THE PEACE PRESERVED
AFTER Juno’s sudden disappearance the theatre and the _caffès_ of
Mulberry lost their charm for Signor Di Bello. He began to roam
abroad evenings in quest of amusement. There came to him a newborn
desire to explore the region of American life that lay beyond the
colony’s border. For twelve years he had dwelt in its heart and felt
the throb of the big city; but never before had it struck his mind
to know more of this _terra misteriosa_ than he could learn from the
morning _Araldo_ and the evening _Bolletino_, two local scions of the
corybantic press, which bawled the news of Mulberry in double-column
scares, but only whispered in paragraphs of the affairs of New York.
With sixty thousand others Mulberry was his world. He had never
sought acquaintance with the great American monster whose roar filled
the surrounding air by day and whose million eyes at night gave the
northern sky a dim, false dawn.
From visiting Bowery shows he became a patron of the vaudeville
theatres farther up town. At length he discovered the Tenderloin, with
its dazzling electric displays at the doors of theatres and drinking
places, its phantom gaiety. Resolved to sound the depths of this ocean
of lights, he went along with a current that flowed to the box office
of the Titania, where the glittering Aztec spectacle, “Zapeaca” was the
magnet, charged with “one hundred American beauties.”
“By Cristoforo Colombo, it is she!” the grocer exclaimed, as the woman
he had hunted in a cityful marched across the stage, bringing up the
rear of a long column of high-heeled warriors. Though disguised in a
tin spear, a pasteboard shield, and a sheening helmet set jauntily
upon her bounteous raven mane, he knew her at first sight. No mistaking
that snub nose, that grand carriage, the plethora of her line, the
Eastern warmth of her colour.
“_Brava!_” he cried out, from his seat near the footlights whenever the
row of beauties to which she belonged showed themselves in marching
order. It was a renewal of the transport into which her presence had
thrown him when in solitary pride she held the stage of La Scala and
bleated “Santa Lucia.” To the jeers of the people about him he paid no
heed, but gave wild, vociferous expression to his delight at finding
her and feasting his eyes upon her, as she stood there in all the truth
of the ballet’s scant drapery.
After the performance he waited in front of the theatre until the
lights were extinguished and the big doors slammed in his face. Well it
was for the public peace that his education did not include a knowledge
of the stage door, for had he gone round the corner to that entrance
not only would he have encountered Juno, but he would have witnessed
the infuriating afterpiece of Bertino taking her arm and carrying her
off toward the East side. It is not unlikely that one steel blade at
least would have gleamed in the half light of that by-street. But his
innocence as to the right door at which to await a lady of the ballet
caused a postponement of the tragedy. When at last he sought the advice
of a cabman and was directed to the proper place it was too late.
“_Satana porco!_” he growled as he started homeward. “I am a grand
donkey. This is Saturday. To-morrow is _festa_. Two whole days must I
go without seeing her. But on Monday night we shall meet, and then she
shall be my promised wife.”
At the same time Juno was telling Bertino of her determination to go
with the “Zapeaca” company in a tour of the country. They talked as
they moved along on foot toward the Third Avenue Elevated. “It is only
ten dollars a week,” she said, “with all expenses save the railroad to
pay; but what would you have? Is it not better than living here the way
you support me? Perhaps you think I will spend my money. Not even in
a dream! A woman expects her husband to support her. To-morrow night,
then, I go.”
“How long shall you be absent?” asked Bertino humbly.
“Goldoni says six months anyway; perhaps longer.”
“You will come back to me?”
“Yes”--and after a pause--“when you can support me like a signora.”
“In six months!” said Bertino exultantly. “Ha! then I shall be my own
_padrone_. Then you shall see what a man your husband is.”
“Why?”
“Armando’s bust will be here. Don’t you remember? The bust that shall
bring us both fortune. Patience, patience, my precious. Mark what I
say: With the grand marble of the First Lady of the Land once in my
hands I shall quickly put my uncle in a sack. In his face I will snap
my fingers and say, ‘I beg to inform you, signore, that Juno is my
wife.’”
She made no answer, and Bertino went on building airy mansions of the
golden harvest to follow the sale of the sculpture then under way
as well as that to be reaped from other marbles to be turned out of
Armando’s far-off workshop. His words affected Juno in a manner that
he little kenned. She had given herself only a fugitive thought as
to what might happen when the bust should arrive and Bertino should
find it an image of his own wife instead of the wife of the President
of the United States. When the critical moment came, when the fruit
of her roguery stood unveiled, she felt that she should be equal to
it--that she could shrug her shoulders and meet Bertino’s suspicions
with a simple plea of ignorance, and trust to his believing that he
himself sent the wrong photograph by mistake. Now she perceived that
it behooved her to keep friends with him, to guile him with affection,
else his suspicion when he should discover the fraud might take the
cast of sullen conviction, and in Mulberry who can tell what a husband
may do with a false wife, whatever the shade of her duplicity may be?
Moreover, she wanted the bust. Her rude self-conceit thirsted for that
effigy in stone of her own dear self. To lose it would be to miss the
prize on which she had set her desire when she said “Yes” that day in
the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian.
“Ah, yes,” she replied when they stood on the Elevated platform. “We
shall put your uncle in a sack and get along well together when the
bust is here.”
“_Brava_, my wife!” said Bertino, and they entered the train.
* * * * *
Next day being the Feast of Sunday, Bertino and his uncle met at the
noon repast in Casa Di Bello, as they had done every Sunday since
Carolina’s absence. The grocer was in jubilant spirits, unable to
contain his joy over the finding of Juno.
“Ah, nephew mine,” he said, when Angelica had set a large bowl of
steaming chestnut soup on the board and retired to her listening place.
“Not many days, _caro mio_, and we shall have a fine woman at table
with us. Yes, a woman truly magnificent.”
“Who is she?”
“The woman who is to be my wife. I told you once. Can you not divine?”
“No.”
“Well, I will tell you, though it is a great secret: Juno the Superb.”
A spoonful of soup that Bertino was in the act of swallowing took the
wrong course and choked him, while Angelica was thrown from her balance
at the head of the kitchen stairs and almost fell to the bottom. When
Bertino had stopped coughing he gasped:
“Juno the Superb?”
“Yes. Is it not famous?”
“Your wife?”
“Yes. Ah, what joy!”
“But it is impossible!”
“Not at all, nephew mine. I have found her. I saw her last night
for the first time since the Feast of San Giorgio. Ah, how I had
searched! It was in the theatre that I saw her--at the Titania, a
grand spectacle. So many women, and beautiful! But not one was the
equal of Juno. My word of honour for that. Well, I waited after the
representation, but did not see her. To-morrow night, though, I shall
say to her: ‘Juno, be my wife. In three months come to my house, to
Casa Di Bello.’ These words will I say to her, and I shall wait at the
stage door until she comes out.”
“You will wait many months, then,” said Bertino to himself with a
smothered chuckle as he fell upon a patty of codfish that Angelica had
just brought in.
“Grand trouble, grand trouble,” sighed Angelica, as she prepared the
after-dinner _zabaglioni_[B] for her master. “If the signorina were
here he would not dare bring her to the house. And when she comes and
finds the singer has been in Casa Di Bello! O Maria--_grandissimo_
trouble!”
[Footnote B: An Italian eggnog, served hot.]
In the evening Bertino accompanied Juno to the Grand Central Depot,
whence she left for Buffalo with the rest of the hundred American
beauties of the “Zapeaca” aggregation.
* * * * *
On Tuesday morning Bertino regarded his uncle quizzically across the
breakfast table, but of his second fruitless visit to the Titania’s
stage door the signore was as silent as the figure of San Patrizio that
looked down upon Casa Di Bello from the architrave of the church on the
opposite side of Mulberry Street. And for many a day thereafter not a
word did he utter concerning any magnificent woman that was to become
his wife.