THE SERVANT WENCH.
It is three o’clock. The Mistress’s soup has been cooked and eaten, the piece of dry boiled beef is removed at last from table, the dishes are washed up, the last reproof has been administered. Maddalena stands before her lady in all the glory of a new-patterned dress, with silk apron, silken-fringed kerchief, brightly glowing gold brooch and ear-drops, fresh pezzotto, whose white muslin folds drape her neck and shoulders—she is ready to go. All blunders and scoldings of five minutes ago are forgotten: the mistress is only a woman, and as a woman she sympathises. Has she not herself smoothed those black braids whose plaits lie round so wondrously? Has she not placed the gold pins to secure the veil, and fastened the kerchief behind? ‘Thou hast a good appearance, in truth,’ she remarks, complacently gazing on her work—for Maddalena is her work, has been her work these years past—and the girl’s blood kindles with pleasure at the praise: la signora Marini knows what’s what, and would not, on this occasion, take the trouble to say what she did not mean!
The sky has not lightened with the growing day nor have the clouds taken their load off the mountains, the scirocco is still in the air, so that marble is less white and colour less brilliant along the streets, but the shadow is a tender shadow, and we do not mourn the searching sunlight. To-day is a great day at the Church of San Siro; the first communion has been given there this morning to hundreds of children, who now parade the streets in gala dress before going home to join in festivities of quite a secular nature. The girls have white dresses—satin, silk, or muslin, according to their degree, with bridal-seeming veils and flowers—the boys wear, probably, their first cloth suits and carry bouquets of flowers, of which they are half ashamed. Maddalena hurries on, smiling complacently. In every little white-robed girl she sees her own little niece, Tomasina, who has also been this morning at San Siro, and in every escorting damsel behind she sees herself walking beside the mamma, for is not she the aunt of a first communion girl? It is not far from San Matteo to Via Luccoli, and soon the little servant has climbed a dark winding stair, has pulled a feeble bell-rope on the 5to piano, has been admitted and warmly embraced by many female relations, in the midst of an admiring throng that is gathered round the little furbelowed and perfumed doll, who stands beside her mamma. ‘What luxury!’ says everybody, and congratulations pour from all sides upon the firstborn and the firstborn’s parents, who have thus safely borne her to years of discretion and the Church’s bosom. But she, poor infant, meanwhile, being but nine years old, listens wondering, and sure only of her new frock and her own importance, and of the comfits which are soon to be hers.
Voices rise shrill, and jokes fly merrily. Maddalena is not of the maddest among the guests. She stands now apart, softly conversing with a young man from Rivarolo, who keeps a baker’s shop, and is in no way to be despised. The shadow of the scirocco has not passed from her eyes, and the heavy lids lie but half folded away, with long lashes sweeping downwards; but the young man from Rivarolo does not seem to mind that sleepy gaze, and has just made up his mind that last Sunday shall not be the only time he follows a little maiden into the church of Saint Ambrogio, when she goes to early mass! Now the board is spread in this large, scantily furnished hall, where the floor is of red brick and the walls of yellow cement, and the curtains of soft and faded calicoes; sixteen people sit down to eat ravioli and stewed beef and truffles, to drink sour Monferrato wine, and to break their teeth over hard sugar-plums. They are all very free and friendly, and talk loudly, all but Maddalena, who prefers to speak in whispers, but then she is sitting beside the baker. When the evening is over it is this same baker who walks with her slowly, in the darkness of eight o’clock, up the steep of Via Luccoli, and along the broad way of the Carlo Felice, till they reach the point where a narrow, brick-paved and rapid descent runs down into San Matteo. ‘Brava! thou com’st home to time,’ says the mistress, when she opens the door to the servant-wench. And then they discuss the party and the presents, the viands, the dresses, the conversation, and all the scandal that can possibly be gathered from so humble an affair. ‘Well, thou hast amused thyself; to-morrow there will be plenty to do, my child,’ says the padrona, as maid and mistress retire to sleep.
And there is plenty to do indeed! La signora Marini has an entertainment in honour of her name-day, and la signora Marini likes to make a show, while being at the same time economical. Mistress and maid climb the steep hill betimes in the morning to have the pick of the market produce in the Piazza San Domenico, and both are a good hand at a bargain and a better hand still at a little friendly wrangling to small purpose. Maddalena is all day long plucking fowls, shredding beans, sorting rice, washing lettuce, rolling paste, stirring minestra—graver kitchen duties the housewife attends to herself—and when the dinner is under way the hall must be swept, and the girl has her mistress’s hair yet to do, and her own little slip-shod person to make neat! ‘Dio, how the ribs ache!’ says Maddalena, and while she says it the feeble door-bell tinkles—the guests are there!
Every man and woman, however, has a word and a jest for the serving-maid, which words and jests re-assure her a good deal, so that by the time the padrona is ready seated, among the company, at the long board with the coarse tablecloth, she is herself again, and, handing the viands, confidentially informs each guest of its chief ingredients, recommending her own favourites to favoured ones in the party. Only, when all are served and comfortably eating, Maddalena does not blush to sit down on the soiled old chintz settee with the vegetable dish in her lap. She can keep just as sharp a look-out over the wants of the table, and feels no way guilty of neglecting any duty—in fact, if reproved would have known quite well how to answer that she had been on her feet all day and was tired. But no one makes any complaint. People, on the contrary, are not afraid to exchange a friendly word now and then with the winsome waitress; and even when the guests are gone and the mistress goes into the kitchen to discuss the party’s success, Maddalena gets no scolding, either for her freedom of manner in the dining-hall, nor because ‘that young man of Rivarolo’ is there, having been brought by a third party in the shape of the charwoman. Indeed the lady gives countenance to this affair by her presence, and when the house is locked up, and both are alone again for the night, the talk between them is just as much of ‘him’ and his prospects as of the boiled beef and roasted capons, and of the success of the tagliarini as second course.
It is not a one-sided interest either. Maddalena has all her mistress’s concerns just as much at heart, and the concerns of her mistress’s aunts and uncles, and nieces and cousins as well. If the tagliarini had not been a success, or the lady had failed to get her due of compliment, the girl would have cried as copiously as when her own new dress was spoilt, the first time of wearing, by the water-squirts in the Pallavicini Garden at her sister’s wedding! And when la signora Marini had on that violet silk just new for the Corpus Domini procession, Maddalena could not refrain from a friendly ejaculation when she opened the street door to her—even though two strange gentlemen had accompanied her back from church! It is she who greases and plaits her lady’s hair on occasions less grand than those for which la pettinatrice—or female hair-dresser—is summoned. Maddalena can do a little of everything, and everything quite passably well, from the mending of a bell-rope with a hairpin to the crimping and ironing of fine muslins, the coiling of plaits, the stewing of fowls, the rolling of paste, the sweeping of rooms, and last, but certainly not least, the nursing of sick folk. When la padrona’s aunt had the typhus, who so deft, so patient, and so tender as the little servant wench? And when the child of the first-floor lodger had to have leeches put on for inflammation, did not the doctor say that he couldn’t have done it better himself than did Maddalena? To which she had answered, ‘No—nor half so well, being but a miserable man.’ Of course she must needs have her cryings, and scoldings, and ill-humours, and many is the time she has vowed to run away from the home she loves so well; but when all’s said and done there is surely no happier place than the 4to piano of that house in S. Matteo where mistress and maid live, and laugh and cry and squabble so thoroughly.
Il Negoziante. The Shopman.
Carnival has been and gone, Lent is over and Easter festivals, with sunny smile, have opened the gate to Spring. Upon the country that spreads around our goodly Riviera city, the flush of almond blossoms still lies rosily, to fade soon into the paler tones of pear and apple and cherry bloom. The trees are budding, to help with their faint green for contrast, but the green that is fullest at this time lies over the fresh, brown earth, where spring crops have come to life and are growing fast in the keen, sunlit air. Nursery gardens spread fair and far about the town, with little white and trellis-covered cottages in their midst for the husbandmen—gardens that have neat furrows intersecting them for water-supply, and that make a rich show in market produce. This is towards Albaro, on Genoa’s eastern side, and the low front of Albaro’s hill is adorned with many a white old palace and the slender columns of marble loggias that are fresco-painted within. From the town’s ramparts these many marble buildings have a great effect, that stand amidst green gardens, with roofs lying upon a bright sky, and—walking along the straight and dusty road that makes, towards the sunrise, for the sea-shore, and is flanked on both sides with arbutus trees—the white colonnades of the Paradiso palace are before you all the time to make you remember for ever after the look of marble arches on a green hillside and a strong blue sky.