The Last Lady of Mulberry

Flowers for a Neapolitan of the Porto!
(See page [53.])

The Last Lady
of Mulberry

A Story of Italian New York
By Henry Wilton Thomas

Illustrated by Emil Pollak

New York
D. Appleton and Company
1900

Copyright, 1900
By HENRY WILTON THOMAS
All rights reserved

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LAST LADY OF MULBERRY

CHAPTER I
A GODDESS SCORNED

All Armando knew of sculpture he had learned from his uncle Daniello, a mountain craftsman who never chiselled anything greater than a ten-inch Saint Peter. At night in the tavern on the craggy height, with a flask of barbera before him, the old carver would talk grandly of his doings in art, while his comrades, patient of the oft-told tale, nodded their heads in listless but loyal accord. They all knew very well that it was young Armando who did most of the carving, yet they cried “Bravo!” for old Daniello’s wine was good. And so it had been for a long time. While the lad chipped all day in a little workshop perched beyond the nether cloud shadows, his uncle passed the hours in Genoa, where, by sharp wits and bland tongue, he transmuted the marble into silver.

But Armando had a soul that looked far above the gleaming tonsures of ten-inch Saint Peters. Wherefore he was unhappy. When his twentieth birthday dawned it seemed to him that his life had been a failure. One morning, after a night of much barbera and noisy gasconade, old Daniello did not wake up, and two days afterward they laid him to rest in the sloping graveyard in the gorge by the olive-oil mill.

Gloomily Armando weighed the situation, standing by the mullioned window of the room wherein he had toiled so long and ignobly. Far in the western distance he could see the ships that seemed to glide with full sails across the mountains. The serene midsummer vapours, pendulous above the Mediterranean, were visible, but the sea upon which their shadows fell and lingered was hidden from his view by a thicket of silver firs. Southward the trees stood lower, and over their tops, where tired sea gulls circled, he gazed sadly toward the jumble of masonry that is Genoa.

Miles below in the sun glare the city lay this morning as Heine found it decades ago, like the bleached skeleton of some thrown-up monster of the deep. And a monster it was in the sight of the poor lad who looked down from the heights of Cardinali—but a monster that he would conquer, even as Saint George, champion of Genoa, had conquered the dragon in ages far agone. Yes, he would strike off for evermore the chains that fettered him to ten-inch Saint Peters, and mount to the white peaks of art! In the Apennine hamlet he had lived all his days, and never heard of Balzac; but he clinched his fist, and, with eyes set upon the cluster of chimney pots at the mountain’s foot, made his vow:

“In this room, O Genoa! will I bring forth a marble that shall make you do me honour.”

Then he felt uplifted—as though he had burned the bridges that hung between his old ignominy and the straight path to fame and riches. The vow was still fervid and strong within him when, two days afterward, he beheld in a shop window of Genoa a photograph of Falguière’s great marble, Juno and the Peacock. Before the divine contours of Jupiter’s helpmeet the simple-hearted graver of saintly images stood enchanted. Presently, as though spoken by a keen, mysterious voice from the upper air, there pierced his consciousness the word “Replica!” Again and again was it repeated, each time with a new insistence. Ah, a copy of this in marble! Yes; with such a masterpiece he would begin his ascent to the white peaks. He bought the photograph, put it in his pocket and kept it there until he was beyond the city’s bounds and trudging up the causeway toward Cardinali. Now and then he took out the picture, regarded it fondly, and, peering back at the town, asked himself if Genoa would look the same when his Juno and the Peacock should be there. Would the soft murmur of that drowsy mass have the same note? Would the people move with the same pace, eat, sleep, and drink as they had always done? He was inclined to think they would not.

Would Genoa be the same when his Juno and Peacock
should be there?

For a twelvemonth, through early tides and late shifts, he modelled and chipped: in winter, when the demoniac mistral, raging all about him, shook the workshop and snapped the boughs of the cypresses; in summer, when the ortolan and the wood-thrush cheered him with their song. And the little group of neighbours, from whom he guarded his great artistic secret, marvelled that no more Saint Peters came forth from their time-honoured birthplace.

Only two persons in Cardinali besides Armando had knowledge of the momentous affair that was going forward. One was Bertino, a fair-haired youth of the sculptor’s age, who busied his hands by day plaiting Lombardian straw into hats, and his head by night dreaming of America and showering cornucopias of gold. He was Armando’s bosom friend. The other confidant was Bertino’s foster sister Marianna, somewhat demure for a mountain lass, and subject to thinking spells. Beauty she had, notably on feast days, when she walked to church with a large-rayed comb in her braided chestnut waterfall, a gorgeous striped apron, and clattering half-sabots, freshly scraped and polished to a shine. She, too, plaited straw, and with it wove many love thoughts and sighs for Armando.

At last the stately goddess and her long-tailed companion stood triumphant in all the candour of marble not wholly spotless. The hour of unveiling it to the astonished gaze of Bertino and Marianna was the happiest that the ruler of Armando’s fate permitted him for many a day thereafter. The bitterness and crushing disillusion came on the day that he loaded the carved treasure on the donkey cart of Sebastiano the carrier, and followed Juno and the Peacock down the mountain pass to the haven of his sweet anticipation.

“He has been saving up his Saint Peters,” said Michele the Cobbler to a group of mystified neighbours as the cart passed his shop. “See, he has a box full of them. I wonder how many saints one can cut out in a year. Ah, well, it was not thus that his uncle Daniello did, nor his father before him. Shall I tell you what I think, my friends? Well, I think that boy is going wrong.”

“Ah, si,” was the unanimous voice.

“May your success be great, Armando mine!” said Bertino when they parted at the first curve of the pass. “Perhaps against your return I shall have famous news from America. Who knows? Good fortune be with you. Addio.”

“The saints be with you to a safe return,” said Marianna. “Addio, and good fortune.”

“Addio, carissimi amici.”

Sebastiano the carrier lifted the block from the wheel and the donkey moved on. Armando walked behind, keeping a watchful eye on the thing in the cart, which was in every shade of the term a reduced replica of Falguière’s inspiration.

“You must be very careful, Sebastiano,” said he. “Never in your life have you had such a valuable load on your cart.”

“Bah!” growled the driver. “Valuable! How many have you there? Are they all the same size? Do you mean to say that I never had a load as valuable as a boxful of Saint Peters? Oh, bello! Only last week did I haul a barrel of fine barolo to the Inn of the Fat Calf. Ah, my dear, that is a wine. Wee-ah! wee-ah!—Go on, you lazy one. That donkey is too careful.”

They reached their destination in Genoa without mishap. When the art dealer who had consented to look at it had bestowed on Armando’s work of a year a momentary survey, he turned to the sculptor, who stood hat in hand, and regarded him earnestly.

“Who told you to do this, dear young man?” he asked, removing his eyeglasses.

“Nobody, signore. It was my own idea.”

The merchant turned to Juno with a new interest.

“Not so bad as it might have been,” he shrugged, moving aside to view the figures in profile. “What is your name? Signor Corrini. Well—but, my dear young man, it will be a long time, perhaps years, before you are able to do work of this kind. Naturally, I could not permit it to remain in my place. What else have you done? Something smaller, I suppose.”

Armando strove hard to keep them back, but the sobs choked him.

While the merchant stood by, offering words meant to comfort, but which added to his anguish, he replaced the marble in the box and nailed the lid before rousing Sebastiano from his siesta in the cart.

“It all comes of keeping the saints too long,” grumbled the carrier, as he helped lift Juno and the Peacock back into the cart. “Never did your uncle Daniello have any thrown on his hands—not he. Ah, there was a man of affairs!”

The donkey tugged at the chain traces, moved the wheels a spoke or two, then stopped and looked around at the driver, wagging his grizzled ears in mute but eloquent disapproval of hauling a load skyward. But after duly weighing the matter, assisted by several clean-cut hints from a rawhide lash, he set off at his own crablike pace.

The first turning of the highway attained, Armando paused and gazed on the city below, his heart aflood with bitterness. Far to the westward the sun, in variant crimson tones, lay hidden under the sea, like the last, loftiest dome of some sinking Atlantis. In every white hamlet of the slopes the Angelus was ringing. Night birds from Africa wheeled around the towering snares set for them by the owners of the olive terraces and villas, whose yellow walls in long stretches bordered the steep route. With his little group of living and inanimate companions Armando trudged along, his head bowed, silent as the marble in the cart. The gloaming quiet was unbroken, save for the gluck of the wheels and the distant chant of the belfries.

They were yet a long way from the outermost cot of Cardinali when a resounding shout brought the donkey to a standstill and startled Sebastiano into a “Per Bacco!”

It was the voice of Bertino. He was rounding a curve in the road, brandishing a piece of folded paper, and clattering toward them as fast as he could in his heavy wooden shoes. His radiant face proclaimed that something had happened to fill him with gladness. A few paces behind came Marianna, but in her eyes there was no token of joy. She had beheld the loaded cart.

“Long live my uncle!” cried Bertino, grasping Armando’s hand. “The letter has come, and I’m off for America. Think of it, Armando mio, I, Bertino Manconi, going to America! It is no longer a dream. I am to go—go, do you understand? The money is here, and nothing can stop me. But come, you do not seem happy to hear of my great good fortune. I know, dear friend, you are sorry to lose me. Bah! one can not live in the mountains all his life, and perhaps you too will be there some day—some day when your Juno is sold. To-night all my friends shall drink a glass of spumante to my voyage—yes, the real spumante of Asti. At the Inn of the Fat Calf will I say addio, for I set sail to-morrow. Tell me, now, do you not count me a lucky devil?”

“You are lucky,” said Armando sadly. “I wish I could go. My own country does not want me.”

Marianna walked at the tail of the cart. While her brother was talking she had lifted the box in the hope that it might, after all, be only the empty one that he was bringing back; but the weight of it told her the truth she had read in Armando’s face.

“The beast!” she said, “to refuse such a fine thing as that. What did——”

Armando signalled silence, and pointed to Sebastiano, who walked ahead. By this time Bertino understood, and he too exclaimed:

“The beast!”

“Who’s a beast?” asked the muleteer.

“That art merchant, whoever he is. Bah! What would you have? In this country a fellow has no chance. What a fool one is to stay here!”

“No, no; the country is good,” said Sebastiano, shaking his head and jerking a thumb toward Armando. “But what can you expect when one keeps his Saint Peters a whole year?”

The others exchanged knowing glances and followed on in silence. The rest of the way it was plain to all who saw Bertino pass that he was thinking very hard, and with the product of this mental exertion he was fairly bursting by the time they reached Armando’s home, for he had not dared to speak in presence of the carrier. When Juno and the Peacock had been restored to their birthplace he began:

“Now, listen to me, amici, for I have an idea. I am going to America. Is not that so?”

“Yes; you are going to America. Well?”

“Patience. You know that as the assistant of my uncle in his great shop in New York I shall be rather a bigger man than I am here. Who knows what I may become?”

“Ah, si; who knows?” said Marianna.

“Listen. Now, let us have a thought together. Here is Armando. He is a fine sculptor. We know that. The proof is here.” He tapped the big box. “But in Genoa they are too stupid and too poor to buy his magnificent work. Now, in America people are neither stupid nor poor. Why can he not make a fortune in America?”

“I can’t go to America,” said Armando.

“No; he can’t go to America,” chimed in Marianna. “What a foolish idea!”

“Excuse me. Who wants him to go to America? He stays in Cardinali and makes statues. I go to New York and sell them. Now, my dears, do you see which way the swallow is flying?”

“But——”

“But——”

“But nothing. Do you think that I, who sail for America to-morrow, do not know what I am about? Listen. What do you suppose I was doing on the way up? Well, I was thinking. I have thought it all out. I ask you this, Armando: Juno and the Peacock you made from a photograph? Very well; can you not make other things from photographs? From New York I shall send you the picture of some great American; some one as great as—as great as——”

“Crespi,” suggested Armando, now interested in the project.

“Crespi? No, no. Some one greater, like—like——”

“D’Annunzio,” Armando ventured again.

“Bah! Who is he? I mean some one very great, like——”

“I know!” cried Marianna. “Like the Pope!”

“No, no,” persisted Bertino. “It must be some man as big as Garibaldi. That’s it. But not a dead Garibaldi. He must be alive, so that I may sell him the bust that you will make of him. What would you do with a man like that, for example?”

“Well,” said Armando, pausing and looking up at the ceiling, as though weighing the matter carefully, “I should make a very fine bust of such a man.”

“Bravo!” cried Bertino. “With a piece of your best work for a sample, how long should I be getting orders for more? Not many days, I promise. And the Americans have gold. What say you, my friend? Is it not a grand idea?”

“Si, si; a grand idea.”

In truth it loomed before Armando as the chance of his life. Now as ardent as the other, he agreed to begin work upon a bust in marble so soon as he should receive from America a photograph of the chosen subject. When finished he would send it to New York, there to be put on exhibition and offered for sale.

That afternoon the Saale steamed from Genoa Bay with Bertino a steerage passenger. Some time after the ship had swung from her quay Armando and Marianna looked from the studio window over the cypress fringe toward the gap in the mountains that shows the sails of ships but conceals the Mediterranean’s waves. Presently a black bar of smoke moving lazily across the aperture told them that he was on his way.

Near the window a block of Carrara marble glistened pure and white in the sunlight. Armando wondered what manner of being he should release from it—a President, a money king, or a great American beauty?

CHAPTER II
CASA DI BELLO

The banked fire of America’s Sabbath gave its quiet to Bowling Green the day that Bertino landed in New York. It was not the New York he had seen so often from the heights of Cardinali. The cloud-piercing houses had always loomed in his dream pictures, but no returned exile had ever told him that they filled the soul with this nameless dread. He longed to be in Mulberry, which all travellers agreed was the next best thing to being in Italy. With a goatskin box under one arm, a tawny cotton umbrella pressed by the other, and his left hand clutching the knotted ends of a kerchief holding more luggage, he set out from the Barge Office. In the band of his narrow-brimmed black soft hat—the precious adornment of festal days—stood a gray turkey feather, and about his bare neck in sailor noose was tied a cravat of satin, green as the myrtle of his native steeps. As he strode up Broadway, past old Trinity and Wall Street, the heavy fall of his hobnailed boots started the echoes of the New World’s financial centre.

A flock of fellow-pilgrims clattered by at high speed in care of a guide, who charged five cents a head for piloting them safely to the Italian colony. The hatless women, burdened with babies and heavy sacks, struggled bravely to keep up with the men, who carried the umbrellas. Bertino fell in behind, and soon they turned the corner of Franklin Street. Here they got their first glimpse of Mulberry, which lay clearly visible in the distance at the foot of a hill whose summit is Broadway. Beneath the Bridge of Sighs, which spans the street at the Tombs Prison, forming an arching frame for the picture, they could see the pleasant lawn of Paradise Park. It was a bright afternoon, and the broad patch of greensward gleamed like a great emerald down there in the sunlight, and the low-roofed houses all around, with the sun’s fire in their window panes, had a homelike countenance. This was not the image their minds had wrought of Mulberry, where travellers said the people were herded in pens that knew not the light of day. How strange that no one had ever told them it was so cheerful and bello! But when they reached the heart of the quarter they had no more thrills from the contemplation of natural beauty. Here the air throbbed with the staccato cadence of south Italian patois. The signs over the shops were no longer gibberish, and Bertino blessed the day that he, Armando, and Marianna had paid the mountain pedagogue three liras to teach them words of ordinary size.

Bertino’s arrival at Paradise Park.

Mulberry was in its accustomed Sunday manner. Nearly all the shops were closed, and their faces, so smiling on week days in scarlet wreaths of dried peppers, clusters of varnished buffalo cheeses and festoons of Bologna salame, now frowned in shabby black or dark-brown shutters. Madre Chiara’s bower, evergreen on working days with chicory and dandelion salad and Savoy cabbage, had vanished with its owner. No gossip-hungry women, with primed ears, bent about the basket of the garlic seller on China Hill, for she was out with everybody to-day in her best clothes. The crippled beggar at the hydrant was not missing, but he shivered in the May sunshine because Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods was not there with her pail of fire. Another important brazier was in Sunday retirement—that of old Cantolini the Gondolier, and in consequence there floated on the air no suave odour of cooking pine cones, whose seed the Napolitani of the Basso Porto so love to munch.

In the rear courts, where gamblers at morra bawled and capered like madmen, rows of pushcarts, their stubby shafts in the air, told of a twenty-four-hour truce in the strategic fray waged between the peddler army and the artful police. The narrow ribbon of sky between the tall tenements had a Sunday look; it was not mottled with shirts of many patches hung out to dry, and the iron fire escapes, stripped of their week-day wash things in the general sprucing up, gave to the eye here and there the colours of Italy. The dingy caffès, from whose tenebrous depths tobacco smoke poured with the scent of viands, were crowded with the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani of the rural districts visiting Mulberry for an innocent spree.

The jewelry shops were open and doing a lively trade. Young men bought wedding rings and tried them on the fingers of their promised wives, while faint-hearted bachelors, at the same counter, parted with their hard-earned coin for little silver-tipped horns against the evil eye. At the door a brawny flower woman in spickest gingham held a basket of dahlias fresh, mingled with carnations and asters that had lost the bloom of first youth. It was a sure vantage ground for her traffic. The mating couples, proud in their ownership of the wedlock band, stopped at the basket, every one, and close-fisted indeed was the future husband who did not hand a posy to his bride elect.

As the wondering Bertino passed, bearded men in the rôle of newsboys bellowed their wares in his ears: “Il Progresso! L’Araldo! L’Italiano in America! Due soldi!” Literature got scant nourishment, but tobacco-selling throve, and the man without a lengthy rat-tail cigar in his mouth was marked among his fellows. They were all in their smartest clothes. Starched shirts were too numerous to give their wearers distinction, and not a few of the clean-shaved necks fretted within stiff collars. Here and there dark-skinned young sparks with red neckties puffed cigarettes and showed fine in apparel that smacked of Bowery show-windows. Scarcely a woman was there from whose ears did not hang long pendants of gold, nor a feminine head that did not gleam in oily smoothness. Shawls woven in the gaudy hues and fantastic patterns of Italian looms splashed the throng with colour, and a few of those large-rayed combs that Apennine maidens love to wear glinted in the sunshine of Paradise Park. Much courting went forward on the park benches, the fond ones caring not an atom for the stare of colder eyes, but retaining their entwined pose in sweet oblivion to the rest of Mulberry.

The company in charge of the five-cent guide followed their leader into a broad alley, and Bertino was left alone in the concourse, at loss whither to turn. Not a soul gave the least heed to him. Those whom he asked to point him to 342 Mulberry Street, his uncle’s abode, passed on shaking their heads and mumbling something in broad Sicilian or Neapolitan which the young Genovese did not understand. Some sighed as they made the sign of not knowing, as though that number were the darkest of mysteries. At length a gleam of light came over one face.

“I know,” said the man, a young fellow decked in Sunday corduroy. “It is Casa Di Bello.”

“Yes; Giorgio Di Bello is the name of my uncle.”

“Your uncle? Santa Maria, signore! Let me carry your trunk.”

But Bertino only hugged the goatskin closer, the tales of Mulberry sharks current in every mountain hamlet of Italy being vivid in his mind.

“I’ll show you the house, anyway,” said the man of knowledge, and Bertino followed.

The sidewalk was too narrow for the buzzing stream. The asphalted roadway had become the grand promenade, and there the panorama of Italia’s types unrolled: black men of Messina, with the hair and skin of Persia, exiled from Etna’s slopes mayhap by the glowing lavas that burn up olive grove and vineyard; red, flat-nosed men and fair-haired women of Lombardy, driven perchance from their fertile plains by the ruin that rides grimly on the freshets of the Po, but brought oftener by the tax collector; cowherds and clodbreakers of the Roman Campagna, whose clear-toned dialect found an antiphonal note in the patter of the gaunt but often brawny sons of fever-plagued Maremma. Here and there in the moving throng strutted a labour padrone, out to salute and be saluted with lifted hat by all who prized his favour. One and all they uncovered as he passed—sturdy dwarfs from Calabria and the Basilicata, mere pegs from the heel and the toe of the Boot; limpid-eyed mountaineers from the Abruzzi, bronzed fags of half-African Sicily, riffraff of the Neapolitan slums; America-mad fishermen of the Adriatic and Tyrrhene, deserters of a coinless Arcadia to become hod-slaves with a bank account.

Slowly but volubly the clans of toil moved by, unheeded by a little mother whose life was given for the moment to shining the heavy gold rings in her baby’s ears.

“Eccola, signore,” said the man in corduroy, pausing before a house that faced St. Patrick’s graveyard. “This is Casa Di Bello, the finest domicile in the colony.”

It was an old-style brick dwelling of two stories and attic on the northern fringe of Mulberry—the only house in the street whose front was not gridironed with fire escapes. The low stoop, iron railing, and massive dadoes, the Ionian door columns of hard wood, the domed vestibule and generous width, marked it a rare survivor of the building era that passed with the stagecoach and the Knickerbocker—a well-preserved ghost of the quarter’s bygone fashion and respectability.

Bertino looked up and read in bold text upon a well-polished brass doorplate the assuring name, “Di Bello.”

“Grazie mille,” he said to his guide. “I am too poor to make you a present. Grazie mille.”

The other made off with a long face, but protesting that he had not expected a present for such a small service.

Heartened by the nearness of a friend, Bertino gave the heavy bell handle a stout pull. Decorously and without undue promptness the broad-panelled oak swung narrowly, and the mountaineer looked into the stern complacency of his aunt Carolina’s eyes. He was too young to remember this smug dame of closing forty, who had gone from Cardinali twelve years before to become perpetua[A] in the Mulberry parish rectory. That peaceful career she had forsaken, for reasons of which we may learn; but the eight years of churchdom were still in her head. Nor had she ever lost the outward badge. She was rotund and well-coloured, monastic of mien, and sleek as a cathedral rat.

“Who are you?” she asked, scanning the lad from his hobnailed soles to the turkey feather in his hat.

“I am Bertino Manconi, nephew of Signor Giorgio Di Bello,” he answered proudly, unabashed by her poignant stare. “Are you Angelica the cook?”

When her breath came free she said: “But it was to-morrow—Monday.” His arrival one day ahead of the appointed time shocked her rubric sense of order and ignored her ritual of coming events. “And you come to the door like a Sicilian, baggage in hand and——”

“Ha! Welcome to my house!” cried a hearty voice at the head of the stairs. “A hundred welcomes, caro nephew! But what a stupendous height! Step aside, my sister, and bid the giant enter. How is this? At the parish house did they teach you to make friends wait outside? Well, it is not so at Casa Di Bello. So you are a day ahead? Well, so much the better. Ah, what a fine voyage you must have had!”

It was no longer a voice on the upper floor, but the form and substance of a bush-headed, chubby man of dawning fifty, whose prodigious King Humbert mustache quaked as he puffed down the staircase as best his short legs would permit. He threw himself upon Bertino, who had to stoop a little to receive a resonant salutation on each cheek. Then Carolina bestowed a pair of stony kisses, first remarking with wooden seemliness, “Welcome, my nephew.”

At the same moment Angelica the cook, a mite of a crone with a Roman nose, carried a steaming soup into the dining room, set it on the table, and called out in the shrillest Genovese:

“Ecco, signori; the minestrone is served, and the most beautiful minestrone I have made since the Feast of the Mother.”

After his three weeks of steerage fare Bertino fell upon the dinner with a zest that delighted his uncle, but dismayed Carolina, and caused the rims of Angelica’s eyes to spread until they were as round as the O of Giotto.

“Well, did you stop to pick up any gold in the street?” asked Signor Di Bello, winking at his sister, and sprinkling grated Parmesan over a ragout of green peppers. “I suppose you have your valise filled with it.”

“Ma che!” said Bertino, holding up his plate and looking wise. “Do you think I am such a fool? I don’t expect to pick up money; but shall I tell you something? Well, it is this: In this country I shall soon make enough money to fill that valise.”

The others dropped their knives and forks and regarded him with amazement.

“By the egg of Columbus!” exclaimed Signor Di Bello. “Are you not to work in my shop?”

“Oh, yes; of course.”

“Then how do you expect to make so much money?”

There was no reason for it; but Bertino, oddly enough, yielded to a sudden impulse to repress the truth. Cocking his eye first to the ceiling and then on the tablecloth, he uttered a fib that concealed his and Armando’s darling project for selling life-size busts in America.

The coffee served and the maraschino sipped, Signor Di Bello drew the straw from a Virginia and settled for a smoke, while Aunt Carolina showed Bertino to the room in the attic appointed for his use. She unpacked his few belongings and placed them tidily in a small chest of drawers, at the same time laying before him solemnly the parish-house rules by which she governed Casa Di Bello. Had her brother below stairs heard this, it is likely that he would have sent up many a guffaw with his smoke rings, for by him these rules had received little honour save in the steady nonobservance.

Carolina had never set her face against Bertino’s coming to the house, and there was no method in the frosty greeting she had given him at the door. It was merely that the sight of him, standing there, bag and baggage, a whole day before the time, had staggered her orderly being and drawn from her an instinctive protest. This all came of her unruffled years as perpetua of the rectory—that domain of peace and even tenor, whose broad, clear windows she often regarded wistfully, looking over the churchyard to Mott Street, from her sanctum on the second floor.

A half decade had gone by since the Wednesday of Ashes when the brother and sister patched up the quarrel that had separated them in their poorer days and she returned to the air of laity. But the sacerdotal brand would not wear off, nor did she wish it to. In the conduct of the household her churchly notions had free scope enough, but applied in censorship of her brother’s life they met with dreary contempt. To no purpose did she preach when Mulberry buzzed with the latest story of his gallantries, for his ready argument was always an eloquent “Ma che!” and an unanswerable shrug of the shoulders. In vain did she wait up, often from compline to prime, that she might shame him when he came home aglow with bumpers of divers vintage. It was after a certain rubicund night at the Caffè of the Three Gardens that he cut short her usual sermon with a roaring manifesto against church and state and a declaration of personal liberty for all time.

“Snakes of purgatory!” he had remarked in conclusion, one foot on the staircase. “Am I not a man? If you want priests, go to the parish house, where you belong. Once a priest always a priest.” With this taunt, meant to be a parting one, he toddled up to bed, but, reaching the landing, stopped and called back: “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll bring a wife here.”

From that time, which was two years before Bertino’s arrival, she gave up her nocturnal vigils, and without let or hindrance the signore feasted and drank with boon comrades, and cracked walnuts on his head with an empty bottle—a feat for which he was justly renowned in all the caffès of the quarter. The lowering peril of a wife in the house had set her to thinking as she had never thought before on this dire possibility. Her brother’s nonconformity was a flaw in her sceptre, but she knew that a wife meant the utter collapse of her sovereignty in Casa Di Bello. Wherefore she resolved to abide by the lesser evil, and bend her strength to warding off the greater. Thus it befell that with the accession of Bertino to the family she was not ill content. The coming of a man to the board imparted no misgiving. What her soul dreaded and her wits had guarded against was the advent of a woman. And she felicitated herself that no wife had succeeded in crossing the threshold. To her ever-watchful eye, she fondly believed, was due the blessing of her brother’s continuance in the path of bachelorhood, despite the caps that were set for him on every bush. The first families of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani, along with the flower of the Genovesi, the Milanesi, and the Torinesi, had in turn put forth their famous beauties as candidates for his hand and grocery store. But they all had been driven from the Rubicon, and at present there was no pretender in the field. Had there been she would have known it, as she knew of all the other marital campaigns, through Angelica, who went to market daily and kept in touch with Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods, Mulberry’s queen of gossips.

CHAPTER III
A SPOT OF YELLOW PAINT

Next morning, while the sun gave its first touch to the bronze head of Garibaldi, Bertino tied on an apron and set to work in Signor Di Bello’s shop, that peerless grocery whose small window and large door look tranquilly on the Park of Paradise. For a dozen years it had been known far and wide among Italia’s children as “The Sign of the Wooden Bunch.” The nickname came of a piece of carved oak simulating a bunch of bananas that hung before the door. In the early days of his business life the padrone had learned that the air of Mulberry was singularly fatal to the real fruit that he put on show outside. It happened some days that as many as twenty bananas on one stem would evaporate, though all the others remained intact. It was always the ones nearest the ground that vanished. One evening it struck Signor Di Bello that a violent chemical change in the exposed fruit would put an end to its mysterious disintegration. So he substituted the bananas of art for those of Nature. The evaporation ceased straightway, but for two or three mornings thereafter certain small boys, on their way to the Five Points Mission School, beheld with bitter disappointment the oaken symbol, and answered its grin of mockery with looks of blackest disgust.

Those boys are workingmen now, and when they dream of the springtimes of childhood, they see Giorgio Di Bello, paint brush in hand, giving a fresh skin of yellow to the make-believe bananas. It was a promise of vernal roses as sure as the chirp of a bluebird in the churchyard grass or the gladsome advent of Simone the Sardinian with his hokey-pokey cart. When the people saw him giving the bunch its annual sprucing up, they were wont to exclaim: “Bravo! Summer is coming. Soon we shall have music in Paradise.”

The morning of Bertino’s début at the shop was a bright one of young June, and the baby maples of the Park were showing their first dimples of green. It was the blatant hour when Mulberry’s street bazaar is in full cry; when the sham battle fought every morning between honeyed sellers and scornful buyers is in hot movement; when dimes and coppers are the vender’s prize against flounders, cabbages, saucepans, calicoes, apples, and shoestrings, as the stake that fires the housewife’s tongue and eye; when stout-lunged hucksters cut the din with the siren songs their kind have sung for ages in the market place.

Spick and span in the clean blouse of Monday, Signor Di Bello stood on his broad threshold ready for the day’s trade. He had just shown Bertino how to convert the prosy doorway into a bower abloom with garlands of freckled salame, cordons of silvery garlic, clusters of cacciocavalli cheese; how to hang in the entry luring sheaves of wild herbs, strings of hazelnuts, and the golden colocynths that are—as all must know—an anodyne for every ill. To flaunt this ravishing group to the senses of the colony was Bertino’s first duty of the day. That accomplished, he set out on either side of the doorway the tubs of tempting stockfish, the black peas of Lombardy, parched tomatoes and red peppers, lupini beans in fresh water, ripe olives in brine, and macaroni of sundry types.

Presently the foraging women, their blue-and-red-skirted hips wabbling under the weight of well-loaded baskets balanced on their heads, began to enter the shop. Dexterously taking down their burdens and setting them on the counter, they called out their wants in the varied jargons of the Peninsula. Not only was Signor Di Bello equal to them, one and all, but he could give back two raps in the haggling set-to for every tap that he received. When the morning had worn on, and the lay of the last vender had died out, he opened a small can of yellow paint, chose a brush from the stock, placed it in the hand of his nephew, and said:

“Nipote mio, do you see the green spots on the boughs? Well, it is time to give the Bunch a new coat.”

Bertino applied the colour, while his uncle looked on with fond and critical eye, for it was the first time he had intrusted the historic task to other hands than his own. Before the finishing touch had been given he was called into the shop to hack off a four-cent chunk of Roman cheese. A moment later Bertino stepped back to survey his handiwork, the brush at heedless poise—Mulberry’s sidewalks are narrow and teeming—when an angry voice fairly stung his ear:

“Guarda, donkey! What are you about?”

He turned and looked into the blazing eyes of a tall young woman, whose full-flowered beauty startled him more than her words had done, and for the moment his tongue had no speech.

“Clumsy dog! Why don’t you look?” she began again, drawing out a gingham handkerchief of purple and putting it to her face. On her cheek, just where the flush faded in the rich tawn of her skin, was a spot of yellow—as strangely there as though some fool had tried to adorn a radiant blossom.

“But excuse me; a thousand pardons. I did not see you,” he blurted. “I did not see you, veramente, signorina—beautiful signorina.”

“Bah!” she flung back. “Where are your eyes, calf of a countryman?”

He watched her as she sailed away above the heads of Mulberry’s little brown maids and matrons, and for hours afterward felt the spell of her massing black tresses, her proud step, and the rugged poetry of her plenteous line.

Small matters these—a spot of fortuitous colour, flashing eyes among a people who are always flashing, and a mountaineer with youth in his veins thinking about a well-knit and warm-hued maid who has proved her fire with a blistering tongue. But in the light of all that has come and gone, that stain of yellow may not be wiped out from this record of the warring dilemmas that sharpened the lives of certain little people of the little world wherein we have set foot.

CHAPTER IV
JUNO THE SUPERB

“O dolce Napoli,

O suol beato,

Ove sorridere,

Voile il creato;

Tu sei l’impero

Dell ’armonia—

Santa Lucia!

Santa Lucia!”

Signor Grabbini, impresario of the theatre of La Scala, resolved to give up his valiant but ruinous fight for the legitimate drama. Such pieces as Othello, Francesca da Rimini, The Count of Monte Cristo, acted with a complete cast, had proved a strain too severe for the treasury as well as for the capacity of his ten-foot stage. In scenes where the entire company was “on,” the jam became so great that spirited pushing set in, each actor aiming to hold that part of the stage allotted to him by the playbook. In the struggle, conducted sometimes with stealthy art, that the audience might not be aware, toes were trodden upon and tempers badly stirred. Thus it happened that after the curtain had rolled down, the ladies and gentlemen of the company were likely to fall to shaking their fists at one another, naturally to the delight of the audience, who could hear the wordy battle very distinctly. Wherefore Signor Grabbini decided to change the policy of his theatre.

One night he stepped before the curtain to make the momentous announcement. Before he could open his mouth a sailor-man, red as Hiawatha, reached over from the wicketed parapet of the gallery and cried:

“A clasp of the hand, comrade!”

With a gallery so low as that it were folly to court dignity, so the little man shook the big hand and then began his speech, which he punctuated with glances at a piece of white paper that he held. In glittering words he set forth the motives that animated him in deciding upon a change from the plan of amusement that had been so successful, so profitable to himself, and so agreeable to the signori of the company. But it was because he wished to serve better, to captivate even more the highly esteemed, the eminent, the generous Italian colony, that in the future there would be no five-act tragedies, but a veritable banquet every night of short comedies—oh, so laughable!—from the pens of the world’s greatest dramatists, in the true Italian as well as the dialect of sweet Naples.

“Bravoes!” from all over the theatre put a stop to the speech for a moment. Men in the orchestra pens leaned over the edge of the stage and lit their cigarettes at the footlights, and, taking advantage of the pause, the meal-cake man shouted his wares.

“But this is not all, my friends,” went on Signor Grabbini.

A fresh shower of bravoes.

“Keep your feet off my head!” cried a man in the pit to one in the gallery.

“Bah!” gave back the other, drawing in a huge boot between the wickets; “in this theatre one can not stretch his legs.”

“Silence! Hear the impresario!”

“Beginning on Sunday night,” said the man on the stage, “I shall have the distinct honour of presenting to the highly discriminating taste of the most esteemed and eminent patrons of La Scala an extraordinary singer of canzonets.”

“Bravo, Signor Grabbini!”

“Silence!”

“Meal cakes! A soldo each!”

“Silence, thou donkey!”

“With your permission, ladies and gentlemen,” the impresario went on, bowing low, “I will proceed. The artist to whom I have referred is—ah! my friends—she is an angel of delight—a glorious type, a creature magnificent. My word of honour, the most beautiful woman in New York—nay, in all America. To the artistic world she is known as Juno the Superb. Pay strict attention, my compatriots. The evening of the Feast of Sunday will indeed be an occasion most extraordinary, for it is my honoured privilege to inform you that in addition to the famous comedies and the exquisite Juno, there will be an oyster cook in the audience under the especial administration of the management, who will prepare soups of sea fruit in true Neapolitan style and at prices the most moderate.”

“Bravissimo!”

“Meal——”

“Silence! Evviva the oyster cook!”

“With these my humble words, highly prized patrons, I will conclude, and from the depth of my heart beg you to accept my most cordial gratitude, and the assurance that in the future as well as the past you will find me ever alert to serve faithfully and to the plenitude of my power the highly esteemed, the eminent, the generous Italian colony.”

“Long live the impresario!” was rained from all parts as he backed off, salaaming.

“Evviva Juno the Superb!” piped one voice.

“And the oyster soup!” thundered a Sicilian hod-carrier.

At length the curtain was raised on the last act of the tragedy, and the knights and ladies, buffoons and sages, soldiers and huntsmen, began moving about the stage gingerly, with great skill avoiding collision as they crossed or ducking their heads when they made exits, hurried or slow, through the dollhouse doors.

On the Feast of Sunday a packed theatre bore witness to the wisdom of Signor Grabbini’s change of policy. From the base-board of the stage, which was fringed by a row of shrubby black heads, to the last tier of benches there was no vacant seat. The first of the short comedies was reeled off without a single toe trodden on, since it required only five dramatis personæ. Not a joke went begging, for the audience heard them all twice—first from the prompter, who bawled them from his little green coop at the footlights, and again from the mouths of the actors.

Next came the star of the evening, Juno the Superb. As the orchestra—blaring its brass—struck up the prelude of her song, Signor Di Bello entered the tiny proscenium box and dropped into a chair. The fame of her plethoric beauty had reached him, as the impresario had taken good care it should reach many an appreciative masculine ear. He was a very different-looking man to-night from the Signor Di Bello of business hours, clad in a long drab blouse, hacking Parmesan and weighing macaroni. Now he showed brave in snowy shirt front of bulging expanse, large diamond, black coat, white waistcoat, lavender trousers, and a gorgeous bouquet stuck under his left cheek.

When she appeared in the glare of the lights, draped frankly in the odd colours and tinsel frippery of the Campania peasant maid—as she is seen nowhere but on the stage—it was plain that the impresario had made an intelligent guess. Her exuberant charms were sufficient to deal even that audience a start. The men caught their breath, and the women made wry faces. Had they possessed eyes for anything but Juno, they would have seen that the grocer in the box was smitten hard by the sudden picture of billowing womanhood and glowing flesh tint. “Ah, what beauty!” he breathed, leaning farther over the rail, deep in the spell of her great hazel eyes, the peony of her cheeks, the soft tawn of her neck, and shoulders that shaded down to clearest amber. “Pomegranates and hidden rosebuds! By the egg of Columbus!”

And in truth she was, as every man had to own, as fine a woman as ever came out of Italy or any other country. But this did not keep their teeth off edge when she began to voice “Santa Lucia,” that evergreen canzonet of Naples. She pitched upon a key that baffled the orchestra. The leader stamped his foot and shifted tones in vain. Only deaf ears could have failed to perceive that it was her generous friend Nature and not art that had opened to her the stage door.

“Madonna Maria!” was the criticism of Luigia the Garlic Woman. “She has the voice of a hungry goat on a foggy morning.”

But there was one pair of eardrums on which her bleating did not grate. They belonged to Signor Di Bello, in calmer moments a man of very good hearing. But he was stone deaf now. Before the Levantine charms of this thrilling creature all his senses were absorbed in sight.

“Brava, bravissima!” he shouted at the interlude. “Oh, simpiaticone!”

“What a whale she is!” said a phthisic cigarette girl to her promised husband, who heard her not.

“An ugly figure she makes, truly,” sneered a barber’s wife to her husband. “A big cow like that in the frock of a child! No honest woman, one sees easily. And look, Adriano! Her nose! I find it similar to the snout of Signora Grametto’s little black-faced dog.”

There was no gainsaying this bold touch of the Supreme Sculptor’s realism. Glorious her black tresses, delectable her form and colour, uptilting and ample her nose.

The canzonet ended, she walked off without bowing to or glancing at the audience, but the men, one and all, their eye thirst still unslaked, joined in Signor Di Bello’s frantic demand for an encore. On she came with stolid countenance and began the song all over again, although the women had set up a hissing that matched the strength of the applause. Signor Di Bello called the flower girl into the box, bought an armful of her wares, and threw them wildly on the stage. They fell in a shower on all sides of Juno. Instantly she stopped, put her arms akimbo, and while the orchestra played on, glared blackly at her vehement admirer. Flowers for a Neapolitan of the Porto! Blossoms that have poison in their breath! Stupid Di Bello! Stupid Genovese! Twelve years in Mulberry, and to forget the hatred that Neapolitans of Naples have for natural blooms! Perhaps you thought she was from the country, like most of the people there. Bah! In such a serious matter one ought to be sure.

It was the women’s golden chance. They started a titter of derisive laughter that became a gale and swept through the theatre. Juno moved toward the box, trampling the odious flowers, and spat in the face of Signor Di Bello. Then she left the stage, followed by an outpour of boorish gibes.

“Infame! infame!” It was the voice of Bertino, crying loudly from the last row of benches, under the gallery hard by the door. With a firing emotion that he did not know was the green fever, he had watched the doings of his uncle, and when the bright colours rained about her, brushing her cheeks and hair, and whisking her shoulders, he thought with a heart-fall of the wretched blossom his hand had bestowed a week before at the Wooden Bunch. Madre Santissima! His uncle kissed her with lovely flowers, and he, miserable soul, kissed her with a spot of yellow paint. But when the people laughed and sneered, and he saw her anger kindle, her cause was his own. The pigs and sons of pigs! To laugh at her! At his queen, the amorosa of his dreamland, by sunglow and starshine, asleep or at work. Grander than the dames of Genoa palaces, more beautiful than the peaches of California. And his uncle! The old mooncalf! He was the cause of it all. Served him right that kiss she gave him back. Ha-ha! But these jeers, these hounds yelping at his queen! “Infame! infame!”

The people thought he meant it for Juno, and took up the cry, which did not subside until the Bay of Naples and the cone of Vesuvius rolled up from the bottom, and the second comedy began. Signor Di Bello had no appetite for this, and he left the box, passing out amid the nudges and snickers of the first families of the Genovesi, Milanesi, and Torinesi, who were there in force along with the flower of the Calabriani, Napolitani, and Siciliani. But he put a good face on the matter, and at the door hailed the impresario:

“Ha, Signor Grabbini! Your singer has at least one liquid tone.” And he disappeared, chuckling.

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST LADY

The following night, and every night of the week, Signor Di Bello held forth ecstatically in the box at La Scala. But the warmth of his demonstrations for Juno was unable to melt the frost that her dreadful voice had caused to settle on the audience—a frost that grew thicker with each new display of her copious self. From his bench under the gallery Bertino was a witness of his uncle’s frantic courtship, and the green fever fairly consumed him, for he had decided that Juno was made for him, and that neither his uncle nor any one else should have her for wife. In the matter of courting he too had not been idle, though he was young enough to know better than to make a public show of his addresses. More than once it had occurred that while Signor Di Bello took his ease in the Caffè of the Three Gardens of an afternoon, Juno and Bertino passed a quarter of an hour together in the grocery. With a black mantilla of cheap lace thrown over her head, instead of the accustomed shawl that maids of Mulberry wear on working days, she visited the shop for her supply of salame, lupine beans, or the goat’s-milk cheese of which she told Bertino she was very fond. The first time she entered, his heart leaped and he began stammering excuses for the spot of yellow he had given her cheek at their last meeting. Would the beautiful signorina believe that it was all an accident, clumsy calf that he was—a mishap most stupid? He begged her to forgive him. Would she not? Oh, how happy it would make him!

“Bah!” she answered, looking him over. “Give me good weight of salame and free measure of beans.”

Clearly, the weight and measure that he gave suited her, for she came every afternoon thereafter, but never when Signor Di Bello happened to be in the shop. One day he said to her:

“Every night I dream of you.”

“Ah, si?” she replied, arching her rich brows. “And every night I dream. Shall I tell you of what?”

“Of me?” breathed Bertino.

“Of you? Simpleton! I dream of getting out of this hogpen. Blood of San Gennaro! Do you think I came to America to live a life like this? Wait until I have money in the Bank of Risparmio.”

“But, signorina, I love you.”

“Love! What good is that? It may do for these animals to live on. For me, no. When I marry I shall become a grand signora.”

On the fifth day of their acquaintance she told him her troubles. Five dollars a week was all she got at La Scala, and Signor Grabbini—a man most stingy—kept back two of that for the dress, the scarlet slippers, and the pink tights. Don’t talk to her of America as a place to make money. What a pigsty was Mulberry! Her room, which she hired of Luigia the Garlic Woman, was smaller and darker than any she ever had in Naples. And what did it cost? A whole dollar every week! Five liras for a room! Merciful Madonna!

“Listen,” said Bertino, coming from behind the counter and walking with her to the door; “I want you for my wife. Marry me, and you shall live in the finest house in Mulberry—in Casa Di Bello.”

“What have you to do with that house?” she asked quickly.

“I live there.”

“But it belongs to Signor Di Bello.”

“Yes; I am his nephew.”

A new interest awoke in her wary and artful eye. “They say he is very rich,” she mused, looking toward the patch of green in Paradise. “He admires my singing very much.”

“Your singing! Bah!” Bertino’s love was not deaf. “Don’t you know why he makes a baboon of himself when you are on the stage? You have turned his old head with your beauty.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said absently, while there came into her mind an extravagant avowal of love that Signor Di Bello had made to her behind the scenes the night before. “Well, he is rich,” she went on, “and you—are poor.”

“True; I am not rich now, but I shall be soon. Ha! Do you know how I am going to make money? I do not tell everybody—not even my uncle—but I will tell you. I have a friend in Italy, at Cardinali. Do you know the place? No matter. My friend is what is called a sculptor, and he is going to make statues—oh, so fine!—of great people in this country. Now, it is I who am to tell him what to make. When I have made up my mind, I shall send him the picture of some great American—some famous man—and from this he will make a marble bust. The marble is all ready. When it is done he will send it to me, and I shall—well, perhaps I shall put it in some fine gallery like our Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. Ah, what a place that is! I was there once on the Feast of the Child. Now, my friend is a sculptor most wonderful. I know what he can do. You should see his beautiful Juno and the Peacock. If you——”

“Juno and the Peacock?” she broke in. “What is that?”

“Ah! a lady most beautiful, without any clothes, and a great bird with a long tail. Oh, how beautiful—as beautiful as you!”

“Veramente?”

“I tell you the truth. Now, when the people of America see the bust that he shall send, what do you think they will do? Why, they will be mad for it, and some rich man will buy it. I have not yet made up my mind how much I shall make him pay. Not less than a thousand liras, of that you may be sure. But this will be only the beginning. After that Armando will make more busts, the rich ladies and gentlemen will continue to buy, and—who knows?—Bertino Manconi may become a millionaire. Now will you be my wife?”

“He has made one Juno,” she said, her thought set on a single phase of his chimera—that whomever he chose for the subject, after that person a bust would be fashioned. “Since he has made one Juno, why not let him make another?” She said it seriously, without guile. “Oh, so many photographs I had taken in Naples! Here, none; I am too poor. Next week I shall have some. But how fine I should look in marble! I have thought of it many a time. Ah, proprio bella, neh?”

“You would make the finest bust in the world,” he said ardently.

“I think so myself,” she nodded, drawing the mantilla under her chin and moving away with her package of freely weighed codfish. He watched her until she turned into the mouth of the Alley of the Moon, whereon her lodgings looked, and the idea that she had put into his head took deeper hold.

“Why not?” he asked the tub of olives at the door. “Is there a more beautiful woman in America? It is settled. To-morrow I shall say to her, ‘Carissima Juno, when you are my wife I will send your picture to Armando, that you may be the first bust.’”

He stood in the doorway gazing out on the park, assured now that she must be his—for what greater honour could man show to woman?—when his eye met the bronze presence of Italy’s liberator. A withered wreath of laurel, with which the Italian societies had crowned their hero on his last birthday, had dropped over the head and become a lopsided necklace. Bertino saw the half-drawn sword, the bared arm, the conquering air, and his promise to Armando came back:

“It shall be some one as great as Garibaldi.”

Thus it fell out that the following afternoon, when Juno came to the shop for garlic and spaghetti, and told him that of all things she would like to see herself in marble, he said: “No; it would be false to my friend.”

“And you say you dream of me?”

“By night and by day.”

“And you love me?”

“Ah, si; Madonna knows.”

“Still you will not do me this favour?”

“But it is to be the bust of a man.”

“Bah! Why not a woman?”

“No, no; I can not. It would be treachery to Armando.”

None the less, she had spoken the words that sealed the fate of the bust. “Why not a woman, indeed?” Bertino asked himself when she had gone. “But it must be the greatest as well as the handsomest woman in America.” He thought of the picture of the President’s wife that he had seen one night at an illustrated Italian lecture in the Hudson Mission. “By San Giorgio!” he exclaimed, astonished at the grandeur of his own idea. “A bust of her Majesty, the First Lady of America! This is the best thing I ever thought of.”

The next day was one of vast import. Not only did it witness the purchase by Bertino in a Bowery store of a small photograph of the President’s wife, warranted genuine, but it brought to the ears of Aunt Carolina news that made her tremble for Casa Di Bello. From the market place Angelica bore the gossip that was fast reaching every niche and turn of Mulberry—the great tidings that Signor Di Bello and Juno the Superb had been seen the night before in the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian sitting at the same table eating a ragout of spiced pigskin.

“It must be stopped!” declared Carolina, setting her gold-patched teeth. The old bugaboo of a wife arose, as it did with any woman to whom the running voice of the colony linked her brother’s name. “He shall never bring that Neapolitan baggage to Casa Di Bello.”

That night, after dinner, from which her brother was absent, she hung long gold pendants in her ears, fastened her lace collar with a large cameo brooch, and, her puce-coloured silk all arustle, went to reconnoitre, as she always did when the sky of her dominion was threatened with a wife. It was a rare sight to see Signorina Di Bello abroad at night, afoot in the heart of Mulberry, and people stared in wonder or bowed reverently as she passed by. A half-hour afterward, when the Bay of Naples and smoking Vesuvius made way for Juno on the stage of La Scala, three shoots of the Di Bello stock were intent beholders—Giorgio in the box, Bertino on his bench under the gallery, and Carolina in a seat directly overhead, where her brother could not see her. With ears stopped, but eyes wide open, the priestly dame surveyed with alarm the expansive glories of Juno, and regarded with dismay the rhapsody of Signor Di Bello. If she knew her brother, and she was confident that she did, here was a woman who could have him for a husband. Thoughtfully she walked home, and thoughtfully she sought her pillow.

From the land of sleep there came no helpful message, and in the morning she sat before her sanctum window still pondering what to do. Over the forest of gray shafts that marked the sepulchres in St. Patrick’s Churchyard she gazed sadly at the broad windows of the rectory where she had lived those years of sweetest order and tranquility, where husbands and wives had no part in life’s economy, where marrying woman and wedlocking man jarred not the placid liturgy of her days. Suddenly the door swung wide, and Angelica panted into the room. As fast as her short legs could waddle she had come from the market place with a basket full of fresh vegetables and a head full of dewy scandal.

“O signorina! The shame!” she gasped. “Truly a disgrace tremendous! Mulberry talks of naught else. I speak of what I know, for it comes straight from the lips of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods, who had it first from Simone the Snail Boiler.”

“What?”

“A grand shame! Signor Di Bello is betrothed to the Neapolitan singer!”

“Juno the Superb?”

“Si, signorina. Oh, the disgrace!”

“Misericordia, Santa Maria!”

“And the day is set. Luigia the Garlic Vender says it, and——”

“For when?”

“The Feast of Januarius.”

“The baggage!” said Carolina, her austere calm all gone. “That’s her doing. A Genovese to be married on the Feast of St. Januarius! By the mass, we shall see!”

Even as the bottled blood of Naples’s patron saint boils once a year, so did the corked emotions of Carolina begin to bubble. Clearly the hour for action had come. It was not the first time that a war cloud of matrimony had darkened her sky, and she buckled for the onset with a veteran heart. She plumed herself on having outwitted and driven to retreat more than a dozen pretenders to her brother’s hand. Once it was the daughter of Pescoli the Undertaker, a ripe maid of barn-owl face and sinewy pattern, famed for settling disputes with the neighbours pugnis et calcibus; but Carolina pitted brain against brawn, and this terror bit the dust. Next came the red Milanese, widow of Baroni the merchant in secondhand bread. In her hand she brought her husband’s ten years’ savings for dowry, and on her apricot face, still fresh, her everblooming smile; she, too, was outgeneralled by Carolina, as were many other would-be wives as fast as they showed their heads. At least, so it seemed to Carolina. That she held her place as mistress of Casa Di Bello, she firmly believed, was due solely to the fact of her never-flagging vigilance. But it may be guessed that her brother’s side of the story would have dimmed her self-glory as a match-breaker. Once he said to her, spicing the sentiment with a dry laugh:

“Do you think I can’t admire a fine woman without giving her a wedding ring?”

But from the watchtower of her ever-present dread the petticoats that she espied were always signals of real danger, however he might laugh them to false alarms. Wherefore she felt that she must take up the cudgels against Juno as she had raised them against other women, and that without delay. The teeming line and colour of the Neapolitan were clear in her memory, and she knew a stronger siege than ever had been laid to her brother’s taste. Henceforth eternal alertness would be the price of Signor Di Bello’s bachelorhood and her own reign, which she took as a most serious matter. Alas! it was the same old battle. Would the struggle never end? And this ever-returning necessity of standing watch and ward, of fighting away aspirants for wedding rings, rose before her now in an unwonted light, as a penance that ought not to be laid upon her, as one that she would like to put off. She could see herself all her days beating back would-be wives from the portals of Casa Di Bello, and the troubled outlook weighted her spirit with despair. A yearning for peace entered her soul, and with it came the thought of a startling alternative for war—a voice telling her to do the very thing that she had fought so long against her brother’s doing. Take a wife! But her taking a wife, she mused smugly, should be quite a different matter from his taking one. The maid of her choosing would be no menace to the status quo of Casa Di Bello. She would be a person of right notions, not puffed with the foolish conceit of being able to govern the household; a ragazza with good sense enough to see that a wife’s place under the connubial roof is far inferior to that of her husband’s sister. Ah! the wife of her choice, she told herself fondly, should be her creature, not a ruler; a subject, not a trampler, of her parish-house laws. It never struck Carolina’s mind to seek her ideal among the girls of New Italy; that would be calling for aid to the camp of the enemy. Her fancy took wing over seas to old Italy, to Apennine maids untinged of the craft and airs of Mulberry; to some maid of clay that would shape easy in the mould of her wish. When Bertino came in at noon from the shop, she began:

“You have a sister?”

“Si; Marianna.”

“Very well. What kind of a girl is she?”

“A fine girl.”

“Is she sound in health?”

“Ah, si; very sound.”

“How big is she?”

“Medium size.”

“Gentle and kind?”

“Yes, very gentle.”

“How old?”

“Let me think. She will be seventeen come the Feast of the Mother.”

“Any bad traits?”

“Not a single one, except that she eats too much molasses.”

“What work does she?”

“Straw-plaiting.”

“Do you think she would like to come to America?”

“Not unless—unless——”

“Well?”

“Not unless Armando came.”

“Armando? An amante, I suppose?”

“Yes, aunt; her amante.”

“Bah!” Her spinster mind did not count this a serious matter. “Perhaps I shall send for her.”

“She wouldn’t leave Armando.”

“Then I might go and bring her.”

“What do you want of her?” ventured Bertino.

“Some day you shall see.”

CHAPTER VI
CAROLINA RESOLVES TO GO COURTING

Upon the facts brought out Carolina decided that Marianna would do very well. But the leap was far too hazardous to be taken in the dark, and the prudence that guided her in the selection of other household belongings she would now bring to bear in choosing a wife. If needs be, she would journey to Italy, and make sure by a close survey of Marianna that hers was not a nature likely to attempt a ruling of the roost. To the Jesuitry of her view, a wife of eighteen and a husband of gloaming forty were well mated when their union would serve her own most laudable purpose; and as for any trifling obstacle like a sweetheart, that could be filliped away. Once upon the ground, and satisfied that the girl would prove a wife of the desired brand, she had no doubt of accomplishing the shipment of the goods. But there set in a fear for the turn events might take during her absence. With the sentinel gone from the gate, Juno might charge and carry the castle. Here was a danger that must be offset.

Throwing a plaid shawl over her head and not stopping to change her open-heeled house slippers, she set forth through the ruck of Mulberry for the shop of her brother. It was a novel sight to behold her hopping over curbstones in that unstately manner, and hot grew the scandalous guesses as to the cause.

“Trouble, grand trouble in Casa Di Bello,” was the common voice.

As Carolina hurried forward she had no eye for the signs of opening summer on every hand—the fire escapes abloom with potted verdure, the blithe touch that glistening radishes gave to the vegetable stalls, the moon face of Chiara the Basilican beaming from her bower of dandelion leaves. Passing the schoolhouse, she received a reverent bow and a low “Buon giorno” from the hokey-pokey man, who stood by his dazzling cart, ready for the onslaught of boys and girls, who would soon be out at recess clamouring for one-cent dabs of pink sorbetto on strips of brown paper. Little maidens decked in snowy frocks and veils walked proudly to their first communion, all mindful of their skirts as they passed the racks of Boccanegra the Macaroni Baker, whose new-made paste hung drying in the sunshine; but of them Carolina took no heed, so wrapped was she in her great project of courting a suitable wife.

At Bayard Street the sound of voices raised in a familiar anthem caught her ear, and there swung into view from around the corner a handful of marching men. They were members of the Genovese Society, garbed bravely in the uniform of Italian infantry, out to celebrate the Feast of St. George, of all holidays the dearest to Genoa. At sight of them the cloud of anxiety that had shadowed her face lifted, and she smiled with a shrewd content. The Feast of San Giorgio! Her brother’s birthday as well as the day of the knight who carved the dragon. The alarm sounded by Angelica concerning Juno had driven the fact from her head, but there came back with it now a heartsome consciousness that it was a day of rockribbed truth in her brother’s life. If at other times his promises might have the frailty of spaghetti sticks, she knew that it would not be so on this, his saint’s day. It had ever been so with the men of Genoa. With renewed spirits she foresaw the success of her plan to exact from him a pledge not to marry until she should return from Italy. Such a promise or any other made to-day he would keep, though all the maids and widows of Mulberry united to make him disregard it.

She found him alone at the shop, sprawled outside beneath the Wooden Bunch in his curve-backed chair, bathing in the sunshine. Only on rare and critical occasions did she visit the shop, and the sight of her brought him quickly to his feet.

“Governo ladro!” he exclaimed. “What has happened?”

“I am going to Italy.”

“To Italy! What for?”

“It is twelve years since I heard the chimes of San Lorenzo.”

“Yes; I think so,” he said, going behind the counter, shaving off a piece of Roman cheese and tossing it into his mouth. “When do you set off?”

“As soon as possible.”

“There is a ship for Genoa to-morrow,” he said eagerly.

Looking him in the eye, she asked, “Are you betrothed to the Napolitana?”

“Satan the crocodile!” he roared, pounding the counter. “This is too much! Do you count me a simpleton?”

“Promise me, caro fratello, that you will not take a wife until I return.”

“By the Egg, I will not promise! Do you think I don’t know this is my birthday? Suppose the ship went down? I should have to live and die a bachelor.”

“Promise at least that you will marry no one for three months.”

“Ma che? What nonsense is this? Are you afraid of the Napolitana? Bah! How foolish you are! A fine woman, yes. But do you think I don’t know what I am about?”

“Promise for three months.”

“Si, si, if you wish it; but it is all grand nonsense.”

“Do you know what I am going to do in Italy?” she asked, with an essay at archness that was a sorry failure.

“Hunt a husband?” he chuckled.

“No; a wife.”

“What shall you do with her?” he asked gravely, scenting the truth.

“Bring her to you, my brother.”