“Good-bye, lovely lada, good-bye.” Rafael caught the hand that lay on his shoulder, kissed it in his passionate, foreign fashion, and glided away into the darkness.
Eleanor stood looking after him with the curious sensation of being the heroine of a pretty old-time romance that belonged in a fairy world of magic and moonlight, and ought to be set to the tinkling music of guitars. And just as she had put out her light and gone to bed, still smiling at the whimsicality of the whole affair, and particularly of her having confided to Rafael her carefully-secreted feeling for Dick—who would do beautifully for the brave young prince of the fairy-tale the music came. The Terrible Ten were grouped under the window singing soft, crooning Italian songs to their Lovely Lada. Giuseppi had traveled with his father one summer in a troupe of street musicians; it was his fingers that picked a bit uncertainly at the guitar’s strings, and little Nicolo’s wonderful voice, rising sweet and true above the others, that led the chorus. But Rafael stood in the centre of the half circle, his angelic face touched with light from a down-stairs window, and the sob and the thrill in the music, that brought a lump to Eleanor’s throat and a mist over her eyes, was all in Rafael’s voice, singing out his love and longing to the cruel lady who would not “haf” him “to mary.”
Eleanor had a bunch of red roses on her table that the adoring Eugenia Ford had sent her, and she tossed them down to the singers, who laughed and cheered in most unromantic boy fashion, and finally departed, leaving Eleanor to wonder how Rafael had explained the serenade to his followers, and how he would treat her at the next club meeting. She little guessed what would happen before then.
For the next morning before she was dressed an apologetic parlor-maid escorted a weeping Italian girl to Eleanor’s door. It was Pietro’s flashing-eyed sister, her beauty tear-stained and her proud confidence quite vanished.
“Rafael’s hurt,” she sobbed. “Black Hand maybe, we think. He don’t know nothing, but he moan your name with his eyes shut. Would you come?”
Of course she would come. She hurried the maid off after the best doctor in Harding, and she and the beautiful Maria went at once to Rafael, who lay tossing in delirium on his blood-stained bed, a terrible gash across his throat, which had been roughly bandaged by an old Italian herb doctor. Nobody, it seemed, guessed what had really happened, though when some one found a tiny dagger under the bed Pietro and Nicolo interchanged curious glances. They had recognized it as the one with which Rafael had struck terror to the hearts of the Ten and compelled their rigid obedience.
Eleanor installed a trained nurse, made the doctor promise to give the case his best attention, and went off to find her unfailing stand-by in troublous times, Betty Wales. For Rafael was beyond knowing anybody, perhaps for all time, and she felt like a criminal when his mother kissed her sleeve in gratitude for all she had done and Maria clung to her, sobbing out her love for Rafael who never had “eyes for any girl” and declaring that if he died she would enter a convent. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them the dreadful truth.
But, “If he dies I shall be a murderer,” she told Betty bitterly. “I’ve always been so vain and frivolous. Now when I want to take life seriously and do things for other people, as you do, I only make a mess of it, and bring dreadful trouble where I wanted most to help. I shall never, never try to do anything more. I wish I were——”
“No, you don’t,” Betty assured her hastily. “Just because you did the best you could for those boys and this silly one had his head full of sentimental nonsense doesn’t make you responsible. It’s a dreadful thing, of course, but I’m sure he’ll get well. Didn’t the doctor think so?”
The doctor hadn’t said.