It was an old-style brick dwelling of two stories and attic on the northern fringe of Mulberry—the only house in the street whose front was not gridironed with fire escapes. The low stoop, iron railing, and massive dadoes, the Ionian door columns of hard wood, the domed vestibule and generous width, marked it a rare survivor of the building era that passed with the stagecoach and the Knickerbocker—a well-preserved ghost of the quarter’s bygone fashion and respectability.
Bertino looked up and read in bold text upon a well-polished brass doorplate the assuring name, “Di Bello.”
“Grazie mille,” he said to his guide. “I am too poor to make you a present. Grazie mille.”
The other made off with a long face, but protesting that he had not expected a present for such a small service.
Heartened by the nearness of a friend, Bertino gave the heavy bell handle a stout pull. Decorously and without undue promptness the broad-panelled oak swung narrowly, and the mountaineer looked into the stern complacency of his aunt Carolina’s eyes. He was too young to remember this smug dame of closing forty, who had gone from Cardinali twelve years before to become perpetua[A] in the Mulberry parish rectory. That peaceful career she had forsaken, for reasons of which we may learn; but the eight years of churchdom were still in her head. Nor had she ever lost the outward badge. She was rotund and well-coloured, monastic of mien, and sleek as a cathedral rat.
“Who are you?” she asked, scanning the lad from his hobnailed soles to the turkey feather in his hat.
“I am Bertino Manconi, nephew of Signor Giorgio Di Bello,” he answered proudly, unabashed by her poignant stare. “Are you Angelica the cook?”
When her breath came free she said: “But it was to-morrow—Monday.” His arrival one day ahead of the appointed time shocked her rubric sense of order and ignored her ritual of coming events. “And you come to the door like a Sicilian, baggage in hand and——”
“Ha! Welcome to my house!” cried a hearty voice at the head of the stairs. “A hundred welcomes, caro nephew! But what a stupendous height! Step aside, my sister, and bid the giant enter. How is this? At the parish house did they teach you to make friends wait outside? Well, it is not so at Casa Di Bello. So you are a day ahead? Well, so much the better. Ah, what a fine voyage you must have had!”
It was no longer a voice on the upper floor, but the form and substance of a bush-headed, chubby man of dawning fifty, whose prodigious King Humbert mustache quaked as he puffed down the staircase as best his short legs would permit. He threw himself upon Bertino, who had to stoop a little to receive a resonant salutation on each cheek. Then Carolina bestowed a pair of stony kisses, first remarking with wooden seemliness, “Welcome, my nephew.”