you.”

He ceased struggling. “But what shall I do?”

“Patience! Here, Bertino; follow on, learn whither the Sicilian swine
take the bust, and when their feast is over we shall demand it.”

Again Bertino took up the trail.




CHAPTER XXII

CAROLINA CONSTRUCTS A DRAMA


A THUNDERSTORM routed the procession, sending the candle-bearers
helter-skelter into doorways, covered alleys, under the awnings of the
shops. At the first flash and report of the sky’s artillery Andrea
deserted his push-cart and its royal occupant. But the dauntless leader
of the election district was at hand. With heroic calm he lifted
the Queen in his arms and unaided carried her into the Caffè of the
Beautiful Sicilian. Mulberry had but few men who could do that--she was
of solid Carrara--and thoughtful voters saw in the feat a new mark of
his fitness for political chieftainship. She was placed on a marble-top
table in the corner and the crown straightened on her spotless brow.
All night she held court, and until the vender songs of the morning
market were heard in the streets. Bottle after bottle joined the dead
men, the rude quips and quibbles grew noisy, quarrelsome, yet no man
drained a glass without first tipping it in homage to the snub-nosed
damsel whose hollow eyes stared at every one all the time.

An hour before midnight Bertino and Armando returned to Casa Di Bello
to report to Carolina the lodging place of the Last Lady. Hardly had
the bell sounded when the door flew open, and Carolina came out, finger
at lips, with a great air of mystery, and drawing to the panelled oak
behind her.

“Be off at once!” she said, her voice fluttering. “Here is money. Go
anywhere to-night--anywhere out of Mulberry. You, Bertino, must not
come back until--until I am ready for you. If she saw you it would ruin
all. Go! Ask no questions. To-morrow Armando will tell me where you
are, and we shall meet. Away!”

With puzzled faces and mystified shakes of the head Armando and Bertino
took themselves off, and Carolina re-entered at the moment that Signor
Di Bello was mounting the staircase to his bedroom. A few minutes
before he had taunted her with the failure of her scheme to cheat him
of a wife, and proclaimed again the idiocy of the priest and all others
who asserted that there was a bust or a husband of Juno. A pretty show
they had made of him. All Mulberry was laughing. But his time would
come. Next Sunday he would turn the tide, for she would be his in spite
of them all. Carolina could do as she liked, go or stay; but a wedding
there must and should be, for that alone could save his good name as a
merchant and a signore.

He had spent a busy night with the flasks of the Three Gardens along
with some choice comrades of the Genovese, and the years had told
Carolina that with her brother it was always _in vino veritas_.
Wherefore she knew that he had spoken naught less than a secret of
his heart--that a wish to wipe out the stain of ridicule was an added
spur to his determination to marry. And this knowledge sparked an idea
that keyed her cunning to its highest pitch. Without an instant’s delay
she began to put the idea into practice. Her first move was to keep
mum about the return of Bertino, although she had waited up to flaunt
in her brother’s face the news that his bride’s husband would stand
before him in a few minutes. But the new design that her crafty wits
had seized upon made that petty triumph seem not worth while--at least
not until the tragic moment she was preparing. Her next step, as we
have seen, was to get Bertino out of the way. The corners of her closed
mouth curved in a smile of wily content as she watched Signor Di Bello
going up to his room in blank ignorance of the little society drama
that was in her head.

“Good night, my dear brother,” she said. “To-morrow I will begin to
make ready for the wedding.”

“Good night.”

On the morrow she gave Angelica orders to prepare a wedding feast that
should be the equal of the one that had gone to Father Nicodemo’s poor.
She ordered her as well to keep her mouth shut about the turning up of
Bertino, and the same command she issued to Marianna. Neither the girl
nor the cook was able to fathom the purpose of Carolina, but Marianna
could not shake off a besetting fear that it boded no good for her.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a bright morning, and bright were the spirits of Signor Di
Bello, and springy his step, as he walked to his shop in Paradise Park.
To his view there was not a speck on the matrimonial prospect, and he
exulted in the promise of laughing last at those who were now laughing
at him. It was the day that the proofs were to be presented to Father
Nicodemo, and he chuckled serenely over the plight that the banker must
be in.

He had gone less than a block when Armando rang the bell of Casa Di
Bello, and Marianna, who had been watching for him eagerly at the
window, threw open the door. Breathlessly she fell to telling him
of the plans for the wedding and her consequent sense of impending
disaster; how Carolina knew that Juno had one husband, and was helping
her to get another! She had closed her and Angelica’s lips. What did it
all mean? Something dreadful, she was sure. If Armando would only take
her away. If----

The interview was cut off by the voice of Carolina, who appeared with
her bonnet on and took charge of Armando.

“Not a word,” she admonished him, “about Bertino’s return or his
marriage to that baggage. Mind you do not tell a living soul. My
reasons you will know at the proper time. Now, lead me to the--Last
Lady.”

Together they walked to the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian. On the
threshold they came face to face with the ex-banker. He was in a fine
frenzy of indignation. At daybreak that morning he had started from
what was left of the iron villa with a push-cart load of dandelion
leaves. After visiting the rectory and making to Father Nicodemo the
humiliating report that the proofs had vanished, there had come to his
ear news of the marble Queen of Springtide, and the talk, current on
a thousand tongues, of her strong resemblance to the Neapolitan who
sang at La Scala, and whom the priest had refused to marry to Signor
Di Bello. And here was the bust of which he had been robbed. Oh, the
money it had cost him! One hundred and forty dollars for duty. Ah! yes;
it was the cause of his ruin. But for that cursed marble he would be
still a signore and one of the influential bankers of Mulberry. He had
demanded his property, but the foreman would not surrender it until he
had proved his ownership. What an outrage! But it mattered not now, for
they, Armando and Signorina Di Bello, would be his witnesses. “Who
well does climb is helped in time.”

“Excuse me, signore,” remarked Armando; “this bust does not belong to
you.”

“What!” shrieked the banker.

“No; it is mine.”

“Yours?”

“I made it.”

“You made it, eh?” the banker snapped. “Very good. But who paid for it?
Eh, who paid for it? Answer that. Who paid the one hundred and forty
dollars of Dogana--you or I? Give me back the duty money and you may
have the infernal thing! Ugly yellow snout!”

Now, Carolina had a lively desire to possess the bust, for she needed
it in the avenging play that she had begun to construct. Nevertheless,
her Italian thrift had not been swamped by the wave of worldly purpose
that had of late come over her churchly qualities. To pay the sum
Signor Tomato asked would necessitate an inroad upon her savings-bank
hoard, an act to which she nerved herself only in the last resort.
So she exerted the might of her tongue in behalf of Armando’s claim,
holding with primordial logic that the Last Lady belonged to the
sculptor by divine right of creation. But the foreman, in his rôle
of thief, custodian of the stolen goods, and judge in equity, had a
homelier code of ethics for his guide. It took him not a moment to
decide. He awarded the bust to the banker on the ground that it was
in his wife’s possession at the time of the theft, and must therefore
belong to her husband. It was only the _reductio ad maritum_ to which
all questions are subject in Mulberry. The upshot was that in the
afternoon Carolina paid the one hundred and forty dollars.

To Signor Tomato it seemed as if some fairy wand had touched the world
and made it a garden of joy. Now they might take away the other pipe
any time, and he did not care. His Bridget and the little Tomatoes
would not be homeless. In his transport of gladness the rude life about
him took on a poetic beauty. The fragrance of Sorrentine orange groves
filled the squalid streets; there was rapturous music in the shrieks of
the parrots on the fire escapes and window sills; the raucous notes of
the hucksters enchanted his ear. To dear old Mulberry he could return
now and resume his proper estate of banker and signore. Long live the
day in his thankfulness! Never more would he quarrel with his lot. Ah!
the grand truth in the proverb, “Blind eyes lose their night when gold
is in sight.” Straightway he went to the landlord, got the key of the
old shop, and, when darkness had fallen, Bridget and her brood were
eating cabbage soup behind the nankeen sail in the revivified Banca
Tomato.

But the Last Lady was still with them, to the hearty disgust of
Bridget. Not yet had the hour arrived for Carolina to bring the bust
on the scene, and Signor Tomato, with many a word and grimace of
reluctance, consented, under an oath of secrecy, to keep it in his
place until the supreme moment. Pains were taken that it should not be
traced to its new biding place. Armando had pushed it away in a cart,
taking a round-about course from the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian
to Paradise Park. Thus it happened that when Signor Di Bello, to whose
ears had come the gossip of a bust that imaged his lost bride, went to
the _caffè_ that morning to see for himself, the bird had again flown.

“Bah! Another stupid jest!” he muttered, and thrashed out of the room
amid the titters of a group of Sicilians.

Soon afterward Juno, an unwonted air of wide-awake desire about her,
entered the _caffè_ and asked to be shown the Queen of Springtide.
Before Signora Crispina, the proprietor’s peachblow wife, could answer,
there came from a half dozen throats the merry chorus:

“Long live the Queen of Springtide!”

“Where is it?” Juno asked.

“She is here, signorina,” said the wit of the company, rising and
tipping his hat. “The lifeless Queen has just left us, but her living
Majesty is here.--It is yourself, beautiful signorina.”

“Bah! Where is the bust?”

No one could answer. Armando was unknown in Mulberry, and only three
persons--Carolina, the banker, and himself--were in the secret of his
destination when he pushed away from the _caffè_ with the Last Lady in
the cart. Juno went back to her lodgings greatly disappointed. A dread
had settled upon her that this marble ghost would spring up in her
path somehow, and foil her plans, after the manner of all well-ordered
avenging spirits. It had been her intention, when she hurried to the
_caffè_ to sound the rumour about the bust, to get Signor Di Bello to
buy it and give it to her. Once in her hands, she would have seen to
it that the thing retired to a safe obscurity. The bottom of the East
River seemed to her a particularly fit place for Armando’s masterpiece.
She doubted no longer that the bust had arrived in Mulberry, and the
mystery of its whereabouts gave her no peace.

But it was not so with Signor Di Bello. To the mind of the grocer, put
upon so hard by recent events, the talk about the Queen’s resemblance
to his lost bride appeared now as a hoax which had accomplished its
purpose of drawing him to the _caffè_ only to be laughed at. If not,
where was the bust? Surely he knew his people too well to misinterpret
this latest prank. He knew. It was the first joke of a practical turn
that any one had dared play on him since the blunder at the church
marked him for the colony’s ridicule. And he saw therein a sure omen
that flat insult would quickly succeed the coarse raillery. Before long
women would spit at him in the street and taunting youngsters tag at
his heels. Others that he knew of had tasted the strange persecution.
But it should not be his lot, by the tail of Lucifer! On the Feast of
Sunday his marriage must silence every idle tongue. For then he would
cease to be that despised of all creatures, a bridegroom without a
bride.

That his lively taste for Juno’s grace of person had become second
to a desire to avert the rising gale of mockery, Carolina understood
very well. And upon this change of his nuptial motive she rested full
confidence of success for her own designs. No bar to her project showed
itself until she visited Bertino, at the cheap hotel on the East Side,
whither he and Armando had taken themselves. Then she found that the
leading man of her drama had notions of his own about his part that
would wreck the plot. He was for killing the feminine villain before
the curtain rose. To her directions that he keep out of sight until
Sunday he demurred vehemently. How could he wait so long when the
_vendetta_ was boiling in his veins? His wife had done him a deadly
wrong, and, _per Dio!_ deadly should be the accounting.

“See the grand trouble she has caused to me, to my friend, and to poor
Marianna!”

“To Marianna?” she asked, in genuine wonder. “What wrong has she done
her?”

“Were not she and Armando to wed when his Presidentessa should be sold?
A long time they must wait now. Thundering heavens! But she shall pay.”

“You are mistaken,” rejoined Carolina, with a note of authority. “It
would have made no difference to Marianna. She was not to wed Armando
in any case.”

“I know better. Anyway, I shall not sit here biting my lips until the
Feast of Sunday, and perhaps be cheated of my right. Who knows when she
may fly?”

“No fear of that.”

“No? Why not? I tell you she knows what to expect from me, and is no
simpleton.” Then he lowered his voice to a stage whisper, first opening
the door and making sure that there was no listener in the hall. “Twice
I would have killed her, but once I deceived myself, and the other time
she gammoned me with a lie that made me try to kill my uncle. Don’t you
see that I can not wait here while she may be getting away?”

“I promise you she will not leave Mulberry. Do you wish to know why?
Well, it is because she thinks you have fled from America and that
she is free to become your uncle’s wife. Ah! don’t you see the fine
_vendetta_ I am hatching for you? On the Feast of Sunday you appear and
stop the wedding. The Neapolitan beast is kicked out of Casa Di Bello.
You follow her and--claim your rights. Is it not a sweet _vendetta_?”

“Yes,” said Bertino after a pause. “I will wait.”




CHAPTER XXIII

A PARTNERSHIP IN TEN-INCH ST. PETERS


THOUGH Carolina had not been blind to the meaning of the signals
flashed by Armando and Marianna’s eyes whenever the lovers were
together, Bertino’s words stirred her to the need of taking instant
measures to smother any marplot that might brew from their attachment.
To this end she resolved to keep them apart until the final act of
her private theatricals should be played. Thus it fell out that on
Friday, two days before the time for Signor Di Bello’s second essay
at a wedding, when Armando called to deliver a most weighty message
to Marianna, he was met at the door with Carolina’s avowal that the
girl was indisposed. He might have credited the dreadful news but for
a face that he saw at the window as he walked away, and a pair of
hands and lips that were telegraphing with much energy. “Wait, and I
shall be out,” was the only part of Marianna’s excited display that he
understood. But it was enough to insure his waiting a week, had that
been necessary. As it was, she did not come until darkness had called
lights to the _caffè_ windows and the banks and grocery shops had put
up their shutters.

“It is finished now,” she said, hatless and breathing hard. “I can
never go back to Casa Di Bello.”

“What matter?” he asked, taking her hand, and for the first time in
many a day showing a joy and contempt for circumstance that befitted
his years. “Come along. I have beautiful news. Let us go to the gardens
of Paradise.”

It was the first music night of the season, and the Park had become a
vast _potbouilli_ of Italy’s children, with a salting from the Baxter
Street Ghetto and a peppering of “Chimmies” and “Mamies” from the old
Fourth Ward. Armando and Marianna made their way through the seething
mass about the band, deaf to the rag-time melody that filled the sultry
air and without eyes for the gorgeous red coats of the musicians. He
was telling her how from the blackness of his despair the light of
knowledge had suddenly broken, and how in the bitterness of his exile
he had found the sweet of content. Far from the band stand, they
crowded on to a bench beside two women with yellow babies at their
breasts, and Armando continued:

“It was last night, and I was here alone, with only the stars for
companions. All Mulberry was asleep. First I thought only of myself,
and my heart was heavy. Then the points of gold in the sky seemed to
whisper--to whisper of you, my precious. After that I was happy. Do you
know why? Ah, it was because I had made up my mind.”

“Yes,” she repeated eagerly; “you made up your mind to----”

“Go home.”

“And I?”

“You go with me. There; do you not see now why I am happy?”

“Madonna-Maria be glorified!” she cried, and the women by their side
exchanged glances and grunts. “When?”

“By the first ship for Genoa.”

“When is that?”

“Some day next week.”

“Joy!”

“Ah! is it not fine? To go back to Italy!”

“_Si_; fine.” She paused a moment pensively, then asked, “Have you
bought the passage tickets?”

“No; she has not paid me yet for the bust.”

“Who has not paid you?”

“Signorina Di Bello.”

“How do you know she will give you any money?”

“Ah! I saw it in her eye. And did she not say, when I spoke of my poor
marble--did she not say that perhaps it would not prove so poor, after
all? Oh, she will pay, I am sure. How much? Ah! who can tell that? But
surely it will be enough to take us back to Cardinali, and what more
can we ask? There we shall be happy. No more shall you go to the mill,
for have I not my house and workshop, and will not Genoa be glad again
to buy my ten-inch Saint Peters?”

“Ah! _si_. Genoa will be glad. And I? Shall I not take them to the
Gallery of Cristoforo Colombo and sell them just as old Daniello did?
By my faith, I think I shall bring home as much silver as ever he did,
and more.”

“_Si, si_; who would not buy of you, _angelo d’amore_?”

He kissed her lips and fair tresses, and the women with their nurslings
left the bench. Thus, and for hours, the exiles lived in the new-found
bliss of their present while planning a joyous future. Over the buzz
of the grimy, toil-bound multitude the notes of the distant band came
to them vaguely--now in a fugitive creak, then in a faint rumble or
detached crash.

It was long after the music had died out, and the people had gone to
their tenements, and the pale eye of night had peeped tardily over a
zigzag line of low roofs, when Marianna said:

“_Dio!_ So late! She will not let me in.”

They walked to Casa Di Bello at a smart pace, and timidly she rang the
bell, while Armando waited not many yards away. Instantly the door
opened, and he saw the hand of Carolina reach forth, grasp his love by
the shoulder, and jerk her into the house.




CHAPTER XXIV

TWO TROUBLESOME WEDDING GIFTS


LOOKING down upon Genoa through the blue reaches of the upper crests is
an Apennine peak which the people, high and low, call Our Lady of the
Windows. Ever mantled in snow, and a fit emblem of icy virtue, she has
for ages inspired a negative chord for that region’s lyres of passion.
The princeling in his hillside palazzo sings of his dream lady--always
an angel as fervid as the glacial Madonna is cold; the red waterman,
in his moonlight barcarole, swears his love would melt that frozen
heart. But she bears no kinship to this chronicle save that Signor Di
Bello, on the afternoon of the pregnant Feast of Sunday, when all was
primed for the wedding, thus addressed his sister, who sat by a front
casement:

“Ha! my Lady of the Windows, it is time to go and fetch my bride.”

Carolina gave back only a silent nod and a closer pressure of the lips,
and he made off to the Santa Lucia, crowing to himself over the timely
bite of his pleasantry. Hour after hour she had been at that window
watching for Bertino, ready to spring to the door and drive him away
should he appear too soon. She was determined that the play should not
be spoiled by the untimely entrance of her star actor. His cue, as
agreed upon, was the exit of Signor Di Bello, but the fear had haunted
her that his itching _vendetta_ might make him forget the book. That
danger was past now, and before his uncle had gone a block, Bertino
was at the door. She bundled him upstairs to her sanctum, and, turning
the key, left him looking out blankly on the graveyard. “In a little
while I shall call you,” she said, after explaining gravely that she
locked him in that his uncle might be kept out. Then she descended to
the street door and waved her hand, a signal that brought a push-cart
out of a near-by alley, with Armando and the banker at its shafts. Of
course, their load was the Last Lady, but no eye could see her face,
for Bridget had given her best and only bed coverlet to veil it. No
easy task to lug the weighty dame upstairs, but they managed it without
mischance, while Carolina stood by imploring care, and all with an ado
of deepest secrecy. At length the bust was set up in the back room of
the second floor. In this room the bride and groom were to wait before
going down to the parlour for the ceremony. A dressing case near the
window answered for a pedestal. In the bright light that fell upon it
the snowy features of Juno showed bold to the eye, while the mirror
rendered back in softer tone her sturdy neck and shoulders. With a
spotless sheet Carolina covered the bust, and with the others left the
room and locked the door.

Repeated jangling of the bell and a low drone in the parlour told of
arriving guests. Marianna had been cast for the part of door-opener and
welcomer to the first families. Armando, in the best attire he could
muster, had only a meditative rôle. Thus far he had done naught but sit
in the parlour and exchange confident glances with Marianna whenever
she ushered in a distinguished Calabriano, Siciliano, or Napolitano.

A cab bearing Signor Di Bello and Juno drew up betimes, and word
was passed to Carolina. Instantly she unlocked the door that shut
in Bertino, and bade him be ready for her summons. Then she called
Marianna and Armando to the room where the bust was, leaving Angelica
to let in the bridal pair. Up the staircase they rustled, Juno first,
her skirts held free of the yellow boots, and Signor Di Bello smiling
after her with a quivering bunch of muslin roses.

“They are here,” said the guests, craning their necks and whispering.
“No fiasco this time.”

“This way, signorina,” piped Carolina, with a spidery smile, stepping
aside and waving her fly into the web.

They entered the room prepared for them, and Signor Di Bello regarded
in wonder the white shape on the dressing case. “Soul of a camel!” he
cried. “What is that?”

“A little surprise that we have for the bride,” answered Carolina,
advancing and raising the window shade. “A wedding present, in fact.
_Eccolo!_”

She drew off the veil quickly, and the Last Lady stood revealed in the
streaming sunlight.

“By the Egg of Columbus!”

Every eye turned from the marble Juno to the Juno of flesh and blood.
She had let fall the counterfeit blossoms that the signore had just
placed in her hand, but gave no other token of disquiet. A glow of
admiration lit up her face as she gazed steadily at her double in stone.

“It is really beautiful,” she said calmly, moving nearer. “I knew I
should look well in marble.”

She passed one hand behind the bust as though to judge it by the sense
of touch, but before any one could hinder she lifted it to the window
sill and sent it somersaulting into the rear court. The crash brought a
score of heads to the lower windows, and the guests set up a cry that
disaster had again visited the wedding of Signor Di Bello.

“_Infame! infame!_” chorused Carolina, Armando, and Marianna when
they looked out and beheld the Last Lady in a dozen pieces on the
flagstones, while the bridegroom merely laughed, for it seemed to him a
capital joke.

Juno was quick to follow her prompt action with suitable words. “You
dogs of Genovese!” she said, sweeping the company with her flashing
eyes. “Do you like the bust now? Did you think I would stand still and
be made a fool of, or that I would fall down and weep?” Then, turning
to Carolina, “And you, Signorina Old Maid, you are a large piece of
stupidity.”

“Ha! You do not like my present!” said Carolina, ready for the combat.
“That is a grand pity. But, mark you, on her wedding day a _married_
maid must be suited to her heart’s full desire. I will give you another
present--yes, a present that every married maid must have. Do you
guess? No? How strange!” She went into the hall and called, “Bertino!”
Instantly he darted in and stood panting before his wife. “Here is the
other present, my married maid--your husband!”

At the same moment there arose from the parlour a tumult of voices, and
Angelica entered and said that the priest had arrived.

“Are you her husband?” groaned Signor Di Bello, his hope all gone.

“Yes,” Bertino answered, glaring at Juno. “She is my wife, the viper!
She put me up to stabbing you, my uncle. She told me you annoyed her;
that she did not want you. But she shall pay!” he cried, waving his
hand above his head. “Do you hear, you Neapolitan thief? You shall pay.
After that to inferno with you, and may you remain there as long as it
takes a crab to go round the world! _Figlia_ of a priest! Wolf of----”

“Stop!” broke in Signor Di Bello. Going up to Juno, he asked
mournfully, “Is he your husband?”

She answered, tossing her head: “He says so. Let him prove it.”

Signor Di Bello grasped the other end of the straw. “Ah, yes; prove
it,” he roared, while Carolina smiled snugly, for she had looked to it
that the properties for this scene were not lacking.

“You want proof?” asked Bertino. “Well, it is here.” He drew a marriage
certificate from his pocket.

Signor Di Bello seized the document and cast his eye over it. The
disorder below had redoubled, and with the noisy demands for the bride
and groom were mingled derisive shouts of “Long live the Genovese
bachelor!” and “Another fiasco!”

“Soul of the moon! It is true!” breathed Di Bello, crunching the paper
in style theatrical.

“Bah!” returned Juno, moving near to him and putting her hand on his
arm. “You believe that?”

“Believe me, then, signori,” spoke up a strange voice, in grammatical
but English-bred Italian. It was the priest from over the border of
Mulberry, who had come upstairs to learn the reason of the delay and
heard the last few lines of the dialogue--the priest whom Signor Di
Bello had engaged because he would not meddle. Turning to Juno he
continued: “I had the honour, signora, of marrying you to this man.”

“_Padre!_” exclaimed Bertino, who knew him at once for the clergyman he
had sought out so hurriedly at the rectory in Second Avenue that day
when, to outwit his uncle--black the hour!--he had taken Juno to wife.

“I know him not,” said Juno, turning to Signor Di Bello, who had
dropped into a chair. But her game of bluff was lost. “Go!” the grocer
said to her, pointing to the door.

She moved to the threshold, turned about, spat into the room, and said,
“May you all die cross-eyed!”--a Neapolitan figure that means “Be
hanged to you!” since the gallows bird squints when the noose tightens.
Then she rustled downstairs, mindful of her purple skirts. Bertino
would have been at her heels but for Carolina, who caught his arm.

“Wait,” she whispered. “This is not the time or place.”

“No matter!” he cried, shaking off her hold. “She shall pay, she shall
pay!”

The sight of Juno’s yellow boots on the staircase served to quiet the
troubled parlour for a brief moment, the people thinking that the
bride and groom were coming at last. But she had seen the stiletto in
her husband’s eye, and was out of the door, into the waiting coupé,
and driving off at high speed before the first families had wholly
grasped the scandalous fact. Next moment there was another flying
exit, and Bertino went tearing after the carriage. This was the signal
for unheard-of insults to Casa Di Bello. The men set up a sirocco of
hisses, and the women shouted mock bravoes for the twice-brideless
groom. During the uproar Alessandro the Macaroni Presser led a
push-and-grab attack on a side table heaped with the kaleidoscopic
dainties with which Mulberry loves to tickle its eye as well as its
gullet.

“_Dio tremendo!_” whimpered Signor Di Bello, the tumult downstairs
assailing his ears. “What a disgrace! what a disgrace!”

It was Carolina’s cue, and she snapped it up. In a few quick words she
unmasked the marital climax her drama was meant to produce.

“Disgrace?” she said. “What need of disgrace, my brother? Are not the
guests here, is the feast not waiting, also the priest, and the bride
ready?”

“The bride?”

“Yes, and one that is worth a hundred--nay, a thousand--of the baggage
that you have lost; the bride that I have brought you all the way from
Cardinali. Hear those cattle below, how they bellow and stamp on your
name! But my bride can shut their ugly mouths. Here is the young and
sympathetic Marianna.”

She turned slightly and beckoned Marianna to her side, but the girl
remained where she was, hand in hand with Armando.

“No, no,” said Marianna, recoiling.

“Bah! She is young, my brother, and does not know what she wants. Can’t
you see that if you are not married at once the colony will always
despise you? Never again shall you hold up your head.”

“But the people will know just the same that I have been put in a
sack,” groaned Di Bello.

“Listen,” said Carolina, putting a finger beside her nose shrewdly.
“Those people are fools. They will believe anything you say, if only
you go before them with a bride. Let it be one of your famous jokes. A
little surprise you have prepared for your dear friends. Naturally,
they had you betrothed to the wrong woman, for that was all a part
of the joke. You laugh at them then. You laugh last. How silly they
will feel! What merriment! Ah! they will say it is Signor Di Bello’s
grandest joke!”

“By the stars of heaven, I will!” cried the grocer.--“Here, my pretty
Marianna, do you wish to be a happy wife?”

“Yes,” the girl answered, nestling closer to Armando, “but--but not
yours.”

The priest, looking out of the window, shook his sides.

“You must be his!” said Carolina, catching hold of her arm and striving
to drag her away from Armando.

“She shall not!” cried the sculptor, placing an arm about Marianna,
authority in his eye and voice. “Take off your hand. No one else shall
have her.”

“Bravo!” exclaimed Signor Di Bello. “Let the pigs squeal. I am not a
man to marry a girl against her will.”

Carolina’s colour ran the scale of red and white, her fingers writhed,
and her eyes set upon Armando’s curling hair. She saw the curtain
ringing down on her self-serving drama, and the cherished _dénouement_
left out. In her fury she would have tested the roots of the sculptor’s
locks, but the priest stepped between them, and raised his hand.

“Signorina,” he said, his voice a distinct note of calm above the
storm below, “if you sincerely desire to save your brother from the
contempt of his neighbours it may be done better by the union of these
young hearts than by tearing them asunder. Let us consider. You speak
of the merry jest.” Here the good man’s eyes twinkled his zest in the
wholesome trick to be played. “Would it not be a greater joke if the
people found that they had betrothed not alone the wrong bride, but the
wrong groom as well; in fact, had come to the marriage of one couple
only to find another walk into the parlour with the priest?”

For a moment no one caught his meaning. Then he went on, with equal
countenance: “What I mean is that you silence the tongue of scandal by
having a wedding at once, with this pair of turtle-doves as the bride
and groom.”

“Bravo!” Signor Di Bello whooped, grasping the priest’s hand. “Indeed
a famous joke. I will tell them that it was all fun about my getting
married; that it was to be my foster niece and her sweetheart all the
time. Ah, the side-splitting joke!”

“Come, then,” said the priest, without waiting for Carolina’s approval;
and the joyous Armando and Marianna, with Signor Di Bello last in the
procession, followed him to the parlour.

Carolina did not go downstairs, but turned into her sanctum, and
with flooding eyes looked out on San Patrizio’s graveyard. She heard
the muffled outburst of wonder that greeted the bridal twain in the
parlour, and alert was her ear to the growing quiet that became
silence when the priest began the nuptial rites. Soon the merriment
of the feast rang beneath her feet. Plainly the lying joke was a great
success. Ah! what a fine _vendetta_ it would be to go down there and
tell them all the truth--even now while her brother was cracking
walnuts on his head and making the table roar! But no; of strife she
was weary. She longed for peace--for the peace that lay beyond that
gray forest of mortuary shafts; the peace beyond that rectory door,
to which the latch string beckoned and a soft voice, clear above the
revelry, seemed calling: “_Perpetua, perpetua, riposo, pace._”

       *       *       *       *       *

When Armando, with one hundred dollars in his pocket--the grateful
tribute of Signor Di Bello--went to Banca Tomato to buy two
second-class tickets for Genoa, the banker led him behind the nankeen
sail--sewed together again by Bridget--and whispered that Bertino would
be on the same ship in the steerage.

“Did she pay?” asked the sculptor.

“No, not all: a cut on the cheek; a clumsy thrust, dealt in a dark
alley, where he waited for her all night. But mark you, the fool wanted
to stay, to go back--to make her pay more--to pay all. He is not
satisfied; and in truth I do not blame him. She ought to pay all.”

“_Si_--all.”

“But how could he go back to her, where a dozen man-hunters are
waiting? They have been here, the loons, to see if he bought a ticket.
They will not find him. He will stay where he is until--until it is
time to go on the ship. Ah, my friend, it was grand trouble to make him
do this. He was for going back to her--to the man-hunters. But I gave
him the light of a wise proverb, and he saw: Better an egg to-day than
a hen to-morrow.”

[Illustration: _The End._]




                        FÉLIX GRAS’S ROMANCES.


The White Terror.

A Romance. Translated from the Provençal by Mrs. Catharine A. Janvier.
Uniform with “The Reds of the Midi” and “The Terror.” 16mo. Cloth,
$1.50.

“No one has done this kind of work with finer poetic grasp or more
convincing truthfulness than Félix Gras.... This new volume has the
spontaneity, the vividness, the intensity of interest of a great
historical romance.”--_Philadelphia Times._


The Terror.

A Romance of the French Revolution. Uniform with “The Reds of the
Midi.” Translated by Mrs. Catharine A. Janvier. 16mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“If Félix Gras has never done any other work than this novel, it
would at once give him a place in the front rank of the writers of
to-day.... ‘The Terror’ is a story that deserves to be widely read,
for, while it is of thrilling interest, holding the reader’s attention
closely, there is about it a literary quality that makes it worthy of
something more than a careless perusal.”--_Brooklyn Eagle._


The Reds of the Midi.

An episode of the French Revolution. Translated from the Provençal by
Mrs. Catharine A. Janvier. With an Introduction by Thomas A. Janvier.
With Frontispiece. 16mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“I have read with great and sustained interest ‘The Reds of the
South,’ which you were good enough to present to me. Though a work of
fiction, it aims at painting the historical features, and such works
if faithfully executed throw more light than many so-called histories
on the true roots and causes of the Revolution, which are so widely
and so gravely misunderstood. As a novel it seems to me to be written
with great skill.”--_William E. Gladstone._




                        BOOKS BY ANTHONY HOPE.


The King’s Mirror.

Illustrated, 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“Mr. Hope has never given more sustained proof of his cleverness than
in ‘The King’s Mirror.’ In elegance, delicacy, and tact it ranks
with the best of his previous novels, while in the wide range of its
portraiture and the subtlety of its analysis it surpasses all his
earlier ventures.”--_London Spectator._

“Mr. Anthony Hope is at his best in this new novel. He returns in some
measure to the color and atmosphere of ‘The Prisoner of Zenda.’... A
strong book, charged with close analysis and exquisite irony; a book
full of pathos and moral fiber--in short, a book to be read.”--_London
Chronicle._

“A story of absorbing interest and one that will add greatly to the
author’s reputation.... Told with all the brilliancy and charm which
we have come to associate with Mr. Anthony Hope’s work.”--_London
Literary World._


The Chronicles of Count Antonio.

With Photogravure Frontispiece by S. W. Van Schaick. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“No adventures were ever better worth recounting than are those of
Antonio of Monte Velluto, a very Bayard among outlaws.... To all those
whose pulses still stir at the recital of deeds of high courage, we
may recommend this book.... The chronicle conveys the emotion of
heroic adventure, and is picturesquely written.”--_London Daily News._

“It has literary merits all its own, of a deliberate and rather deep
order.... In point of execution ‘The Chronicles of Count Antonio’ is
the best work that Mr. Hope has yet done. The design is clearer, the
workmanship more elaborate, the style more colored.”--_Westminster
Gazette._


The God in the Car.

New edition, uniform with “The Chronicles of Count Antonio.” 12mo.
Cloth, $1.25.

“‘The God in the Car’ is just as clever, just as distinguished in
style, just as full of wit, and of what nowadays some persons like
better than wit--allusiveness--as any of his stories. It is saturated
with the modern atmosphere; is not only a very clever but a very
strong story; in some respects, we think, the strongest Mr. Hope has
yet written.”--_London Speaker._

“A very remarkable book, deserving of critical analysis impossible
within our limit; brilliant, but not superficial; well considered, but
not elaborated; constructed with the proverbial art that conceals,
but yet allows itself to be enjoyed by readers to whom fine literary
method is a keen pleasure.”--_London World._




                       BOOKS BY GILBERT PARKER.
                           Uniform Edition.


The Seats of the Mighty.

Being the Memoirs of Captain Robert MORAY, sometime an Officer in the
Virginia Regiment, and afterwards of Amherst’s Regiment. Illustrated,
$1.50.

“Another historical romance of the vividness and intensity of ‘The
Seats of the Mighty’ has never come from the pen of an American. Mr.
Parker’s latest work may without hesitation be set down as the best he
has done. From the first chapter to the last word interest in the book
never wanes; one finds it difficult to interrupt the narrative with
breathing space. It whirls with excitement and strange adventure....
All of the scenes do homage to the genius of Mr. Parker, and make ‘The
Seats of the Mighty’ one of the books of the year.”--_Chicago Record._

“Mr. Gilbert Parker is to be congratulated on the excellence of
his latest story, ‘The Seats of the Mighty,’ and his readers are
to be congratulated on the direction which his talents have taken
therein.... It is so good that we do not stop to think of its
literature, and the personality of Doltaire is a masterpiece of
creative art.”--_New York Mail and Express._


=The Trail of the Sword.= A Novel. $1.25.

“Mr. Parker here adds to a reputation already wide, and anew
demonstrates his power of pictorial portrayal and of strong dramatic
situation and climax.”--_Philadelphia Bulletin._


=The Trespasser.= $1.25.

“Interest, pith, force, and charm--Mr. Parker’s new story possesses
all these qualities.... Almost bare of synthetical decoration, his
paragraphs are stirring because they are real. We read at times--as we
have read the great masters of romance--breathlessly.”--_The Critic._


=The Translation of a Savage.= $1.25.

“A book which no one will be satisfied to put down until the end has
been matter of certainty and assurance.”--_The Nation._


=Mrs. Falchion.= $1.25.

“A well-knit story, told in an exceedingly interesting way, and
holding the reader’s attention to the end.”


=The Pomp of the Lavilettes.= 16mo. Cloth, $1.25.

“Its sincerity and rugged force will commend it to those who love and
seek strong work in fiction.”--_The Critic._




                        BOOKS BY E. F. BENSON.


Mammon and Co.

12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“Eminently readable.”--_London Athenæum._

“Entertaining and amusing.”--_London Academy._

“A novel of mark. Its character drawing is vigorous, its dialogue
vivacious.”--_Literature._

“Mr. Benson writes from intimate knowledge and the inside. He is a
part of the very society which he openly censures.... His novel stands
out as a strong bit of work in which he is very much at home. Its
brilliant sayings and clever epigrams give it a finish and polish
which are even more effective than the setting itself. What is more,
Mr. Benson sees with a great deal of heart the tragedy of human
experience and writes of it feelingly.”--_Boston Herald._


Dodo.

A Detail of the Day. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

“‘Dodo’ is a delightfully witty sketch of the ‘smart’ people of
society.... The writer is a true artist.”--_London Spectator._


The Rubicon.

12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

“The anticipations which must have been formed by all readers of
‘Dodo’ will in no wise be disappointed by ‘The Rubicon.’ The new
work is well written, stimulating, unconventional, and, in a word,
characteristic. Intellectual force is never absent, and the keen
observation and knowledge of character, of which there is abundant
evidence, are aided by real literary power.”--_Birmingham Post._




                            DAVID HARUM.


A Story of American Life. By EDWARD NOYES WESTCOTT. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“David Harum deserves to be known by all good Americans; he is one of
them in boundless energy, in large-heartedness, in shrewdness, and in
humor.”--_The Critic, New York._

“We have in the character of David Harum a perfectly clean and
beautiful study, one of those true natures that every one, man, woman,
or child, is the better for knowing.”--_The World, Cleveland._

“The book continues to be talked of increasingly. It seems to grow in
public favor, and this, after all, is the true test of merit.”--_The
Tribune, Chicago._

“A thoroughly interesting bit of fiction, with a well-defined plot,
a slender but easily followed ‘love’ interest, some bold and finely
sketched character drawing, and a perfect gold mine of shrewd,
dialectic philosophy.”--_The Call, San Francisco._

“The newsboys on the street can talk of ‘David Harum,’ but scarcely
a week ago we heard an intelligent girl of fifteen, in a house which
entertains the best of the daily papers and the weekly reviews, ask,
‘Who is Kipling?’”--_The Literary World, Boston._

“A masterpiece of character painting. In David Harum, the shrewd,
whimsical, horse-trading country banker, the author has depicted a
type of character that is by no means new to fiction, but nowhere
else has it been so carefully, faithfully, and realistically wrought
out.”--_The Herald, Syracuse._

“We give Edward Noyes Westcott his true place in American
letters--placing him as a humorist next to Mark Twain, as a master of
dialect above Lowell, as a descriptive writer equal to Bret Harte,
and, on the whole, as a novelist on a par with the best of those
who live and have their being in the heart of hearts of American
readers. If the author is dead--lamentable fact--his book will
live.”--_Philadelphia Item._




                         MISS DOUGALL’S BOOKS.


_THE MORMON PROPHET._ 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“A striking story.... Immensely interesting and diverting, and as a
romance it certainly has a unique power.”--_Boston Herald._

“In ‘The Mormon Prophet’ Miss Lily Dougall has told, in strongly
dramatic form, the story of Joseph Smith and of the growth of the
Church of the Latter-Day Saints, which has again come prominently
before the public through the election of a polygamist to Congress....
Miss Dougall has handled her subject with consummate skill.... She
has rightly seen that this man’s life contained splendid material for
a historical novel. She has taken no unwarranted liberties with the
truth, and has succeeded in furnishing a story whose scope broadens
with each succeeding chapter until the end.”--_New York Mail and
Express._

“Mormonism is not ordinarily regarded as capable of romantic
treatment, but in the hands of Miss Dougall it has yielded results
which are calculated to attract the general public as well as the
student of psychology.... Miss Dougall has handled a difficult
theme with conspicuous delicacy; the most sordid details of the
narrative are redeemed by the glamour of her style, her analysis
of the strangely mixed character of the prophet is remarkable for
its detachment and impartiality, while in Susannah Halsey she has
given us a really beautiful study of nobly compassionate womanhood.
We certainly know of no more illuminative commentary on the rise
of this extraordinary sect than is furnished by Miss Dougall’s
novel.”--_London Spectator._

“Miss Dougall may be congratulated both on her choice of a subject
for her new book and on her remarkably able and interesting treatment
of it.... A fascinating story, which is even more remarkable and more
fascinating as a psychological study.”--_The Scotsman._


_THE MADONNA OF A DAY._ 12mo. Cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.

“An entirely unique story. Alive with incident and related in a fresh
and captivating style.”--_Philadelphia Press._

“A novel that stands quite by itself, and that in theme as well as
in artistic merit should make a very strong appeal to the mind of a
sympathetic reader.”--_Boston Beacon._


_THE MERMAID._ 12mo. Cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.

“The author of this novel has the gift of contrivance and the skill
to sustain the interest of a plot through all its development. ‘The
Mermaid’ is an odd and interesting story.”--_New York Times._


_THE ZEIT-GEIST._ 16mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

“One of the most remarkable novels.”--_New York Commercial Advertiser._




                       BOOKS BY GRAHAM TRAVERS.


_WINDYHAUGH._ A Novel. By GRAHAM TRAVERS, author of “Mona Maclean,
Medical Student,” “Fellow Travellers,” etc. 12mo, cloth, $1.50.

“‘Windyhaugh’ shows an infinitely more mature skill and more subtle
humor than ‘Mona Maclean’ and a profounder insight into life. The
psychology in Dr. Todd’s remarkable book is all of the right kind;
and there is not in English fiction a more careful and penetrating
analysis of the evolution of a woman’s mind than is given in
Wilhelmina Galbraith; but ‘Windyhaugh’ is not a book in which there
is only one ‘star’ and a crowd of ‘supers.’ Every character is
limned with a conscientious care that bespeaks the true artist,
and the analytical interest of the novel is rigorously kept in its
proper place and is only one element in a delightful story. It is
a supremely interesting and wholesome book, and in an age when
excellence of technique has reached a remarkable level, ‘Windyhaugh’
compels admiration for its brilliancy of style. Dr. Todd paints on a
large canvas, but she has a true sense of proportion.”--_Blackwood’s
Magazine._

“For truth to life, for adherence to a clear line of action, for
arrival at the point toward which it has aimed from the first, such
a book as ‘Windyhaugh’ must be judged remarkable. There is vigor and
brilliancy. It is a book that must be read from the beginning to the
end and that it is a satisfaction to have read.”--_Boston Journal._

“Its easy style, its natural characters, and its general tone
of earnestness assure its author a high rank among contemporary
novelists.”--_Chicago Tribune._

“We can cordially eulogize the splendid vitality of the work, its
brilliancy, its pathos, its polished and crystalline style, and its
remarkable character-painting.”--_New York Home Journal._


_MONA MACLEAN, Medical Student._ 12mo, paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

 “A high-bred comedy.”--_New York Times._

 “‘Mona Maclean’ is a bright, healthful, winning story.”--_New York
 Mail and Express._

 “Mona is a very attractive person, and her story is decidedly well
 told.”--_San Francisco Argonaut._

 “A pleasure in store for you if you have not read this volume. The
 author has given us a thoroughly natural series of events, and drawn
 her characters like an artist. It is the story of a woman’s struggles
 with her own soul. She is a woman of resource, a strong woman, and her
 career is interesting from beginning to end.”--_New York Herald._


_FELLOW TRAVELLERS._ 12mo, paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

 “The stories are well told; the literary style is above the average,
 and the character drawing is to be particularly praised....
 Altogether, the little book is a model of its kind, and its reading
 will give pleasure to people of taste.”--_Boston Saturday Evening
 Gazette._

 “‘Fellow Travellers’ is a collection of very brightly written tales,
 all dealing, as the title implies, with the mutual relations of people
 thrown together casually while traveling.”--_London Saturday Review._




                         BOOKS BY ALLEN RAINE.
              Each, 12mo, cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.


Garthowen: A Welsh Idyl.

“Wales has long waited for her novelist, but he seems to have come at
last in the person of Mr. Allen Raine, who has at once proved himself
a worthy interpreter and exponent of the romantic spirit of his
country.”--_London Daily Mail._


By Berwen Banks.

“Mr. Raine enters into the lives and traditions of the people, and
herein lies the charm of his stories.”--_Chicago Tribune._

“Interesting from the beginning, and grows more so as it
proceeds.”--_San Francisco Bulletin._

“It has the same grace of style, strength of description, and dainty
sweetness of its predecessors.”--_Boston Saturday Evening Gazette._


Torn Sails.

“It is a little idyl of humble life and enduring love, laid bare before
us, very real and pure, which in its telling shows us some strong
points of Welsh character--the pride, the hasty temper, the quick
dying out of wrath.... We call this a well-written story, interesting
alike through its romance and its glimpses into another life than
ours.”--_Detroit Free Press._

“Allen Raine’s work is in the right direction and worthy of all
honor.”--_Boston Budget._


Mifanwy: A Welsh Singer.

“Simple in all its situations, the story is worked up in that touching
and quaint strain which never grows wearisome no matter how often the
lights and shadows of love are introduced. It rings true, and does not
tax the imagination.”--_Boston Herald._

“One of the most charming tales that has come to us of late.”--_Brooklyn
Eagle._




                          BY ELEANOR STUART.


Averages.

A Novel of Modern New York. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“To picture a scheming woman who is also attractive and even lovable
is not an easy task.... To have made such a woman plausible and real
in the midst of modern New York life is what Miss Stuart has achieved
in this novel. And the other characters reach a similar reality.
They are individuals and not types, and, moreover, they are not
literary echoes. For a writer to manage this assortment of original
characters with that cool deliberation which keeps aloof from them,
but remorselessly pictures them, is a proof of literary insight
and literary skill. It takes work as well as talent. The people of
the story are real, plausible, modern creatures, with the fads and
weaknesses of to-day.”--_N. Y. Life._

“The strength of the book is its entertaining pictures of human nature
and its shrewd, incisive observations upon the social problems, great
and small, which present themselves in the complex life of society in
the metropolis. Those who are fond of dry wit, a subtle humor, and
what Emerson calls ‘a philosophy of insight and not of tradition,’
will find ‘Averages’ a novel to their taste.... There are interesting
love episodes and clever, original situations. An author capable of
such work is to be reckoned with. She has in her the root of the
matter.”--_N. Y. Mail and Express._


Stonepastures.

12mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

“The story is strongly written, there being a decided Bronte flavor
about its style and English. It is thoroughly interesting and
extremely vivid in its portrayal of actual life.”--_Boston Courier._




                     BY ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER.


_A DOUBLE THREAD._ 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“The excellence of her writing makes ... her book delightful reading.
She is genial and sympathetic without being futile, and witty without
being cynical.”--_Literature, London, Eng._

“Will attract a host of readers.... The great charm about Miss
Fowler’s writing is its combination of brilliancy and kindness....
Miss Fowler has all the arts. She disposes of her materials in
a perfectly workmanlike manner. Her tale is well proportioned,
everything is in its place, and the result is thoroughly
pleasing.”--_Claudius Clear, in the British Weekly._

“An excellent novel in every sense of the word, and Miss Ellen
Thorneycroft Fowler is to be congratulated on having made a most
distinct and momentous advance.”--_London Telegraph._

“We have learned to expect good things from the writer of ‘Concerning
Isabel Carnaby,’ and we are not disappointed. Her present venture
has all the cleverness and knowledge of life that distinguished its
predecessor.”--_London Daily News._


_CONCERNING ISABEL CARNABY._ No. 252, Appletons’ Town and Country
Library. 12mo. Cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.

“Rarely does one find such a charming combination of wit and
tenderness, of brilliancy, and reverence for the things that
matter.... It is bright without being flippant, tender without being
mawkish, and as joyous and as wholesome as sunshine. The characters
are closely studied and clearly limned, and they are created by one
who knows human nature.... It would be hard to find its superior for
all-around excellence.... No one who reads it will regret it or forget
it.”--_Chicago Tribune._

“For brilliant conversations, epigrammatic bits of philosophy,
keenness of wit, and full insight into human nature, ‘Concerning
Isabel Carnaby’ is a remarkable success.”--_Boston Transcript._

“An excellent novel, clever and witty enough to be very amusing, and
serious enough to provide much food for thought.”--_London Daily
Telegraph._




                    TWO SUCCESSFUL AMERICAN NOVELS.


_LATITUDE 19°._ A Romance of the West Indies in the Year of our Lord
1820. Being a faithful account and true, of the painful adventures of
the Skipper, the Bo’s’n, the Smith, the Mate, and Cynthia. By Mrs.
SCHUYLER CROWNINSHIELD. Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“‘Latitude 19°’ is a novel of incident, of the open air, of the sea,
the shore, the mountain eyrie, and of breathing, living entities,
who deal with Nature at first hand.... The adventures described are
peculiarly novel and interesting.... Packed with incidents, infused
with humor and wit, and faithful to the types introduced, this book
will surely appeal to the large audience already won, and beget new
friends among those who believe in fiction that is healthy without
being maudlin, and is strong without losing the truth.”--_New York
Herald._

“A story filled with rapid and exciting action from the first page to
the last. A fecundity of invention that never lags, and a judiciously
used vein of humor.”--_The Critic._

“A volume of deep, undeniable charm. A unique book from a fresh, sure,
vigorous pen.”--_Boston Journal._

“Adventurous and romantic enough to satisfy the most exacting
reader.... Abounds in situations which make the blood run cold,
and yet, full of surprises as it is, one is continually amazed by
the plausibility of the main incidents of the narrative.... A very
successful effort to portray the sort of adventures that might have
taken place in the West Indies seventy-five or eighty years ago....
Very entertaining with its dry humor.”--_Boston Herald._


_A HERALD OF THE WEST._ An American Story of 1811-1815. By J. A.
ALTSHELER, author of “A Soldier of Manhattan” and “The Sun of
Saratoga.” 12mo. Cloth, $1.50.

“‘A Herald of the West’ is a romance of our history which has not
been surpassed in dramatic force, vivid coloring, and historical
interest.... In these days when the flush of war has only just
passed, the book ought to find thousands of readers, for it teaches
patriotism without intolerance, and it shows, what the war with Spain
has demonstrated anew, the power of the American people when they are
deeply roused by some great wrong.”--_San Francisco Chronicle._

“The book throughout is extremely well written. It is condensed,
vivid, picturesque.... A rattling good story, and unrivaled in fiction
for its presentation of the American feeling toward England during our
second conflict.”--_Boston Herald._

“Holds the attention continuously.... The book abounds in thrilling
attractions.... It is a solid and dignified acquisition to the
romantic literature of our own country, built around facts and real
persons.”--_Chicago Times-Herald._

“In a style that is strong and broad, the author of this timely novel
takes up a nascent period of our national history and founds upon it a
story of absorbing interest.”--_Philadelphia Item._

“Mr. Altsheler has given us an accurate as well as picturesque
portrayal of the social and political conditions which prevailed in
the republic in the era made famous by the second war with Great
Britain.”--_Brooklyn Eagle._



                          BY A. CONAN DOYLE.
            Uniform edition, 12mo. Cloth, $1.50 per volume.


_A DUET, WITH AN OCCASIONAL CHORUS._

“Charming is the one word to describe this volume adequately. Dr.
Doyle’s crisp style and his rare wit and refined humor, utilized with
cheerful art that is perfect of its kind, fill these chapters with joy
and gladness for the reader.”--_Philadelphia Press._

“Bright, brave, simple, natural, delicate. It is the most artistic
and most original thing that its author has done.... We can heartily
recommend ‘A Duet’ to all classes of readers. It is a good book to
put into the hands of the young of either sex. It will interest the
general reader, and it should delight the critic, for it is a work of
art. This story taken with the best of his previous work gives Dr.
Doyle a very high place in modern letters.”--_Chicago Times-Herald._


_UNCLE BERNAC. A Romance of the Empire._

“Simple, clear, and well defined.... Spirited in movement all the
way through.... A fine example of clear analytical force.”--_Boston
Herald._


_THE EXPLOITS OF BRIGADIER GERARD._

_A Romance of the Life of a Typical Napoleonic Soldier._

“Good, stirring tales are they.... Remind one of those adventures
indulged in by ‘The Three Musketeers.’... Written with a dash and
swing that here and there carry one away.”--_New York Mail and
Express._


RODNEY STONE.

“A notable and very brilliant work of genius.”--_London Speaker._

“Dr. Doyle’s novel is crowded with an amazing amount of incident and
excitement.... He does not write history, but shows us the human side
of his great men, living and moving in an atmosphere charged with the
spirit of the hard-living, hard-fighting Anglo-Saxon.”--_New York
Critic._


_ROUND THE RED LAMP._

_Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life._

“A strikingly realistic and decidedly original contribution to modern
literature.”--_Boston Saturday Evening Gazette._


_THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS._

Being a Series of Twelve Letters written by STARK MUNRO, M. B., to
his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell,
Massachusetts, during the years 1881-1884.

“Cullingworth, ... a much more interesting creation than Sherlock
Holmes, and I pray Dr. Doyle to give us more of him.”--_Richard le
Gallienne, in the London Star._




                          BY S. R. CROCKETT.
              Uniform edition. Each, 12mo, cloth, $1.50.


_THE STANDARD BEARER._ An Historical Romance.

“Mr. Crockett’s book is distinctly one of _the_ books of the year.
Five months of 1898 have passed without bringing to the reviewers’
desk anything to be compared with it in beauty of description,
convincing characterization, absorbing plot and humorous appeal. The
freshness and sweet sincerity of the tale are most invigorating,
and that the book will be very much read there is no possible
doubt.”--_Boston Budget._

“The book will move to tears, provoke to laughter, stir the blood, and
evoke heroisms of history, making the reading of it a delight and the
memory of it a stimulus and a joy.”--_New York Evangelist._


_LADS’ LOVE._ Illustrated.

“It seems to us that there is in this latest product much of the
realism of personal experience. However modified and disguised, it
is hardly possible to think that the writer’s personality does not
present itself in Saunders McQuhirr.... Rarely has the author drawn
more truly from life than in the cases of Nance and ‘the Hempie’;
never more typical Scotsman of the humble sort than the farmer Peter
Chrystie.”--_London Athenæum._


_CLEG KELLY, ARAB OF THE CITY. His Progress and Adventures._
Illustrated.

“A masterpiece which Mark Twain himself has never rivaled.... If
there ever was an ideal character in fiction it is this heroic
ragamuffin.”--_London Daily Chronicle._

“In no one of his books does Mr. Crockett give us a brighter or more
graphic picture of contemporary Scotch life than in ‘Cleg Kelly.’...
It is one of the great books.”--_Boston Daily Advertiser._


_BOG-MYRTLE AND PEAT._ Third edition.

“Here are idyls, epics, dramas of human life, written in words that
thrill and burn.... Each is a poem that has an immortal flavor. They
are fragments of the author’s early dreams, too bright, too gorgeous,
too full of the blood of rubies and the life of diamonds to be caught
and held palpitating in expression’s grasp.”--_Boston Courier._

“Hardly a sketch among them all that will not afford pleasure to the
reader for its genial humor, artistic local coloring, and admirable
portrayal of character.”--_Boston Home Journal._


_THE LILAC SUNBONNET._ Eighth edition.

“A love story, pure and simple, one of the old-fashioned, wholesome,
sunshiny kind, with a pure-minded, sound-hearted hero, and a heroine
who is merely a good and beautiful woman; and if any other love
story half so sweet has been written this year it has escaped our
notice.”--_New York Times._

“The general conception of the story, the motive of which is the
growth of love between the young chief and heroine, is delineated
with a sweetness and a freshness, a naturalness and a certainty,
which places ‘The Lilac Sunbonnet’ among the best stories of the
time.”--_New York Mail and Express._




                            BY ALBERT LEE.
                 12mo. Cloth. $1.00; paper, 50 cents.
                IN APPLETONS’ TOWN AND COUNTRY LIBRARY.


The Gentleman Pensioner.

The scene of this admirable historical romance is laid in the
tumultuous England of the sixteenth century, at the time when the
plots of the partisans of Mary Stuart against Elizabeth seemed to be
approaching a culmination. The hero, Queen Elizabeth’s confidential
messenger, has a trust to execute which involves a thrilling series of
adventures. This stirring romance has been compared to “A Gentleman of
France,” and it is safe to say that no reader will find in its pages
any reason for flagging interest or will relinquish the book until the
last page has been reached.


The Key of the Holy House.

A Romance of Old Antwerp.

“A romance of Antwerp in the days of the Spanish oppression. Mr. Lee
handles it in vigorous fashion.”--_London Spectator._

“This is a fascinating specimen of the historical romance at its
best, the romance which infuses energetic life into the dry facts of
history.”--_Philadelphia Press._


D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

--Seene, on page 110, has been changed to scene.

--Bench, on page 153, has been changed to Bunch.

--Lateen, on page 86, has been changed to nankeen, to match the
  later description of the sail.

--The redundant no on page 247 has been removed.

--Dialect has not been regularized across this e-book.

--Spelling and hyphenation have been rendered as typeset.



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