## The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Last Lady of Mulberry: A Story of Italian New York

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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]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

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

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

[Pg 1]

## 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 [Pg 2]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 [Pg 3]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 [Pg 4]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,[Pg 5] 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.

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 [Pg 6]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 [Pg 7]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.”

[Pg 8]

“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,[Pg 9] 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 [Pg 10]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 [Pg 11]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 [Pg 12]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.

[Pg 13]

“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[Pg 14] 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!”

[Pg 15]

“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.

[Pg 16]

“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 [Pg 17]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?

[Pg 18]

## 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[Pg 19] 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 [Pg 20]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.

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 [Pg 21]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 [Pg 22]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 [Pg 23]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. [Pg 24]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.

[Pg 25]

“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 [Pg 26]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,[Pg 27] 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.

[Pg 28]

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 [Pg 29]proudly, unabashed by her poignant stare. “Are you Angelica the cook?”

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 [Pg 30]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 [Pg 31]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.

[Pg 32]

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[Pg 33] 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 [Pg 34]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. [Pg 35]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 [Pg 36]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.

[Pg 37]

## 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 [Pg 38]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, [Pg 39]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, [Pg 40]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, [Pg 41]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 [Pg 42]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 [Pg 43]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.

[Pg 44]

## 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 [Pg 45]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 [Pg 46]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.

[Pg 47]

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, [Pg 48]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.”

[Pg 49]

“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 [Pg 50]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 [Pg 51]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 [Pg 52]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 [Pg 53]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! [Pg 54]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 [Pg 55]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, [Pg 56]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.

[Pg 57]

## 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 [Pg 58]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 [Pg 59]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 [Pg 60]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 [Pg 61]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. [Pg 62]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 [Pg 63]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 [Pg 64]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,[Pg 65] 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 [Pg 66]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.”

[Pg 67]

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 [Pg 68]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 [Pg 69]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. [Pg 70]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:

[Pg 71]

“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[Pg 72] 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. [Pg 73]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?”

[Pg 74]

“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.”

[Pg 75]

## 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 [Pg 76]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 [Pg 77]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. [Pg 78]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 [Pg 79]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? [Pg 80]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.”

[Pg 81]

“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.”

[Pg 82]

## 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 [Pg 83]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 [Pg 84]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 [Pg 85]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 [Pg 86]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.”

[Pg 87]

“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 [Pg 88]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.”

[Pg 89]

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 [Pg 90]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 [Pg 91]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 [Pg 92]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 [Pg 93]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.

[Pg 94]

## 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 [Pg 95]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 [Pg 96]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 [Pg 97]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 [Pg 98]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 [Pg 99]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!”

[Pg 100]

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.

[Pg 101]

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.”

[Pg 102]

## 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 [Pg 103]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 [Pg 104]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 [Pg 105]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 [Pg 106]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 [Pg 107]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,[Pg 108] 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 [Pg 109]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.

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 [Pg 110]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 [Pg 111]was many years since she went away, but he knew her. Had the sun overcome her? A broken leg! Dio Santo!

“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, [Pg 112]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[Pg 113] 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.

[Pg 114]

## 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 [Pg 115]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!”

[Pg 116]

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 [Pg 117]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 [Pg 118]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[Pg 119] 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?”

[Pg 120]

“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 [Pg 121]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. [Pg 122]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.

[Pg 123]

## 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.

[Pg 124]

“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, [Pg 125]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 [Pg 126]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 [Pg 127]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.

[Pg 128]

“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 [Pg 129]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 [Pg 130]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 [Pg 131]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!”

[Pg 132]

“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?”

[Pg 133]

“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? [Pg 134]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.”

[Pg 135]

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 [Pg 136]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 [Pg 137]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. [Pg 138]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 [Pg 139]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[Pg 140] 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.

[Pg 141]

“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.

[Pg 142]

“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.”

[Pg 143]

## 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. [Pg 144]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 [Pg 145]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 [Pg 146]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 [Pg 147]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 [Pg 148]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[Pg 149] 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 [Pg 150]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!”

[Pg 151]

“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[Pg 152] 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!”

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.

[Pg 153]

## 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 [Pg 154]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 [Pg 155]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, [Pg 156]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?”

[Pg 157]

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 [Pg 158]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 [Pg 159]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 [Pg 160]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:

[Pg 161]

“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 [Pg 162]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.

[Pg 163]

“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 [Pg 164]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 [Pg 165]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, [Pg 166]“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.

[Pg 167]

“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 [Pg 168]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 [Pg 169]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 [Pg 170]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 [Pg 171]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.

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.

[Pg 172]

## 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[Pg 173] 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,” [Pg 174]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[Pg 175] 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.” [Pg 176]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 [Pg 177]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. [Pg 178]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 [Pg 179]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——”

[Pg 180]

“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 [Pg 181]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 [Pg 182]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 [Pg 183]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 [Pg 184]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.

[Pg 185]

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.

[Pg 186]

## 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 [Pg 187]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 [Pg 188]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 [Pg 189]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.

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, [Pg 190]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 [Pg 191]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 [Pg 192]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, [Pg 193]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 [Pg 194]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, [Pg 195]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 [Pg 196]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.”

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, [Pg 197]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 [Pg 198]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.

[Pg 199]

“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 [Pg 200]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 [Pg 201]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 [Pg 202]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.”

[Pg 203]

“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 [Pg 204]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 [Pg 205]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?”

[Pg 206]

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, [Pg 207]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.”

[Pg 208]

“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 [Pg 209]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 [Pg 210]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.

[Pg 211]

## 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 [Pg 212]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.

[Pg 213]

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 [Pg 214]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, [Pg 215]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 [Pg 216]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 [Pg 217]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.

[Pg 218]

“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, [Pg 219]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 [Pg 220]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[Pg 221] 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, [Pg 222]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[Pg 223] 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 [Pg 224]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 [Pg 225]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 [Pg 226]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 [Pg 227]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.

[Pg 228]

## 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[Pg 229] 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?”

[Pg 230]

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!

[Pg 231]

“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 [Pg 232]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 [Pg 233]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 [Pg 234]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. [Pg 235]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 [Pg 236]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 [Pg 237]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.

[Pg 238]

## 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[Pg 239] 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 [Pg 240]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 [Pg 241]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 [Pg 242]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[Pg 243] 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 [Pg 244]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 [Pg 245]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 [Pg 246]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 [Pg 247]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! [Pg 248]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 [Pg 249]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 [Pg 250]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 [Pg 251]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[Pg 252] 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 [Pg 253]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.

[Pg 254]

“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.

[Pg 255]

## 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 [Pg 256]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 [Pg 257]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 [Pg 258]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 [Pg 259]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 [Pg 260]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 [Pg 261]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 [Pg 262]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 [Pg 263]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 [Pg 264]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, [Pg 265]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 [Pg 266]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 [Pg 267]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.

[Pg 268]

## 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 [Pg 269]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.

[Pg 270]

“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 [Pg 271]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.

[Pg 272]

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.[Pg 273] “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.

[Pg 274]

“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 [Pg 275]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[Pg 276] 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 [Pg 277]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.

[Pg 278]

## 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 [Pg 279]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[Pg 280] 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 [Pg 281]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 [Pg 282]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 [Pg 283]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 [Pg 284]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 [Pg 285]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 [Pg 286]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 [Pg 287]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.

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.

[Pg 288]

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!”

[Pg 289]

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.”

[Pg 290]

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! [Pg 291]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.

[Pg 292]

## 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 [Pg 293]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!”

[Pg 294]

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 [Pg 295]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.”

[Pg 296]

“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.

[Pg 297]

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 [Pg 298]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 [Pg 299]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 [Pg 300]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 [Pg 301]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. [Pg 302]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. [Pg 303]“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 [Pg 304]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 [Pg 305]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!”

[Pg 306]

“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 [Pg 307]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.”

[Pg 308]

## 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 [Pg 309]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 [Pg 310]“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——”

[Pg 311]

“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[Pg 312] 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[Pg 313] 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.

[Pg 314]

## 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 [Pg 315]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 [Pg 316]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 [Pg 317]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.”

[Pg 318]

“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, [Pg 319]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 [Pg 320]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 [Pg 321]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 [Pg 322]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 [Pg 323]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 [Pg 324]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,[Pg 325] 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 [Pg 326]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.”

[Pg 327]

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?”

[Pg 328]

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 [Pg 329]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.

[Pg 330]

“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.”

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BOOKS BY GRAHAM TRAVERS.

W INDYHAUGH. 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.

M ONA 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.

F ELLOW 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.

C ONCERNING 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.

L ATITUDE 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.

U NCLE 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.

T HE 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.

R ODNEY 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.

R OUND THE RED LAMP.

Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life.

“A strikingly realistic and decidedly original contribution to modern literature.”—Boston Saturday Evening Gazette.

T HE 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.

T HE 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.

L ADS’ 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.

C LEG 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.

B OG-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.

T HE 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.

Footnotes:

[A] A priest’s housekeeper.

[B] An Italian eggnog, served hot.

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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