Presently the foraging women, their blue-and-red-skirted hips wabbling under the weight of well-loaded baskets balanced on their heads, began to enter the shop. Dexterously taking down their burdens and setting them on the counter, they called out their wants in the varied jargons of the Peninsula. Not only was Signor Di Bello equal to them, one and all, but he could give back two raps in the haggling set-to for every tap that he received. When the morning had worn on, and the lay of the last vender had died out, he opened a small can of yellow paint, chose a brush from the stock, placed it in the hand of his nephew, and said:
“Nipote mio, do you see the green spots on the boughs? Well, it is time to give the Bunch a new coat.”
Bertino applied the colour, while his uncle looked on with fond and critical eye, for it was the first time he had intrusted the historic task to other hands than his own. Before the finishing touch had been given he was called into the shop to hack off a four-cent chunk of Roman cheese. A moment later Bertino stepped back to survey his handiwork, the brush at heedless poise—Mulberry’s sidewalks are narrow and teeming—when an angry voice fairly stung his ear:
“Guarda, donkey! What are you about?”
He turned and looked into the blazing eyes of a tall young woman, whose full-flowered beauty startled him more than her words had done, and for the moment his tongue had no speech.
“Clumsy dog! Why don’t you look?” she began again, drawing out a gingham handkerchief of purple and putting it to her face. On her cheek, just where the flush faded in the rich tawn of her skin, was a spot of yellow—as strangely there as though some fool had tried to adorn a radiant blossom.
“But excuse me; a thousand pardons. I did not see you,” he blurted. “I did not see you, veramente, signorina—beautiful signorina.”
“Bah!” she flung back. “Where are your eyes, calf of a countryman?”
He watched her as she sailed away above the heads of Mulberry’s little brown maids and matrons, and for hours afterward felt the spell of her massing black tresses, her proud step, and the rugged poetry of her plenteous line.
Small matters these—a spot of fortuitous colour, flashing eyes among a people who are always flashing, and a mountaineer with youth in his veins thinking about a well-knit and warm-hued maid who has proved her fire with a blistering tongue. But in the light of all that has come and gone, that stain of yellow may not be wiped out from this record of the warring dilemmas that sharpened the lives of certain little people of the little world wherein we have set foot.