_Siena_
THE RACING SNAIL
Then at Marseilles, where Cynthia had planned to take train for Paris,
for Cherbourg and a ship for home, she caught up with her mail. One
specially fat and formidable envelope, with many seals, for which she
had to sign papers and more papers, proved to contain, of all things,
the long deferred check for the capture of Goncourt, the jewel thief.
Cynthia, in the office of Cook and Sons, stood surveying the paper
with bright round eyes. So many francs--one thought in francs now, not
in dollars--would purchase--what? Presents for home? Her luggage was
already heavy with ’em. More clothes in Paris? She had, really, all
she needed. A trip to some place farther on? Cynthia nibbled a pink
finger tip and thought about that. Maybe never again, after this once,
would she get to Europe. Maybe she’d be some day, a long time off,
one of those little old ladies with shawls who sit in corners, well
out of the draft, and talk with wistful reminiscence of “when I was in
France--when I was in Italy.” Meaning of course the _one_ time they
were there. Perhaps that wouldn’t be true, perhaps she’d come again in
a year or two. But just the same she owed it to herself to get all she
could out of this adventure while she was right here on the spot. The
thief had proved to be just so many extra francs, dropped by the gods
directly into her lap. Shouldn’t she, therefore, take it for a sign,
cable home that she was waiting for a later boat, and go on with the
adventure?
“When I was in Italy,” the rhythm returned. Cynthia whirled to face the
surprised young man behind the counter.
“If you had a windfall of ... so many hundred or thousand francs,” she
asked him, “where would you go--from here?”
The young man grinned cheerfully and replied in meticulous English.
“Madmoiselle, I should go to Italy.”
“Bon!” Cynthia was enchanted that his advice should agree with her
mental toss of a coin. “And where in Italy, please?”
The young man grinned more widely and shuffled the papers on his
counter. Here then was a customer for the tickets he had to sell.
“Madmoiselle, I should go to the palio in Siena. It is the month for
that. Madmoiselle has heard of the palio? Non? Oh, but then----,” and
he proceeded to expound.
Twenty minutes later Cynthia, walking on air, emerged from Cook and
Sons. In her purse reposed a ticket for Italy. And the palio in Siena
would be one of those things she could talk of, once she got to the age
of relating, “When I was in Italy.”
Five days later Cynthia, in Siena, pressed her small tip tilted nose
flat against the glass of the dusty window, peering in. She had come
again, for the third time today to see the frame. The lovely leather
frame was right in the foreground propped against the glass, just as
it had been yesterday and probably for weeks and weeks before that.
Beside it lay other leather things; cigarette cases, glove boxes
and portfolios, all beautiful. But it was the frame that interested
Cynthia.
It was the one frame in all Siena, which, after all is a city of
leather frames, for the photograph of Chick which she had received in
the mail in Marseilles. And nothing short of perfection was worthy of
holding that picture. In it the face of Chick squarely fronted the
beholder, the hair of Chick was fluffy and rumpled, as it had been when
the Academy bunch had given him his nickname, the eyes looked straight
and truly into the eyes of Cynthia, and the quirky mouth seemed just
about to say: “Hi, Cynthia ... Darling!”
The frame was wine colored, the leather as soft as old satin, and all
around its edge was a delicate gold border of conventional ivy leaves,
with, next to it, a band of oak leaves and tiny acorns, and inside,
next to the glass a tiny frail beading. All very simple but it was the
color and the workmanship that held Cynthia’s eye.
She sighed. She knew to a lira just exactly what was in her purse, knew
that she mustn’t afford the frame, no matter how low the price might
be. Nevertheless she pushed open the paint scarred old door in the
stone housefront and entered the little shop.
It was, as she had expected, dim and dusty within. The proprietor,
an aged little Italian with the down-drooping nose of one who works
in delicate detail, was busy with another customer. She also, was an
American, small and dainty, expensively clad, older than she appeared.
Cynthia smiled to herself. After two months in Europe she knew the type
very well.
“Too much, too much!” she was saying, in Italian over and over again,
and gestured prettily with a gloved hand toward a small pile of
cigarette cases lying on the counter. Unexpectedly then she turned to
Cynthia.
“You look as though you could speak Italian, my dear. Do ask him if he
will give me a better price for the whole dozen. I want them for bridge
prizes, next winter.”
Cynthia was willing to try, and struggled with her scant store of the
language. The proprietor shrugged his shoulders and spread expressive
Italian fingers wide. “Yes, yes, eight, ten lira less perhaps,” he
smiled. And Cynthia knew that all along he had expected to take less
than his original price. But the pretty lady was pleased.
“Wrap them up,” she ordered the man, in the loud tone so often employed
to the foreigner who seems not to understand, as though by mere volume
of sound one could impress one’s meaning.
Cynthia had removed the lovely frame from the window and now held it
in her hand. Close like this, it was even more beautiful than when
viewed through the wavering old glass, and at Cynthia’s “How much?”
the old man smiled almost fondly, as though he too knew this for one
of his best pieces. He named the sum in lire and Cynthia made a rapid
calculation, then, with a sigh, shook her head and turned to replace
it in the window. He might as well have said fifteen hundred dollars,
as fifteen. Why, in her tiny room in the _pensione_ she could live for
two whole weeks on fifteen dollars. Chick would have to wait, unframed,
till she returned to the States and a steady job.
The American lady was still fussing over the wrapping of her package
when Cynthia left the shop and stepped out into the street again, one
of those steep streets of Siena that seemed to bear always in their
sunny stone the tinge of a perpetual sunset glow. From far down the
street came the roll of a drum, and Cynthia who had already seen two
of these _contrade_ rehearsals pelted off as fast as rubber soles on
cobbles could carry her. Never mind the frame, though she gave it a
regretful relinquishing thought.
Tomorrow was the Palio, the famous horse race with which Siena, twice
a year, for the past four hundred years, has celebrated her liberation
from the long arm of her tyrant neighbor, Florence. And now for the
past three days Siena had fallen back, body and spirit, into the
fifteenth century.
Certainly Cynthia, rounding the corner of the narrow street, felt as
though she had been projected feet first into a slice of the middle
ages. Banners of silk and of satin, of tapestry and of heavy velvet,
fringed and tasseled in gold, embroidered with the arms of some ancient
family, hung from a high balcony, and above it, glowing in the warm
stone was carved again the heraldic device. Below the slow swaying
banners stood a little band of Siennese, two drummerboys in long-hose
and doublets, peaked caps over their frizzy locks, their companions two
banner-bearers, all in black and white and gold. The flags displayed
the arms of their _contrada_, or ward; this one Lupa, the Wolf, and
their huge ruffled sleeves and the little purses which dangled from
their belts were embroidered in fine gold with a similar device.
The drums tapped out a strange, intriguing little rhythm while the two
banner bearers, practising their rite, did a sort of solemn dance with
the great five foot square flags. The object seemed to be to keep up a
continual stepping, with the banners never for one moment allowed to
lag. Under the arms and up again, out and beneath the dancing feet, and
the drums always beating faster and faster. Fascinated, Cynthia watched
for the culmination which she knew would come. With a final roll of
the drums the banners were flung high, high, almost ... incredibly, to
the tops of the houses, then descending, their heavy sticks acting as
weights, were caught lightly and skillfully. And the dance, for the
moment, was over.
There was a slight cheer from the small group that had gathered to
watch and a voice behind her said “Gosh, that was great!”
It was such a shock to hear, in this scene of the past, a good American
voice that Cynthia whirled involuntarily to face the speaker. To
her surprise he was all of fifty, with the reddish complexion of a
confirmed golf player, a shock of nice thick white hair, gray tweeds,
the expensive kind, and a panama hat which he wore in his hand.
Cynthia met his smile with one as friendly. “It is nice, isn’t it,” she
said, for no particular reason except that one so often does speak to
fellow Americans on foreign soil. Then she started to turn away.
“They’re having a _prove_, in the Piazza del Campo, this morning,” he
informed her. “Perhaps you’d like to see that too?”
“Oh are they? Thank you,” said Cynthia, and this time she really did
turn away. She had already seen one of the _proves_, the rehearsal for
the big race, and thought she’d prefer, instead of seeing this one, to
find a place to sketch. With her final cover off to America she was
free now to sketch wherever she pleased, and she had an idea that she
might work up material for an exhibition, back in New York. The heads
to be her main attraction but perhaps a few landscapes to add a little
variety to the show.
That afternoon she saw the man again. She had taken her sketch box
and camp stool, and having hired a tiny barouche, was set down about
two miles out of Siena where a little old monastery sat atop a tall
hill. Here among the cypresses she could sketch for an hour, or two,
or three, nibble her apple and sandwiches, and in the cool of later
afternoon pack her box and walk back to town.
Cynthia had chosen a shady angle of the wall, and had roughed in her
drawing; a bit of a gateway tiled in warm red, and a tall niche where
stood a della robbia madonna robed in blue as deep as the Italian
sky. Bougainvillea spilled in a fountain of magenta over the wall,
and Cynthia was struggling with this riot of color when she heard the
_clopity-clop_ of horses’ hoofs, but did not look up. Color dried so
swiftly in this warm dry air, one had no time for distractions.
Then there were voices, two, a man’s and a woman’s, the feminine voice
light, pleasant, but pitched to a note of amused complaint that was
vaguely familiar. Cynthia could not help overhearing.
“Why on earth you had to drag me way out here, Gerald! Oh, of course
the road was lovely, but we have so little time in Siena and I did want
to get in some more shopping ...”
“Shopping! Always shopping! Don’t you get enough shops in the States?”
replied the man’s voice in very husbandly tones.
“Now Gerald, you remember I didn’t really want to come to Siena in the
first place, but then of course I had no idea the leather and the iron
work was so lovely here.”
Leather, that was it! The woman who had bought the cigarette boxes this
morning. And the man with her? Cynthia, absent-mindedly wiping her
brush on her white skirt said a faint “Darn!” for the color was rose
madder and probably would stain ... peered out from behind her wall.
The man was her nice gray haired acquaintance. Well, his trip to the
monastery was no business of hers.
Now how to get that tone of sunlight between the deep leaf-shadows? Ah,
that did it! Intent on the success of a trick of the trade, Cynthia
forgot the voices and when she came out of her corner an hour later
there was no one, native or American, in sight. Cynthia took the two
mile walk home through a lemon tinted sunset, ran into another flag
rehearsal just at the edge of the town and enjoyed it hugely.
So pervasive and insistent was the tap. tap ... tr...r..r..r... tap.
tap. of the drums that she seemed, that night to dream about them all
night long and she woke the next morning with the distant, dream patter
of the rhythm still tapping merrily through her head. In the pale light
of early morning the sound was so real she could not banish it with the
remainder of her doze and finally hopped out of bed to see if she had
been hearing the reality.
Sure enough, just down the street the banner-dancers were practicing
their strange little steps, and the first rays of sunlight over the
housetops caught the gilded tips of the banner staves as they were
flung, in the final flourish of the dance, to the house tops. Cynthia
remembered the fourteenth of July celebration in Paris and grinned to
herself. She was prepared, now, for such festive spirits. Besides that,
and all reports to the contrary notwithstanding, the Italians didn’t
seem to put so much noise into their celebrations as their French
neighbors. But then they let off more steam in just every-day living.
When she had finished her brief and early breakfast and emerged to the
street she saw that this was truly and whole-heartedly a gala day.
The steep cobbled way to the cathedral which crowned the hill was like
an illustration clipped from her Morte d’Arthur, a street made ready
for the entrance of a Lancelot or a King. Banners of silk and banners
of velvet, cloth of gold and cloth of silver, all embroidered with the
arms of Siena and her ruling houses, and, so far as Cynthia knew, of
Mussolini himself, hung from every upper window and balcony, fluttering
in the morning breeze with a constant play of color and pageantry along
the gay little street. Every doorway held smiling faces above the
garments of this holiday mood. Every child carried a brilliant hued
balloon or a whistle, or a small flag. And down around the _piazza_
where the race was to be run the side streets were crowded with tiny
bright colored booths, peddling those cheap and sticky indigestibles
that go with a holiday all the world over.
Cynthia wanted very much to see the ceremony of blessing the horses
that were to run in the race. Only ten of the seventeen wards might
compete, due to the tiny race course, and these would be chosen by lot
just before the race began. Each horse would be in the little chapel of
its own _contrada_, so Cynthia chose the Snail, since that of all the
ward names seemed to appeal to her most. It was so delightfully silly
for a Snail to be running a race, even by proxy.
The chapel was a plain little building of warm stone, hidden in the
lower edges of the walled town, and the room was already crowded with
interested and loyal Snailists, including the horse, who seemed the
most interested of all.
Cynthia listened with delight to the sonorous Latin phrases of the
little priest, but almost burst into giggles at the horse’s astonished
expression when his nose was sprinkled with water from a kind of
overgrown silver pepper box. It was an emotional relief when she caught
a glance from an amused gray eye, twinkling over the heads of the
shorter Sienese and automatically she twinkled back at it. Then she
saw a tuft of stiff white hair and recognized her acquaintance of the
day before. Cynthia flushed and bit her lip. When she looked again he
was gone.
Behind the chapel was a room used for exhibition purposes. Here in the
dim glass cases, dusty with age, were the ancient costumes worn in past
Palios by the jockeys of the Snail. Many of them were hundreds of years
old and all displayed the same careful craftsmanship, the same loving
care for detail that Cynthia had noted in the costumes she had seen on
the streets.
She made some sketches in her notebook, and went back to the _pensione_
by way of the leather shop to have another look at the frame in the
window.
Back in her room she emptied her pocketbook on the bed, and counted her
express checks and lire. But the frame was hopeless. She just couldn’t
manage it, not even if she asked the shop keeper to come down in his
price. The price was fair, Cynthia felt that it was even more than
that, and one couldn’t ask a fellow artist to cheapen his wares.
“I’m afraid, Chick darling,” she told the photograph propped between
the mirror and the hair brush, “you’ll just have to go as you are.
Maybe a little later ...”
For the future looked very bright indeed. Cynthia had already received
two letters from advertising firms who were interested in her covers on
_Little One’s Magazine_, and she had an idea for a new series for that
same publication, once she was back in the States. But at the moment,
in a strange country, with no friend nearer than Nancy and her Mother
in Brittany, Cynthia didn’t dare risk fifteen of her precious dollars.
Oh dear, it was difficult to be poor, ’specially when Chick needed a
frame!
Where at she planted a cautious kiss on the pictured countenance of Mr.
Charles Dalton.
The Palio race was due to start at five that afternoon. Cynthia took
her sketch book and her portfolio to use as a lap-rest and went off
early to find the seat she had purchased three days before. She could
spend the time in sketching the crowd--you never could tell; some day
she might be called on to illustrate a story about Siena and then her
foresight and her sketches would come in handy.
For days the workmen of Siena had been preparing the Piazza del Campo
for this event. In the center was a walled off space known as the Dog’s
Box, where the poorer people might stand. The race course itself came
between this and the tiers of seats raised against the housefronts that
faced the piazza; hard, narrow little seats like the bleachers of a
ball park. But Cynthia was lucky, for she was on the shady side, and
was so interested that she didn’t much care how long she sat there.
Her neighbors were mostly tourists, French, Italians from the south,
Germans, a few Austrians, and one or two Americans. Small boys sold
bags of nuts, and programs in five languages while the shadow of the
bell tower slowly crept across the Dog’s Box and the hard packed earth
of the race course. Cynthia noted the mattresses strapped against the
bare walls at the four corners of the course, presumably that the
horses or riders might not be injured in the scramble around these
dangerous places, and learned from her pink leafed program that many
of the horses did daily duty through Siena’s streets, pulled cabs, or
fruit carts during the year and their owners each belonged to the
_contrada_ from which they were chosen to race.
At last the sound of a mortar. The crowd which had been strolling
leisurely about the course began to squeeze in under the fence to their
places in the box, or scramble, goat-like up the steep tiers of wooden
seats. Urged on by the carabinieri, those delightful, self-contained,
tweedledum and tweedledee police of Italy, loiterers were soon cleared
from the course and way was made for a group of little men, like blue
clad gnomes. These, pushing tiny wheelbarrows, swarmed along the
roadway. Their job seemed to be to cover with earth any places where
the original paving stones might show through.
Then again the sound of the mortar. And here they come!
First the Ensign Bearer of Siena, with the simple black and white flag
of the city. Then the Palace Trumpets, the picturesque long trumpets
with their pendent banners carried by youthful pages in jaunty velvet
caps, slashed doublet and sleekly silken hose. Then the musicians,
all in costume and the crossbowmen with their ancient weapons and at
last a group from each _contrada_. In each group a drummer, two flag
bearers, a Lord or Captain on horseback in gorgeous armor, of silver,
or bronze, or steel beautifully inlaid with gold that glittered in the
sunlight. Behind him his squires, his ensign bearers, and on the race
horse, the jockey who would ride later, in the race.
Slowly the procession passed around the course. Before the judges’
stand, and four times as they circled the square each group paused that
the drummers might perform their little rhythm, that the banner bearers
might dance their skillful little steps.
Cynthia sat enthralled. Almost she had to pinch herself to believe it
was real. Glorious in color as an old window of stained glass; silks
and velvets, knights in full armor, pages, banners and trumpeters, and
at the very end the Palio itself, a great banner drawn in a cart, with
the staked flags of the _contrada_ around it.
The procession was over. Cynthia sat back and cracked a few nuts and
ate them. Just to return to reality for a while, after so much beauty,
was a rest and a relief. She had thought so intensely, packed it
down so tightly into her memory that no least gesture of it might be
forgotten. Even so, she felt as though she would have liked a week of
that procession in order to be able to remember it all.
Again the mortar.
The race was about to start. Ten restive little horses ranged behind
a rope, ten jockeys struggling to keep them in line. The sound of the
gun. They’re off!
Panting, scrambling, hurled against the Dog’s Box, cutting corners,
they tore around the course, and the piazza was one vast shout as
though from a single throat. Cynthia, on her feet like the rest,
stamped and clapped and shouted with the others. The Snail, the little
brown Snail was among the leaders. Once around the course. Three times
was the extent of the race. And the starting post was in sight again.
But one rider was off--which was it?
The Snail’s! Cynthia could have sobbed aloud with despair, with
disappointment. Her favorite, out of the race because without a rider.
Someone had raised a whip and the Snail’s jockey had been the victim.
Oh well, so much for that! Cynthia, disgusted, almost sank back to her
seat, but the mass of excitement around her was too strong to resist.
The Snail, for some reason, seemed still to be a favorite, his name
rose again and again from surrounding throats. Stubbornly he kept to
the track, came to the first of the tiny streets that turned off, away
from the race track. Gallantly he resisted temptation, clung to the
course. Past the next alley, past the next street, and well among the
leaders still. Pulling ahead now, faster and faster, because riderless,
guideless. The Snail caught up with the horse of the Eagle, passed him,
caught up with the horse of the Owl, hitherto the leader. The Owl’s
rider plied whip with vigor, but he was a husky youth, quite a burden
for the Owl’s little horse to carry. And the Snail was half a head in
the lead as the goal post was passed for the second time.
“Oh come on ... come _on!_” Regardless now of the fact that the horse
was riderless, Cynthia wanted only that he should make the circle the
third time. Successfully.
Now he was well in the lead, past the wicked flail of the Owl’s
malicious rider. Nothing now could stop him, though as he approached
for the third time the steep street leading up into the town Cynthia
held her breath lest this time he should leave the course and gallop up
it. Held her breath so that she was completely unconscious of the broad
shoulders in front of her which her eager hands were grasping.
For an instant the pony faltered. Then urged on by the pounding hoofs
behind him passed the last temptation. And was on the final stretch for
the goal post.
Faster. Faster! A length, two lengths, three lengths ahead. Cynthia
shouted wildly, pounded a fist on the harris tweed shoulder and yelled
with the others. “Go on ... Snail ... go on! ... Go on! ... Home! ...
_Ah..h..h!_”
The race was over. “And quite fitting that it should have been won by
the Snail,” dryly remarked the owner of the harris tweed shoulder.
Cynthia came out of her daze and gaped at him. It was the nice twinkley
man she had seen in the chapel this morning, the one who had come to
the monastery with his wife.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she gasped, feeling very hot and red in the face.
“Did I pound you to a jelly? Races are pretty exciting, aren’t they?”
“They certainly are,” he agreed cheerfully. “And that was a most
surprising one.”
“Do you suppose he really won?” asked Cynthia, carefully following the
man down the steep narrow steps. “I don’t imagine it will be allowed
like that, without a rider, will it?”
The man laughed. “Well, this is Italy, you know, and after all they may
figure it was a race for horses, not jockeys. And the horse certainly
came in ahead. But let’s go and find out,” he suggested. “By the way,
my name is Lewis, though I believe we have met before, even if you
didn’t know my name.”
“How do you do, Mr. Lewis. I’m pleased to meet you I’m sure,” stated
Cynthia with mock primness. “And now that’s over, we’re both from the
States, I gather, and my name is Wanstead. Didn’t your wife come to the
races?”
Mr. Lewis shook his head. “If it had been Longchamps, or Saratoga ...
But she wasn’t interested in a little Italian hick town race. Oh, here
we are, and I imagine there’s little doubt about the winner.”
The rose-and-gold Snail jockey, wreathed in flowers and comically
suggestive of an ancient Greek statue, a blood stained handkerchief as
additional decoration about his forehead, was being carried high on the
shoulders of a dozen competitors for the honor of the burden. Around
him surged a horde of shouting friends and at least a score of pretty
girls tossed jests and languorous glances toward the victor.
“I think they ought to be carrying the horse up there,” was Cynthia’s
objection. “The jockey didn’t do anything but tumble off.”
“That in itself seems to have been a feat not without its perils. How
about some tea up here, to celebrate that our horse won?”
Over the tea cups, in the ancient palace now transformed into a tea
shop, over delicious tiny cakes, sweet with honey, deep with frosting,
Cynthia heard about Mr. Lewis. Heard that long ago he, too, had been
an art student and had come to Siena, heard that he had come back this
time, a successful broker, to try to recapture some of the enchantment
of that far off time. “But it’s not the same,” he said sadly. “How
about some more tea?--No?--Then some more cakes--oh, just one more.”
“Well, maybe, just one.” Cynthia chose a cake like a little Italian
palace, all tiled with lemon peel and crowned with a candied cherry.
“And do you know the lovely old monastery at the top of the hill?”
“I should say I do. I made a sketch of that, years ago--before you
were born, young lady.” Why did people always lay such emphasis on
one’s lack of age? “But my wife didn’t think much of it, and perhaps it
wasn’t very good, really. Anyway it got lost once when we were moving.”
His smile was slightly rueful and Cynthia forgave the remark about
her youthfulness. “It was of the gate, and a lovely old Della Robbia
madonna. I went out to see it again, just yesterday, but couldn’t find
it.”
“Why, I found it, and did a sketch of it too,” Cynthia blurted out,
and a moment later wished she hadn’t. It was obvious that he had been
dragged away before he had had time to do much exploring.
“Did you? Oh, could I see it perhaps? But first won’t you have another
cake, some more tea?” urged the hospitable Mr. Lewis.
“I couldn’t eat another cake if I knew it was the last one in Siena,”
protested Cynthia. “And I think I’ve got the sketch right here. The
portfolio made a good rest for my sketch book.”
So there in the tea shop, cool and quiet and growing a bit dim as the
sun sank behind the towers and tiles of Siena, Cynthia hauled out
her sketches. There were some of the crowd she had made just this
afternoon, of the carabinari, heads gravely bent, two by two, always
two by two, white gloved hands folded behind their solemn backs.
“You have quite a knack for caricature,” commented Mr. Lewis, and
Cynthia said, “You have to, if you are going to do portraits. A really
good likeness always holds a little exaggeration.”
At which he nodded understandingly. Nice to be showing your sketches to
another artist.
“And here are some of the landscapes I’ve done around Siena, mostly
bits of streets and old tiled houses. They aren’t as good as my people.”
“And here is your madonna,” she cried, hauling out the drawing she
had finished the day before. She told him about her plan to have an
exhibition of the heads and of the landscapes together.
“That’s a good idea too,” he agreed, and propped the little sketch of
the monastery against a chair and sat back to squint at it.
“I wonder,” he said at last, “if you’d be willing to make a sale before
you go home. I have a fancy to own this one,” and he nodded towards the
little tiled gateway. “Could you part with it, do you think?”
Cynthia hesitated. She did sort of want to show that one to Chick and
hear his approval. But perhaps tomorrow she could go back to the same
place and make another, even a better one.
“We..ll, yes,” she agreed reluctantly. “I might.”
And then came the “How much?” which she had dreaded. Cynthia knew
the value, at least the commercial value, of her portraits. But the
landscapes were different. They were just studies, perhaps not worth
anything at all. “Would ... would two dollars be too much?” she asked.
“Or maybe three?”
“My dear child!” protested Mr. Lewis, and Cynthia laughed.
“Well, give me what you like. It will be all right anyway.--Oh,
American money, how nice to see it again!” And it was quite a roll, too.
She took the two bills and handed over the painting. “Better take
along this cardboard, it’s just the back of the pad, but it fits, and
will keep the sketch from being crumpled. And now I really must run. I
promised a little English girl at the _pensione_ that I’d have dinner
with her tonight and tell her all about the palio. She couldn’t afford
a ticket for it. I know she won’t at all approve of the way it turned
out. ‘Most unsportin’ my deah!’” she laughed, mimicking the other’s
accent.
“Goodbye,” waved Cynthia from the doorway. Nice Mr. Lewis. It had been
fun, the tea, and such an appreciative audience--and the two dollars.
She opened her purse, just for the comfort of seeing good United States
greenbacks again, shook them out of the rumple and gazed at them,
startled. Not two one dollar bills, but two for ten dollars each.
Twenty good bucks! Oh gosh ... oh glory ... oh joy!
“Miss British Isles can wait,” said Cynthia aloud to the deserted
street and turned rapidly in a direction opposite to the _pensione_.
She knew somehow that her luck would hold, her marvelous luck of
the day, and that even as late as this sunset hour, with the rosy
housefronts of Siena still holding their perpetual sunset glow, the
little man in the frame shop would still be there.
* * * * *
Chick that night was no longer propped limply, somewhat forlornly,
between the dusty, green tinged mirror and the box of cold cream, but
smiled gaily, resplendently, festively, in a frame of wine colored
leather with a border of acorns and gold beading.
Cynthia bent over and bestowed a brief kiss on the chilly glass.
“Hi, Chick ... Darling,” she laughed. And turned off the light.