“What! It’s not the Furst Lady iv the Land?”
“No, no; ees-a de last lady, I’m tink. Ees-a lost evrytheen. Misericordia! What I’m do now?”
Bridget thought bitterly of the proverb about the angel descending when the devil is out, but she had no heart just then to twit her husband by a sarcastic recital of it, although the tempter put the words on her tongue. But she could not hold back an angry thrust at Bertino, who rose now in black relief as the author of their present and greatest trouble. At sound of his betrayer’s name the banker became calm. He stood silent a moment, and then, with upraised fists tightly clinched, swore that Bertino’s blood should answer. Then he took up again his wild lamentation, railing against heaven and earth. He went over the whole catalogue of his disasters, and closed with the news to Bridget that for three months not a nickel of shop rent had been paid. He had staked his all on the Presidentessa, and now that she had proved false they had no place to lay their heads.
Bridget treated herself to a flood of tears, and the children kept her company. All at once Signor Tomato stopped wailing, and startled her by saying resolutely that they must all leave Mulberry—right away, that very night. His dear wife need give herself no care as to their destination. Enough that her loving husband, with an eye on the trickster Fate, had always kept a refuge in the country—a place of shelter for his family whereof he had never spoken. It was not far. They could load their household stuff on the push-cart still at the door, and be off under cover of the night. In the sweet country perhaps their fortune would change. After all, it was good to fly from Mulberry, out to the free meadows, amid trees and flowers, where birds sang, and one could see the big gold moon hanging over the fields for hours and hours. Some picture of his fatherland had flashed in his vision, and Bridget, catching the buoyancy of it, offered a “Glory be!” for the chain of events that was to lift her out of “Ghinnytown.”
“Arrah,” said she meditatively, “maybe it was an angel, afther all.”
“Ah, yes; who knows?” he said in Neapolitan, and she knew a proverb was coming: “Chance is the anchor of hope and the tree of abundance.”
Their poverty brought its blessing in the fact that they were able to crowd all their worldly holdings—not forgetting the bust and Mike and Pat and Biddy—into a single load of the push-cart. The puzzle of bestowing the children so that they might be comfortable enough to sleep during the long journey at hand was a teasing one. But the Tomatoes were equal to it, though it called out all the genius for multum in parvo of which experience had made them masters. What bedding they owned was spread on the bottom of the cart, and the furniture so stacked as to form a low arch, beneath which the youngsters crept with shouts of glee. A bed not made up on the floor had played no part in their happy lives, and this sally abroad in the darkness and open air seemed a much better thing than huddling in the cote back of the nankeen sail, where Bridget kept her doves at night. While the parents moved back and forth, carrying the remaining odds and ends and finding a place for them on the cart, anxious treble voices issued from the load:
“Mah, did yer put in the skate?”
“Don’t fergit der duster handle.”
“Where’s der Jack Tar wagon?”