The sempstress was old when Joe saw her and so stout that the great scissors that hung from her vast apron bobbed as she moved; but she was handsome still and gracious with the graciousness of a duchess; I well recollect Joe’s comment on it.
The laughing girls who clustered round us in wonder pinched his calves, perhaps to see if they were padded, though their excuse to old Teresa’s sharp and quick reprimand was that they only wanted to feel “the beautiful real English wool” of his shooting stockings.
Joe had not objected, but she was not placated, and bade the hussies be off while she invited us into her dwelling.
A girl sat at the hand-loom, rapidly moving her bare brown feet and flinging the shuttle to and fro for the weaving of the sheeting, a completed length of which lay beside her ready to be bleached on the stones by the river.
Joe wanted to hear about it from her, for her eyes were “like the fish pools of Heshbon”; but she jumped up at the mistress’s bidding and he lost interest in weaving; I think he would even have tasted the sour wine which she presently brought on a copper tray if I had not quickly invented a polite fiction to the effect that Englishmen never drink anything but tea in the afternoon.
A slice of chestnut cake we were forced to accept from the elder woman’s hospitable hand as she asked my husband’s name. I remember the charming bow with which she turned to him after she had heard it and said: “O che bel San Guiseppe!” and his equally charming recognition of her pretty compliment.
Irish and Italian—there was some subtle affinity always between them—the grave and the gay, the superstitious and the Pagan, as he said—and he was positively confused when she observed that his golden beard and fair, curling hair were just like the St. Joseph’s in the Church. It was a merry run we had down through the chestnut woods and a sweet walk by the river in the sunset, back to the Presbytery.
Graver but none the less satisfactory was the appreciation given to him by my old nurse, when we arrived presently in Genoa. She was of a different type—refined, sensitive, serious even to sadness—with the blight always on her of a foundling’s ignorance of parentage; but devoted beyond all words and of a rare intelligence: Joe was impressed with her and likened her to a female Dante.
Yet the brighter types were more in accordance with his holiday mood: when we were on a visit later at a mediaeval castle whose battlements stand sheer above the sea and whose olive groves slope to a transparent bay, he spent all the time not occupied by eating figs off the tree on the Castle keep to playing with half-naked brown urchins on the quay of the tiny fishing-port below.
His first acquaintance with one of them was at dead of night when we were alone in the weird old place and a hollow bell clanged suddenly through the hot air.