“Fool!” said Carolina. “Do you think they will let you take their Queen? A hundred knives would stop you.”
He ceased struggling. “But what shall I do?”
“Patience! Here, Bertino; follow on, learn whither the Sicilian swine take the bust, and when their feast is over we shall demand it.”
Again Bertino took up the trail.
CHAPTER XXII
CAROLINA CONSTRUCTS A DRAMA
A thunderstorm routed the procession, sending the candle-bearers helter-skelter into doorways, covered alleys, under the awnings of the shops. At the first flash and report of the sky’s artillery Andrea deserted his push-cart and its royal occupant. But the dauntless leader of the election district was at hand. With heroic calm he lifted the Queen in his arms and unaided carried her into the Caffè of the Beautiful Sicilian. Mulberry had but few men who could do that—she was of solid Carrara—and thoughtful voters saw in the feat a new mark of his fitness for political chieftainship. She was placed on a marble-top table in the corner and the crown straightened on her spotless brow. All night she held court, and until the vender songs of the morning market were heard in the streets. Bottle after bottle joined the dead men, the rude quips and quibbles grew noisy, quarrelsome, yet no man drained a glass without first tipping it in homage to the snub-nosed damsel whose hollow eyes stared at every one all the time.
An hour before midnight Bertino and Armando returned to Casa Di Bello to report to Carolina the lodging place of the Last Lady. Hardly had the bell sounded when the door flew open, and Carolina came out, finger at lips, with a great air of mystery, and drawing to the panelled oak behind her.
“Be off at once!” she said, her voice fluttering. “Here is money. Go anywhere to-night—anywhere out of Mulberry. You, Bertino, must not come back until—until I am ready for you. If she saw you it would ruin all. Go! Ask no questions. To-morrow Armando will tell me where you are, and we shall meet. Away!”
With puzzled faces and mystified shakes of the head Armando and Bertino took themselves off, and Carolina re-entered at the moment that Signor Di Bello was mounting the staircase to his bedroom. A few minutes before he had taunted her with the failure of her scheme to cheat him of a wife, and proclaimed again the idiocy of the priest and all others who asserted that there was a bust or a husband of Juno. A pretty show they had made of him. All Mulberry was laughing. But his time would come. Next Sunday he would turn the tide, for she would be his in spite of them all. Carolina could do as she liked, go or stay; but a wedding there must and should be, for that alone could save his good name as a merchant and a signore.
He had spent a busy night with the flasks of the Three Gardens along with some choice comrades of the Genovese, and the years had told Carolina that with her brother it was always in vino veritas. Wherefore she knew that he had spoken naught less than a secret of his heart—that a wish to wipe out the stain of ridicule was an added spur to his determination to marry. And this knowledge sparked an idea that keyed her cunning to its highest pitch. Without an instant’s delay she began to put the idea into practice. Her first move was to keep mum about the return of Bertino, although she had waited up to flaunt in her brother’s face the news that his bride’s husband would stand before him in a few minutes. But the new design that her crafty wits had seized upon made that petty triumph seem not worth while—at least not until the tragic moment she was preparing. Her next step, as we have seen, was to get Bertino out of the way. The corners of her closed mouth curved in a smile of wily content as she watched Signor Di Bello going up to his room in blank ignorance of the little society drama that was in her head.