Two hours afterward, her arms heaped with bundles, and every cent of the ten dollars gone, she appeared in the kitchen of her landlady and shocked her with tidings of the nuptials so near at hand.
“Body of the Serpent!” remarked the Garlic Woman. “In the morning you are a woman without hope, and in the evening you come back the promised wife of a rich signore.”
While she shook her head in doubt and suspicion, Juno spread out many yards of purple satin, white lace and pink lining, a wreath of muslin orange blossoms that should give no poisonous odour, a pair of white stockings, and—the sympathetic yellow boots. As the bent crone gazed at the finery her zincky visage lost the hard cast put upon it by a lifetime of penny-splitting bargain and sale. A tender light filled her eye, and she lived again in the sweet days of her youth. Where was the soldier boy that her girlish heart loved? Where the dashing Bersagliere that led her to church in the mountain village? A great mound in northern Africa—the tomb of a whole regiment—could answer. Across the mind of Juno there flashed a thought of her husband and the crime upon which she was about to enter, but the next instant it perished as she snatched up the purple satin to preserve it from danger, for old Luigia had stained it with a tear.
They plied their needles early and late, and when the Feast of Sunday dawned Juno was ready for the church. All Mulberry knew of the great event in preparation, and made high store of attending the ceremony at the altar; but only the first families of the Torinesi, Milanesi, and Genovesi, and the upper lights of the Calabriani, the Siciliani, and the Napolitani were bidden to the feast at Casa Di Bello. When Angelica received the command to make ready this feast, she declared to Signor Di Bello that a malediction had fallen on the house. To this he returned only a stout guffaw. It was a terrible blow to the cook, who was in full accord with Carolina’s policy of a closed door to wives. Many months she had longed for the return of her mistress, lest this very calamity might betide during her absence. O poor Signorina Carolina! To come back just too late to keep out the Napolitana—the baggage above all others against whom she wished to close the door. She knew it, she knew it! In her dreams she had seen Juno the Superb queening it over her in the kitchen, ordering more garlic in this, more red pepper in that, and making everything fit only for Neapolitan pigs to eat. Maria have mercy, but she must obey. So, taking up her big basket, she had gone forth to market, with face long and voice doleful, and poured into the eager ears of Sara the Frier of Pepper Pods and the group of raven heads always about her, the story of the dreadful rush going on to plant in Casa Di Bello the woman whom Carolina had crossed the seas to keep out.
Though a stone of composure in all the other turns that her adventuring course had taken, Juno lost her calm a little in the haste and flurry of constructing the nuptial gown. As an effect she failed until the last moment to discharge a duty very needful to the success of her plans. The oversight did not occur to her until Sunday afternoon, at the moment when she was seated in the chair of Chiara the Hair Comber, receiving the marvellous wedding coiffure for which that artist was famous. The hair dressing accomplished, Juno lost no time in going to the restaurant and penning these words, taking great care with the spelling, and making sure that the address, “Post Office, Jamaica, Long Island,” should be correct:
Dear Bertino: Your uncle died to-day. Fly from America. The man-hunters are after you! J.
Then she put on the gorgeous purple gown, and called the Garlic Woman to button the yellow boots. And while the bells of San Patrizio pealed, and the people, dressed in their Sunday clothes, moved toward the church gates, Juno waited—waited for the open carriage with its plumed horses that should bear her to the altar with Signor Di Bello.
CHAPTER XV
FAILURE OF BANCA TOMATO
The banking house and steamship office of Signor Tomato had reached the border of a crisis. Inch by inch the despairing padrone had seen his well of profit dry up. No longer did labour contractors come to him for men, and for more than a year he had not taken in a soldo of commission on wages. Even Anselmo the baker, who for two loyal years had bought a four-dollar draft on Naples, took his business to an upstart rival, and people sneered at the sham packages of Italian currency exposed in the little window. The slow but ever-crumbling wreck had left him at last with only the steamship tickets to cling to; but even this spar of hope failed one day when a ship of the Great Imperial International General Navigation Company was stabbed to death off the Banks, and a half dozen of Signor Tomato’s clients returned to Mulberry minus their tin pans, mattresses, and other baggage, but well charged with denunciation of the agent who sold them the trouble. Thereafter it would have been as easy to get home-goers to take passage in a balloon as to book them for the G. I. I. G. N. C. line.
Crushing as it was, this disaster might have been tided over had not a long season of domestic reverses added to the difficulty. For three years there had been no christening party in the tiny parlour back of the nankeen sail, and during that period the bank’s advertisement in the Progresso had appeared without the famous foot line, “Also a baby will be taken to nurse.” The first families of Mulberry had always bid high for Bridget’s offices, and the advent of a new Tomato had never failed to mark an era of prosperity in the bank’s history. Bridget’s vogue was greatest among the Neapolitan mothers, who do not hold with the American dairy wife that it is seldom the biggest kine that yield the richest quarts. But psychological reasons were not lacking for the favour in which the rugged Irish woman was held. In the minds of her patrons was rooted the conviction that for a child of Italy, destined to fight out the battle of life in New York, there could be no better start than the “inflooence” of a nurse of Bridget’s race.