AT LAST
THE small, pale apparition of Natale, suddenly projected into their
midst, so startled them all that even Olga forgot to listen for the
thud of Il Duca’s heavy body on the ground and the sound of his groans.
They stared open-mouthed for an instant, and then the apparition
vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
But the strains of the “Dead March” now recalled little Olga to
herself, and she darted from behind the curtain and out into the light
of the oil lamp, only to hear a familiar boyish voice instead of her
own answering shrilly Giovanni’s question, “What are you crying about,
child?”
“Because our horse is dead!”
“But are you sure he is quite dead?” And Giovanni’s voice faltered with
sudden fear, as he gazed at Natale’s small, dusty figure kneeling at
the horse’s head, with Oh! such a world of pleading in his dark eyes
and folded hands.
“Quite dead!” wailed Natale.
“Get up and feel his pulse, boy. If there is any pulse he is _not_
dead!” Giovanni spoke fiercely, but there was no frown upon his face.
And so the farce went on as usual, to the end, while Olga, with pouting
lips, slipped behind the curtain again and joined the others who were,
every one, peeping in to see little Natale do his beloved dying-horse
act.
The little girl had come to enjoy her bit of acting with Giovanni and
Il Duca, for kneeling with folded hands and sobbing breath was a pretty
attitude, always loudly applauded, and she no longer feared that Il
Duca would lift his faithful hoof against her. But now, here was Natale
back again, and his shrill little voice going over the silly replies
to the clown in his own, old way. Well, it would be rather nice, after
all, to have Natale again, and she would not fuss about it as there
were so few things he could really do, while she was learning new feats
already, and would soon be riding Tesoro bareback around the ring.
A perfect storm of applause succeeded the end of the dialogue, when Il
Duca scrambled to his feet, and the tent was filled with cries for a
repetition of the scene. But Giovanni turned swiftly and lifted Natale
to the horse’s back, only in time to prevent the child’s falling to the
ground, as if stunned by the noise of the shouting. Out of the ring
and through the smaller tent to the open air beyond Il Duca pranced
proudly, with Giovanni at his bridle, holding Natale in his place with
his free hand.
Outside, they laid the child down on the warm ground in the dim light,
and Arduina brought a cupful of water and bathed his face, while Olga
stood by, and Antonio and Elvira went back to help Giovanni with his
table-leaping inside.
“He is not dead, is he, Arduina?” Olga asked in a frightened voice.
“Feel his pulse as we do Il Duca’s!”
“Hurry and call Nonna!” the older girl urged nervously. “We shall have
to go in, the very next thing after this, and Nonna will know what to
do.”
So when Natale next opened his eyes, the light of a sputtering candle
showed him the gray head of dear Nonna bent over him. He lay on a small
mattress in a corner, and the smoke-stained ceiling of the house-wagon
shut out the sky.
“_Ecco!_ he opens his eyes, my _bimbo_! my Natalino! _Carino_,[10] what
does it all mean? Tell Nonna how you have come back to the _circo_!”
[Footnote 10: Darling.]
But at first Natale only lifted one hand to stroke the dear, wrinkled
face of Nonna, in smiling content. After a little, he laid his hand on
the breast of his blouse and begged to be allowed to go to Giovanni.
“He will not scold me for coming back when he sees what I have brought
with me,” he urged.
But Nonna reminded him that the tent was still crowded with
spectators,--did he not hear the music close by, and the laughter
of the people, as the clown and Antonio and Arduina did the funny
pantomime?
Natale lay back listening, with a happy smile on his lips, while Nonna
went to blow up the coals of a small fire on the ground outside, and
to hurry the broth that Natale might have nourishment. She could not
prevail upon the boy to confide to her what he was so anxious to tell
his stepfather, and she left him alone, too glad to have him returned
to them, to grumble over his reticence.
Of all the children, Natale most sweetly recalled her own son’s
childhood, and Antonio’s boyish affection for her, his cheeriness and
obedience, had seemed to live again in Natale, although he was Elvira’s
son, and no grandson, at all, of her own.
The little ones, Tito, Maria, Gigi and the rest, were asleep in their
corners, and Nonna had been sitting at rest in the wagon door when
Olga had rushed up with the news that Natale had arrived and lay
dying, perhaps, on the ground outside the tent. It was Nonna’s strong
arms that had borne him away to the house-wagon, and Nonna’s vigorous
rubbings and applications of cold water that had brought him out of
the half-swoon of exhaustion. So Nonna was content with her work, and
would not press Natalino’s secret from him.
By the time the performance was over, and the merry-makers had streamed
out whistling, chatting and laughing together, and had gone their ways
homeward, Natale, fed and rested, was sitting up bright-eyed and eager
to announce his news.
It was stuffy and hot in the wagon, and Giovanni went to fetch the
boy outside, the moment the tent had emptied and the players were at
leisure. Olga had not even taken time to change the yellow satin blouse
and pink tights for her usual faded cotton frock. As for Antonio, he
had only slipped his feet into a pair of loose slippers, so the great
acrobat stood before Natale in all the glory of his spangled black
velvet and shapely, pink-clad limbs.
As the night was dark, one of the lamps was brought from the tent, and
a wild, gypsy-like scene its rays revealed under the trees about the
steps of the house-wagon. Elvira, in an access of motherly tenderness,
gathered Natale to her red satin bosom, and called him by all the
musical pet names belonging to the boys and girls of Italy, while
the musicians peeped over the shoulders of the actors and wondered
how little Natale had ever found his way on foot all the way from
Cutigliano to the Bagni.
“The tramping will have limbered up his legs!” one whispered to another.
“Stiffened them, rather!” was the reply, and then everybody stopped
talking and only gazed the harder as Natale put his hand within the
breast of his blouse and drew out the old leather pocketbook.
“There, Giovanni!” he said simply, reaching the book toward his
stepfather. “The ugly, black peddler with the red cap like our Leo’s
stole the money, and while he slept on his back, by the road, I stole
it from him, and then--Oh, how fast I ran and ran that he might not
catch me and kill me with his long, sharp knife!”
Giovanni, speechless with astonishment and joy, solemnly received and
kissed and opened the pocketbook, and then spread out the notes, one by
one, on his knee, while the rest crowded around, counting them aloud.
What if all should not be there? Natale’s eyes shone feverishly as he
leaned forward from his mother’s knee, his gaze alternately upon the
clown’s face, and the long, lithe fingers handling the money.
Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five,
forty, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, seventy,
seventy-five, eighty, eighty-two, eighty-four, eighty-six,
eighty-eight, ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three,
ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight,
ninety-nine, _one hundred_!
Natale’s head dropped back against the red satin shoulder of his
mother, and his large eyes gazed wistfully into Giovanni’s face.
Would they let him stay now that he had come all the weary way “after
the wagon”, bringing them the lost money? Their welcome had been
encouraging; would they let him remain, or must he be sent back to
Cutigliano, to the priest, to Sora Grazia, to school, to imprisonment
in a house without wheels, and without Nonna?
It was Antonio Bisbini who brought up the question finally and in a
manner settled it with his slow-spoken words. Everybody had wondered
and rejoiced over the safe return of the pocketbook, with the money
untouched, and Natale had had to tell all about the peddler, and the
risks he had run of rousing the fellow from sleep in making his escape
with the pocketbook.
“He was the man who teased me to buy the beautiful diamond brooch on
the day of San Lorenzo!” cried pretty Arduina, who well remembered
the peddler’s flattering attentions to her in his hope of finding a
purchaser for his paltry glass jewelry.
“And the same who so frightened our Tito outside the church,” Nonna
chimed in indignantly. “And he all the time pretended to be so pious
and anxious to see the saints’ relics in the church! No wonder Tito
cried at the snapping of those dirty, thievish fingers in his little
face. The saints only know how he found the money in Giovanni’s
coat-pocket hung in the tent!”
“Mamá _mia_, do you remember how stiff my legs were when I played at
leaping with the boys at school in Florence?” Antonio, the finished
acrobat, asked thoughtfully, breaking a long straw with his fingers and
looking at nobody. His blond head reached almost to the lowest boughs
of the chestnut tree under which he stood, and the lamplight flared
over his fair face and glittering costume.
Natale sat up to hear the words of this oracle, and even slipped off
the satin lap of Elvira to the ground, in order to be nearer Antonio.
“I remember that you were a studious boy,” Nonna murmured in reply,
with a note of the old bitterness in her voice.
“Natale has done a good work in returning the money to us, Giovanni,”
the acrobat continued. “Why send him back to the foreigners? He was
unhappy, or he would never have come all this distance alone--mere baby
that he is.”
“And the Englishwoman’s money?” Giovanni asked in a businesslike tone.
“What has been used, replace from the pocketbook. It is not much, as we
have taken in so good a sum, here at the Bagni. Leo can ride back with
it to Cutigliano to-morrow morning, and return in time for our last
night here.”
“_Ebbene!_” said Giovanni, and this meaning “All right, with a very
good will,” so it was decided, and then everybody hurried to get into
comfortable old clothes and to eat supper.
Leo was sent to the nearest wine shop for a bottle of good red wine
that the troop might drink to the joy of Natale’s return and the
recovery of the money; also to the just discomfiture of all thieving
peddlers.
Long before the evening came to an end, a tired but most happy little
boy had crept into the shadow and fallen asleep, with his head pillowed
against Nonna’s knee.
“I am glad thou art come back to us, Natalino,” she whispered in the
softest Italian above the tangled brown curls, while the rest sang and
made merry, “and if thy little legs will only grow as straight and as
strong as my Antonio’s, and thy heart remain as faithful to old Nonna,
the saints forgive me if I care very much whether thou be acrobat or
priest!”
* * * * *
For some reason known best to himself, but readily guessed by the clown
and the rest of the older members of the circus, the swarthy peddler
was not seen in Bagni di Lucca for many a day after. But Natale did
not lose his dread of encountering the fierce eyes and the cruel knife
until long after the circus troop had taken to the road again.
Nothing in the world could have induced Mrs. Bishop, the English lady
at Cutigliano, to touch the money returned with, what was to her, most
astonishing promptness and honesty through Leo, one of the musicians.
In the first place, the notes were very dirty, much more so, she was
sure, than when she had paid them to the clown a little more than a
week before. Secondly, she would not reclaim money which had been once
devoted to the cause of civilization and of education. If the “little
ingrate” despised his opportunities and had finally returned to his
“wallowing in the mire”, let the money which would have bought him
for decency and for usefulness go with him. Thirdly--but this was not
acknowledged even to Betty--the old lady’s heart had been touched by
the tale Luigi the priest had come to tell her on the morning after
the flight of the birdling. So her heart was not quite so hard as
her words sounded, and she was in truth rather rejoiced, as well as
very much relieved in mind, when Leo had arrived to tell of runaway
Natale’s return to the troop in safety. Therefore, generously, Mrs.
Bishop would not receive the money because it seemed to her no longer
her own; surely Giovanni and Elvira and Nonna had kept their part of
the bargain in giving up the child, while Natale had not even been
consulted in their plan.
The roll of notes was therefore returned by Leo to Giovanni, with the
foreign lady’s instructions that the money was to be spent in providing
meat for broth for the children so long as it should last. There would
still be plenty of cold water always, free as air, for daily baths
along the roads of Italy, and Mrs. Bishop hoped that Sora Grazia’s
ministrations in that line would not soon be forgotten by Natale, who
for one short week had been a scrubbed little lad. (It is safe to say
that they were not!)
Along with the money, Mrs. Bishop sent a school primer to Natale,
with the admonition that he would at least try to learn to read
while jogging up and down the earth and upsetting his stomach in all
heathenish sports.
But Madame Cioche and Betty rejoiced in open triumph over Natale’s
freedom, to say nothing of the priest Luigi and the wise old gentleman
who had in fact unwittingly opened the cage door for flight.
Sora Grazia was a trifle glum for a day or two at finding her pains
thrown away upon the sulky little protégé of the foreign lady, but as
the month’s pay for his board and lodging had been in advance, and the
nearly new clothes and shoes and cap were now thrown into the bargain
by Mrs. Bishop, to repay her for her extra trouble, she too soon became
content and even pleased with the ending of the rich lady’s scheme.
So the bare front wall of the priest’s house in Cutigliano among the
mountains has, as yet, no prospect of being adorned by a memorial
tablet to a waif of all outdoors who was willing to be a great man in
books and goodness.
And Natale?
Well, Natale is learning, better and better, how to turn his
_capitomboli_ over the dusty circus carpet, and he still feels Il
Duca’s pulse with sorrowful apprehension to the tune of the “Dead March
in Saul”--by night among the oil lamps.
By day, he trudges along hot white roads, under the marvelous blue of
Italy’s sky, with Niero and Bianco for company. Or, he lies on the
ground at Nonna’s side under some spreading tree in the camping-out
times, sometimes spelling out words in a dog-eared primer, oftener
gazing past the tree tops at the cloud-ships sailing overhead, while
Nonna tells of Antonio’s wonderful childhood.
By and by, when Natale grows too large to do the dying-horse act, and
little Tito, or Gigi takes his place, he will be dashing with the
horses around the ring. And then, in the still further and sweeter by
and by, when Antonio’s agile legs will perhaps have begun to stiffen
again, and the straight back to bend forward a little as he walks, who
but Natale will be the shining star of the Circo Equestre, like another
bespangled, pink-clad Antonio, with crisp brown curls and laughing
eyes, and the nimblest, straightest legs in all Italy?
_The story of a little patriotic Cuban girl_
LITTLE CUBA LIBRE
_By_ JANIE PRICHARD DUGGAN
Illustrated. 282 pages. 12mo. $1.35 _net._
In all the big city of Havana there was no more patriotic little girl
than Amada Trueno, daughter of one of the city gardeners. With all her
heart she hated the Spaniards who ruled her beloved island of Cuba.
“Little Cuba Libre” they called her when she stamped her foot and
called the Spaniards enemies and tyrants. When she went to her cousin’s
house in the country, although she played on friendly terms with the
children of a Spanish planter, still her hatred of the oppressors
slumbered. How the Cubans finally revolted, and how little Amada
herself took part in that revolution, even to the extent of bearing
arms, is told in this charming story. “Little Cuba Libre” contains
faithful pictures of Cuban life and Cuban people, and while written
especially for young readers, its fine qualities should also appeal to
older ones. Besides being an interesting story of Cuban girlhood it is
a depiction of the very spirit of patriotism.
LITTLE, BROWN & CO., PUBLISHERS
34 BEACON STREET, BOSTON
_Real stories of three famous elephants_
THE ADVENTURES OF
MOLLIE, WADDY and TONY
_By_ PAUL WAITT
Illustrated in color by Clara E. Atwood.
75 cents net.
Mollie, Waddy and Tony are three of the most wonderful elephants in the
world. Born in India, they have traveled all over Europe and our own
America, showing their clever tricks to thousands of boys and girls.
They were bought by the children of Boston and are now kept in the
Franklin Park Zoo, where they will remain the rest of their lives.
Mr. Waitt writes of their adventures when they were traveling, and
tells of some tricks they played which their keeper never taught them.
Little Tony is the roguish one, and he is always getting into mischief.
That clever little trunk of his pokes into all sorts of places where it
doesn’t belong, and sometimes it takes Mollie, Waddy and Johann, the
keeper, to make him behave as a proper little elephant should.
“This is the most bewitching elephant story we ever read. It is
the story of their travels through many countries. It is as good a
story for boys and girls as any boys and girls will ever want to
read.”--_Journal of Education_, Boston.
“The story of ‘The Adventure of Mollie, Waddy, and Tony’ is one of
the nicest that little people who like animals can read.”--_New York
Times._
LITTLE, BROWN & CO., PUBLISHERS
34 BEACON STREET, BOSTON
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
On page 4, Tesore has been changed to Tesoro.
On page 71, up-stairs has been changed to upstairs.
Illustrations have been moved to avoid interrupting the flow of
paragraphs.
In text edition of this e-book, footnotes have been moved to
immediately below the paragraph where they occurred.
All other spelling, hyphenation, and non-English dialogue have been
retained.