‘My child, you dream! Ten soldi! I might have made two Spiriti Santi in the time. Impossible! Eighteen.’
‘Nevermore,’ declares Bianca, staunchly. ‘Before I pay you eighteen soldi I take the letter to some one who knows how to read, and I make myself be told if you have said what I required.’
The poor scrivano begins to get frightened. What would this bode? He might never write a letter again. ‘Make it fifteen soldi,’ he pleads.
And long and hotly they wrangle ere the price can be fixed between them, but at length a compromise is effected. Frà Giuseppe is to put up with twelve soldi now, and to have a hand in the marriage ceremony, if the letter fulfil its purpose. What more could justice demand? The document is folded and sealed. Bianca exchanges it for the dirty coppers, and with a hasty leave-taking makes her way across the stream and up the rugged path to the thatched house, under the chestnuts. Neither Pietro Gambari, nor soldi, nor Cappellano, trouble her slumbers much in spite of all apparent excitement. Even a white lie rests lightly on a conscience of eighteen years old, that gets up at four in the morning.
La Cresima. The Confirmation Day.
The cherries are over; neither large, black nor small bright ones are on the trees now, and the wood-strawberries were forgotten long ago. The grapes begin to flush purple-red over their pale green skins: soon they will be ready for the vintage. But the grapes are not havoc for the village children, and if it were not for many another kind of fruit that grows on trees, and can, happily, not be made into wine, it would be a weary time till the walnut harvest came round! Heaven be praised, there are large purple plums and larger yellow plums and little blue plums that may all be climbed for, letting alone the peaches, and apricots, and figs, and the large pears, that are ripe enough now for the taste of any simple-minded village child!
And summer is play-time. Nobody thinks of the girls till winter is well in, and then it is only one or two out of the whole village gang whose mothers will spare them to learn reading of the Signor Prevosto of an evening, or knitting and darning of Ninetta del Cappellano in the forenoon.
But whatever is done in the bleak months, we have not long passed the dog days now, and no mother gives a thought to any child but the swaddled puppet who hangs at her breast, or the tall damsel who can weave at the handloom and fetch back purchases from town or fair. So Virginia had naught else to do all the days of the summer but be up and down, with the rest of the village children, amid the hamlets and through the woods, across meadows and streams. Her mother is Maddalena, the wife of Pietro the pedone, but she has six children, and four of them are girls, who are of an age to help in the house and the fields. Virginia thanks the Virgin that she has been of more use out of the way than anywhere else!
Till last week nobody thought of her; she was one of the village torments, neither more nor less: one of the children who shout at festivals, and stare and wonder at mass when a newcomer enters the church; one of those village inflictions who are always up other people’s fruit trees, yet never get properly punished; one of that dark-eyed, walnut-hued gang, whose feet are always shoeless, whose hair is always rough, whose garments are always in rags; one of the rest, in fact, to share and share alike, excepting that when ‘the rest’ happen to be all boys it isn’t much Virginia gets but a cuff here and there, and not much that she gives, for the matter of that, but a good blow back again! That was how Beppo came by his black eye yesterday, perhaps, and Virginia by that ugly rent in her apron!
Well, till last week, nobody thought of Virginia; but last Monday, when the pedone went to Ponte Novo with the letters, he was accompanied by the pretty Nettina, who is Virginia’s eldest sister, and in Ponte Novo Nettina bought a piece of stuff, for which she bargained many a long hour, on and off, and which was just enough of a remnant to make the child a new frock. And it was no flinsy print material either, but a bit of woollen fabric, for is not Virginia’s father the postman, and must not his child look more fitly dressed than a mere poorest contadina when she goes to take la Cresima from the Archbishop?