“You look as though you could speak Italian, my dear. Do ask him if he will give me a better price for the whole dozen. I want them for bridge prizes, next winter.”
Cynthia was willing to try, and struggled with her scant store of the language. The proprietor shrugged his shoulders and spread expressive Italian fingers wide. “Yes, yes, eight, ten lira less perhaps,” he smiled. And Cynthia knew that all along he had expected to take less than his original price. But the pretty lady was pleased.
“Wrap them up,” she ordered the man, in the loud tone so often employed to the foreigner who seems not to understand, as though by mere volume of sound one could impress one’s meaning.
Cynthia had removed the lovely frame from the window and now held it in her hand. Close like this, it was even more beautiful than when viewed through the wavering old glass, and at Cynthia’s “How much?” the old man smiled almost fondly, as though he too knew this for one of his best pieces. He named the sum in lire and Cynthia made a rapid calculation, then, with a sigh, shook her head and turned to replace it in the window. He might as well have said fifteen hundred dollars, as fifteen. Why, in her tiny room in the pensione she could live for two whole weeks on fifteen dollars. Chick would have to wait, unframed, till she returned to the States and a steady job.
The American lady was still fussing over the wrapping of her package when Cynthia left the shop and stepped out into the street again, one of those steep streets of Siena that seemed to bear always in their sunny stone the tinge of a perpetual sunset glow. From far down the street came the roll of a drum, and Cynthia who had already seen two of these contrade rehearsals pelted off as fast as rubber soles on cobbles could carry her. Never mind the frame, though she gave it a regretful relinquishing thought.
Tomorrow was the Palio, the famous horse race with which Siena, twice a year, for the past four hundred years, has celebrated her liberation from the long arm of her tyrant neighbor, Florence. And now for the past three days Siena had fallen back, body and spirit, into the fifteenth century.
Certainly Cynthia, rounding the corner of the narrow street, felt as though she had been projected feet first into a slice of the middle ages. Banners of silk and of satin, of tapestry and of heavy velvet, fringed and tasseled in gold, embroidered with the arms of some ancient family, hung from a high balcony, and above it, glowing in the warm stone was carved again the heraldic device. Below the slow swaying banners stood a little band of Siennese, two drummerboys in long-hose and doublets, peaked caps over their frizzy locks, their companions two banner-bearers, all in black and white and gold. The flags displayed the arms of their contrada, or ward; this one Lupa, the Wolf, and their huge ruffled sleeves and the little purses which dangled from their belts were embroidered in fine gold with a similar device.
The drums tapped out a strange, intriguing little rhythm while the two banner bearers, practising their rite, did a sort of solemn dance with the great five foot square flags. The object seemed to be to keep up a continual stepping, with the banners never for one moment allowed to lag. Under the arms and up again, out and beneath the dancing feet, and the drums always beating faster and faster. Fascinated, Cynthia watched for the culmination which she knew would come. With a final roll of the drums the banners were flung high, high, almost ... incredibly, to the tops of the houses, then descending, their heavy sticks acting as weights, were caught lightly and skillfully. And the dance, for the moment, was over.
There was a slight cheer from the small group that had gathered to watch and a voice behind her said “Gosh, that was great!”
It was such a shock to hear, in this scene of the past, a good American voice that Cynthia whirled involuntarily to face the speaker. To her surprise he was all of fifty, with the reddish complexion of a confirmed golf player, a shock of nice thick white hair, gray tweeds, the expensive kind, and a panama hat which he wore in his hand.