“Bah!”
Without difficulty the driver turned his horse in the opposite direction, and at a contented jog he started downhill toward the spot where Carolina lay. The showman’s wife was supporting her head and begging forgiveness for her husband and the bear. Presently Sebastiano the Carrier reached the scene with his empty cart. Did he know the lady? Some there were who forgot faces, but not he. Signorina Di Bello. It was many years since she went away, but he knew her. Had the sun overcome her? A broken leg! Dio Santo!
“A broken leg! Dio Santo!”
After much vehement talk and excited gesture the baggage was taken from the victoria and the injured woman placed, none too tenderly, in the donkey cart, that being deemed the only safe course. It was the same springless wain that had carried Armando’s Juno and the Peacock on their fruitless pilgrimage to Genoa. For Carolina it was simply a car of torture. By the time it rolled under the arched gate of Cardinali she was no longer sensible of pain.
It was the most stupendous event the village had ever known—this return of Carolina Di Bello after an absence of twelve years, and bumping along over the cobbles in old Sebastiano’s cart. Every house that the terrible ambulance passed was straightway emptied of its inmates, who fell in behind the cart, clamouring for a view of its unconscious occupant. She lay as though lifeless, her head propped by a travelling bag, her face exposed to the glare of the sun. No one thought of covering her face, so eager were they all to gaze at it and compare her looks with what they were twelve years before when she departed for America. The women discussed her gown and foot gear, and pronounced them both very signora. Sebastiano drew up at a flight of broken stone steps that zigzagged to a porch shaded by a gnarled fig tree, whereunder a cow-faced woman stood patiently stirring a copper vessel of steaming corn-meal mush. The donkey gave a bray of approval at the calling of a halt, and the woman, in response to a general cry, clattered down to the cart.
“Cousin Carolina! Misericordia! What has happened? Where did she come from?”
The new actor on the scene was Serafina Digrandi, aunt of the maid for whose wiving Carolina had made the disastrous journey; and, following the mountain usage, she would have flung herself weeping upon the moveless figure of her relative, but the village doctor broke through the crowd in time to hold her back and declare the patient still alive. At this Serafina dried her tears and began a bustling preparation of the best room in the house.
CHAPTER X
BIRTH OF THE LAST LADY
When the fractured shin bone had been set by a surgeon from Genoa, and Carolina had passed a day and a night in sullen rebellion at fate, she asked for Marianna.