A HOUSE DIVIDED
A TRAIN for Jamaica next morning carried four anxious souls from
Mulberry. In one car were Signori Di Bello and Tomato, in another
Carolina and Armando. The banker had agreed to meet Armando at the
country station; but the sculptor had given no hint that he would have
Carolina in company, nor did either of the latter dream of finding
Signor Di Bello with the banker. They all met on the station platform.
At sight of Carolina her brother divined her state of mind. He knew
that her presence meant the first advance of a revived era of meddling
in his love affairs, and with the perversity of the ripe-aged swain he
resented it as stoutly as though his own judgment about woman had not
just been caught soundly napping.
“You have come to see the husband of your brother’s bride, I suppose,”
he said. “You are glad to be near to see me made a fool of, _neh_?”
“No,” she answered; “I seek only the proofs that Casa Di Bello is not
to be disgraced.”
They climbed into a creaky, swaying stage that the banker hired to
convey them to the iron villa.
“It was you that said she was the Presidentessa,” broke out the
signore, eying Armando on the opposite seat. “What the porcupine did
you mean?”
As the decrepit stage squeaked through the village, plunging and
tossing on its feeble springs like a boat in a choppy sea, Armando gave
the history of the Last Lady--the jugglery of the photographs, of which
the banker had told him; his months of fruitless toil on the second
Juno following a year lost on the first.
“Ah, signore,” he added, yielding to a blank sense of desolation,
“surely the evil eye has fallen upon me and I am doomed to fiasco.”
“Body of a rhinoceros!” was Signor Di Bello’s first comment. Then he
added, after an apparent mental struggle with the stubborn truth: “Yes;
she has made grand trouble for you, but you shall not suffer. I will
buy your Juno and the Peacock and--the other Juno, if only to smash it
in a thousand pieces!”
“Will you pay me back the Dogana, signore?” put in the banker, striking
the hot iron. “I too have been ruined by the Last Lady.”
“Excuse me, signore; you are old enough to know better.”
“And so are you,” chirped Tomato, whereat Signor Di Bello held his
tongue.
They had left the village street behind and were tottering over a rude
wagon trail that threaded the thicket of dwarf oaks on whose margin
crouched the dwelling of the Tomatoes. The site of the iron villa was
not far distant, and from its kitchen chimney a spiral of ascending
smoke showed plainly in the sunlight that bathed the flat landscape.
From the railroad cut the muffled roar of a passing train lent a basso
undertone to the squeak and clack of the voluble stage. At length they
struck into the road that borders the railway, and the banker leaned
out of the vehicle and peered ahead, wondering if all were well with
Bridget and the youngsters. As he drew nearer, the deeper became a look
of horror that had come upon his face.
“_Diavolo!_” he exclaimed at last. “A new calamity!”
“What is it?”
“Half of my house is gone.”
One woe-begone pipe was all that he could see of the imposing
double-tubed villa that reclined there so proudly two days before.
Stripped of the foliage that had shielded it and its mate from the
burning sun, it loomed black in ominous nakedness.
Had further evidence of disaster been needful, the countenance of
Bridget would have supplied it abundantly. Like a feminine Marius, she
sat amid the ruins of the Tomato Carthage. Strewn about her in wild
disorder were the twigs of oak that had been so carefully fashioned
over the pipes, mingled with the bedclothes and boxes that had
furnished the interior of the dormitory. The little garden of tomato
plants that had been set out at the back doors bore the vandal marks of
hobnailed boots and was slashed with the tracks of heavy wheels.
“Where’s the other pipe?” shrieked the banker before the stage came to
a stop.
“Howly shamrock, Domenico, is it yersilf? Sure I thought they was
comin’ for the rest iv the house. Where aire ye these two days, and the
worruld comin’ to an ind all around us?”
“No ees-a maka differenza where I’m goin’ be,” he said, jumping down,
followed by Signor Di Bello, Carolina, and Armando. “I ask-a you where
ees-a de oder pipa?”
“Ax the divvil and he’ll tell yer betther, for the ground has opened
and shwalleyed it.”
There was a chorus of whoops at the edge of the brush, and the trio of
juvenile Tomatoes came trooping toward their father.
“What-a kind talk you call-a dees-a?” he said, glaring at Bridget and
pushing away the children fiercely. “I ask-a you, where ees-a de pipa?”
“And I answer that I don’t knaw, Dominick Tomah-toe! Me and the childer
was away beyandt there, pickin’ dandelie-yuns, d’ye moind! Be the sun,
I’m thinkin’ we was gone two hours. Well, whin we got back only the wan
pipe was there, and a cushibaloo made iv the place as ye see it now.”
“And Bertino, where ees-a?”
“Gone wid the pipe.”
“Goin’ weet de pipa?” echoed the others.
“Didn’t I say it?”
“And de bust-a, ees-a where?” asked Signor Di Bello.
“Gone wid the pipe.”
“Bravo!” cried the grocer, who saw the case against Juno crumbling.
Locking his hands behind him, he began to whistle cheerfully, his eyes
on the moving pictures of the sky.
“Shame to you, my brother!” broke out Carolina. Then she took the
witness in hand. “When you have seen-a Bertino--de last-a time, ees-a
when?”
“Airly this mornin’ whin we wint for the dandelie-yuns, me and the
childer here.”
“And he no more coma back?”
“Divvil a hair iv him.”
“Bravo!” again from the grocer, the last barrier between him and Juno
levelled.
“Where he say he go?” asked Carolina.
“Well, mum, if I understud his dog Italian and his hog English, he said
he was goin’ to Jamaiky to ax at the post arface was there a letter
from somebody in Mulberry.”
* * * * *
Signor Di Bello returned to New York in high spirits. Whether the
proofs of Juno’s attempted bigamy were and always had been myths of
Tomato’s fancy was not the question that seemed to him of most import
now. What towered above all else was the monolithic fact that the
proofs were missing, and Juno might be his, after all. As the wish
gained firmer hold on the thought, he began to view the doings of the
past two days as moves in a miscarried plot of his sister’s to cheat
him of the woman who challenged his taste.
In the train he sat apart from Carolina and Armando and nursed his
delight. They could see that he was gloating over the events that had
cast them into hopeless gloom. And while they brooded, Signor Di Bello
replanned his wedding. Arrived in Mulberry, he made straight for the
Restaurant of Santa Lucia and caroled the triumphant tidings to Juno.
“Did I not tell you they were a flock of geese?” he said, passing the
bottle of _barbera_. “There was no bust, and, of course, no husband.
But there will be a husband on the Feast of Sunday, my very sympathetic
one,” he cooed.
“Ah! Bertino has received my letter and fled,” she mused under her
fallen eyelids as she tipped the glass.
That evening Signor Di Bello observed to Carolina:
“There will be a wedding in this house next Sunday. The priest will not
be the harebrained Father Nicodemo. I shall invite many of my Genovese
friends, some Milanesi, some Torinesi, and a few of the first families
of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani, for I am a man
above race prejudice.”
It was what she had dreaded since the moment Bridget made known
the fact of Bertino’s melting away. Convinced--without proof,
however--that Juno was his wife, she had resolved never to live under
a bigamous roof, though she might, with a wife of her own selection,
endure life in a monogamous household. Wherefore she would secede from
Casa Di Bello--embrace again the rubric peace of the anagamous rectory.
Father Nicodemo had given her repeated assurance that the latchstring
was always hanging out; that the spaghetti sauces had never been proper
since she left; that they had despaired of having a palatable dish of
boiled snails fricasseed with pepper pods.
“Very well, my brother,” she returned frostily; “when that Neapolitan
baggage comes in, I go out.”
“Ah, you will enter the Church again, I suppose,” he taunted. “Have I
not said it truly--once a priest always a priest?”
“You will have the police in the house,” was her last word.