It was nine o'clock as the Signorina descended the stairs. Through the
open doorway morning met her, crisp and cool, with sunshine touching
grass and green branch, still wet with dew. The very footfalls of the
girl on the shallow marble steps were eager and expectant, and her face
was gayer than those of the nymphs in the frescoes on the wall. At the
bottom of the stairs, Giacomo met her, his face wreathed in smiles.
"Bertuccio has returned," he announced.
"Si, si, Signorina," came the voice of Assunta, who was pushing her way
through the dining-room door behind Giacomo. She had on her magenta
Sunday shawl, and the color of her wrinkled cheeks almost matched it.
"What is Bertuccio?" asked the girl. "A kitten?"
"A kitten!" gasped Assunta.
"Corpo di Bacco!" swore Giacomo.
Then the two brown ones devoted mind and body to explanation. Giacomo
gesticulated and waved the napkin he had in his hand; Assunta shook her
black silk apron: and they both spoke at once.
"Il mio Bertuccio! It is my little son, Signorina, and my only, and
the Signorina has never seen his like. When he was three years old he
wore clothing for five years, and now he is six inches taller than his
father."
This and much more said Assunta, and she said it as one word. Giacomo,
keeping pace and giving syllable for syllable, remarked:--
"It is our Bertuccio who has been working in a tunnel in the Italian
Alps, and has come home for rest. He is engineer, Signorina, and has
genius. And before he became this he was guide here in the mountains,
and he knows every path, every stone, every tree."
"What?" asked Daphne feebly.
Then, in a multitude of words that darkened knowledge, they said it all
over again. Bertuccio, the light of their eyes, the sole hope of their
old age, had come home. He could be the Signorina's guide among the
hills, being very strong, very trusty, molto forte, molto fedele.
"Oh, I know!" cried the Signorina, with a sudden light in her face.
"Bertuccio is your son!"
"Si, si, si, Signorina!" exclaimed Giacomo and Assunta together,
ushering her into the dining-room.
"It is the blessed saints who have managed it," added Assunta devoutly.
"A wreath of flowers from Rome, all gauze and spangles, will I lay at
the shrine of our Lady, and there shall be a long red ribbon to say my
thanks in letters of gold."
The hope of the house was presented to the Signorina after breakfast.
He was a broad-shouldered, round-headed offshoot of Italian soil, with
honest brown eyes like those of both father and mother. It was a face
to be trusted, Daphne knew, and when, recovering from the embarrassment
caused by his parents' pride in him, he blurted out the fact that he
had already been to the village that morning to find a little donkey
for the Signorina's wider journeyings, the girl welcomed the plan with
delight. Grinning with pride Bertuccio disappeared among the stables,
and presently returned, leading an asinetto. It was a little,
dun-colored thing, wearing a red-tasseled bridle and a small sheepskin
saddle with red girth, but all the gay trappings could not soften the
old primeval sadness of the donkey's face, under his long, questioning
ears. So Daphne won palfrey and cavalier.
In the succeeding days the two jogged for hours together over the
mountain roads. Now they followed some grassy path climbing gently
upward to the site of a buried town, where only mound and gray fragment
of stone marked garden and forum. Here was a bit of wall, with a touch
of gay painting mouldering on an inner surface,--Venus, in robe of red,
rising from a daintily suggested sea in lines of green. They gathered
fragments of old mosaic floor in their hands, blue lapis lazuli, yellow
bits of giallo antico, red porphyry, trodden by gay feet and sad,
unnumbered years ago. They found broken pieces of iridescent glass
that had fallen, perhaps, from shattered wine cups of the emperors, and
all these treasures Bertuccio stored away in his wide pockets. Again,
they climbed gracious heights and looked down over slopes and valleys,
where deep grass grew over rich, crumbling earth, deposit of dead
volcanoes, or saw, circled by soft green hills, some mountain lake,
reflecting the perfect blue of Italian sky.
Bertuccio usually walked behind; Daphne rode on ahead, with the sun
burning her cheeks, and the air, fragrant with the odor of late
ripening grapes on the upper hillsides, bringing intoxication. She
seemed to herself so much a thing of falling rain, rich earth, and
wakening sunshines that she would not have been surprised to find the
purple bloom of those same grapes gathering on her cheeks, or her soft
wisps of hair curling into tendrils, or spreading into green vine
leaves. They usually came home in the splendor of sunset, tired,
happy, the red of Daphne's felt hat, the gorgeousness of Bertuccio's
blue trousers and yellow waistcoat lighting the gloom of the cool,
green-shaded ways. Hermes always ran frisking to meet them,
outstripping by his swiftness the slow plodding of the little ass.
Perhaps the lambkin felt the shadow of a certain neglect through these
long absences, but at least he was generous and loved his rival.
Quitting the kitchen and dining-room, he chose for his portion the
pasture where the donkey grazed, in silence and in sadness, and frisked
dangerously near his comrade's heels. For all his melancholy, the
asinetto was not insensible to caresses, and at night, when the lamb
cuddled close to him as the two lay in the grass in the darkness, would
curl his nose round now and then protectingly to see how this small
thing fared.
So Daphne kept forgetting, forgetting, and nothing recalled her to her
perplexity, except her donkey. San Pietro Martire she named him, for
on his face was written the patience and the suffering of the saints.
Some un-Italian sense of duty stiffened his hard little legs, gave
rigid strength to his back. Willing to trudge on with his load,
willing to rest, carrying his head a little bent, blinking mournfully
at the world from under the drab hair on his forehead, San Pietro stood
as a type of the disciplined and chastened soul. His very way of
cropping the grass had something ascetic in it, reminding his mistress
of Eustace at a festive dinner.
"San Pietro, San Pietro," said Daphne one day, when Bertuccio was
plodding far in the rear, whistling as he followed, "San Pietro, must I
do it?"
There was a drooping forward of the ears, a slight bending of the head,
as the little beast put forth more strength to meet the difficulty of
rising ground.
"San Pietro, do you know what you are advising? Do you at all realize
what it is to be a clergyman's wife?"
The steady straining of the donkey's muscles seemed to say that, to
whatever station in life it pleased Providence to call him, he would
think only of duty.
Then Daphne alighted and sat on a stone, with the donkey's face to
hers, taking counsel of those long ears which were always eloquent,
whether pricked forward in expectation or laid back in wrath.
"San Pietro, if I should give it up, and stay here and live,--for I
never knew before what living is,--if I should just try to keep this
sunshine and these great spaces of color, what would you think of me?"
Eyes, ears, and the tragic corners of the mouth revealed the thought of
this descendant of the burden bearers for all the earth's thousands of
years.
"Little beast, little beast," said Daphne, burying her face in the
brownish fuzz of his neck, and drying her eyes there, "you are the one
thing in this land of beauty that links me with home. You are the
Pilgrim Fathers and the Catechism in one! You are the Puritan
Conscience made visible! I will do it; I promise."
San Pietro Martire looked round with mild inquiry on his face as to the
meaning and the purpose of caresses in a hard world like this.