“I will wait,” he promised.
The bleak Roman winter spent its chill days. Flurries of snow shrouded the garden and the wide doors of the Convent, open so many days of the year, were closed. Andrea did not forget his bulb, though. Every day he ran out to the place where he had buried it, eagerly watching for the slim green fingers he had been told would push their way through the frosty earth. As the weeks drifted by, and while the garden was still bare, a strange thing happened to the soul of little Andrea. The patience that was necessary for keeping alive his hope in the brown bulb began to show itself in other ways.
“Andrea no longer frowns when the little brother of Bruno takes away his letters,” the Signorina exclaimed. “Instead, he goes to the cabinet and fetches a buttoning frame, offering it to the little one instead of the letters for which he is not ready.”
Every child should have a pet.
In other ways Andrea proved his patience. A bit of drawing that he had finished, hastily, a month before and with crooked lines, now held him concentrated for an hour, and was completed with exquisite neatness and exact contour of line. At the midday meal of the children Andrea did not, as formerly, beg to be served first, nor did he open his little green basket of luncheon before the other children. It was as if the slow-growing bulb which was working its sure way up through the bare ground to the sun had its counterpart in the unfolding root of patience it had planted in the heart of a little child.
After a little, the winter melted into a spring of yellow lilies and long sunny noons and laughter at all the gray street corners. Andrea came earlier than the other little ones to the Children’s House each morning, that he might spend a half hour with his little green watering pot in the garden. He met Bruno and Piccola with an air of assurance that set him apart from them. He held his head very high in those days because of realized hope which he had made his own.
“Andrea is our little gardener,” the children said to each other, watching his triumph.
Then came a visitor’s morning at the Children’s House of the Via Giusti Convent. The children’s greatest happiness was to welcome these grown-up friends who came to learn of the little ones the truths of life. Among the throng of students, tourists, curiosity seekers, earnest thinkers, a woman whom the children knew entered and slipped into a waiting chair. She had been during the winter a frequent visitor, quiet, sympathetic, with deep, smiling eyes. Then she had not come to the Children’s House for many days.
But they remembered her still. As flowers turn to meet the sun, they twined about her, feeling her soft, strong hands, touching with eager finger tips the dull, clinging garment that draped her. Ah, they drew back, consulting together in little questioning groups.