“Listen, Andrea,” the foreman went on, addressing the other man whom Bertino knew, “I find this thing on the city’s property, and I shall keep it. To Mulberry you will carry it, my friend, for I have a famous idea for the Feast of Springtide.”
With block and tackle and much hauling of ropes and singing of hee-hoo! they loaded the pipe on the truck. Then the foreman and Andrea lifted on the bust, and before Bertino’s eyes the Last Lady was abducted.
He did not rise from his covert until the truck, its big horses straining at the traces and the wheels glucking under their heavy burden, had gone a quarter of a mile. Then he started after it, keeping a safe distance between himself and the men who might recognise him at closer range. Only a vague sense had he at first of the purpose that impelled him onward; he could not bear to see his friend’s precious work of months, upon which he had built his very life hope, thus carried away without doing something, and that something, whatever it pleased Fate to provide, could not be done unless he kept the bust in sight. Later the clearer design came to him of following the Last Lady to her destination, and letting the banker know, so that he might go forward and reclaim her from the abductors.
Over dusty roads of the burning plains, through woodland passes, in village streets, and on the crazy pavements of Long Island City he kept in her wake. With a feeling of relief he saw the truck drive into a gateway, and while he waited to make sure that she was to lodge there for the night Andrea came out with a push-cart, and on it the well-known pine box. Again he took up the pursuit, which led this time to the ferry and across to New York. For a moment he shrank from trailing on through the city, which his fancy filled with man-hunters peering into every face to find the murderer of Signor Di Bello. But an impulse of fidelity to Armando conquered his fears, and, turning up his coat collar and drawing his soft hat over his eyes, he went on, dogging the push-cart in all its fits and starts through the lighted highways that he was sure teemed with detectives.
At Bleecker Street and the Bowery Andrea turned, and with a sinking of courage Bertino guessed that the Last Lady was bound for the very heart of Mulberry. Here every man and woman would know him for a murderer, and not a doorway or alley that would not have a law-hound in its shadow! But it was too late to falter. If the bust were lost now he could never again look Armando in the face. Bah! he knew a trick that would fool the police. He tied his gingham handkerchief over his mouth and struck forth, wholly confident that his disguise was impenetrable.
Another turn into Elizabeth Street, where the tribes of Sicily forgather, and Bertino found himself amid the boisterous throng in the flare of light and colour that of ages belong to the Feast of Springtide. The New World memory of the Sicilians’ agricultural festival was in the last of its three days and nights of fantastic gaiety. All the colony was out of doors. On both sides of the way the house fronts were lost in a jungle of American and Italian flags. In drooping garlands that reached from window to window across the street, dim-burning lights in red and purple glasses gave the barbaric scene a strange, sombre note. Men as dark as Parsees, and their women decked with paper flowers, and little girls in white frocks crowned with real and make-believe blossoms, stood about, each bearing a lighted candle, waiting eagerly to march in the procession that would go singing through Mulberry. Here and there, apart from the gabbling collection, was the face of a silent, pensive one who looked on at the doings of these wage slaves of the sweat-shop, building scaffold, river tunnel. Did he see a thorn on the rose of their festivity—a plaintive satire of Fate in this clinging to the poetic shadows of their native vineyard and field after the substance had been despised and forsaken?
The foreman had come to town by rail, swelling with the political significance of his find in the pipe. First he sounded a few comrades in the wine-shop, and their approving “bravoes” told him that his idea for a queen of the feast would hit the bull’s-eye of public opinion. Then with inflated chest he proclaimed that he, the leader of the election district, had not only an idea but its marble embodiment as well. Yes, a beautiful bust, the masterpiece of a renowned sculptor, who had been induced, at vast expense to him, the leader of the election district, to do this high honour to the brave Sicilian voters. From tongue to tongue the news flew, and when Andrea appeared with his push-cart the expectant people, to whom symbolism were ever precious, shouted a delighted welcome all along the line.
The Last Lady as Queen of the Feast.
“Long live the Queen of Springtide!”