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.
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