She spoke in Signor Tomato’s jargon, tinctured freely with dashes of her mother brogue.
“Yes,” Bertino answered; “it was on that day she promised to be my wife, and that day I wrote the letter to Armando and put in a picture of the First Lady.”
“Be the same token, ye did nothin’ iv the koind, for it’s mesilf that remimbers seein’ her take out that pictoor when ye ran to the dure at her biddin’, and putt another wan in its place. Then it was she putt in her own ugly mug and ruined the hull iv us. Sure anny blind man can see it now wid half an eye. Worra, worra, why didn’t I know what it mint at the toime!”
“I will kill her,” Bertino said in a low voice, and Signor Tomato dropped wearily on the ground. It was the moment for a soul-thrilling proverb, but the apt one would not come, and he eased his feelings with the poor makeshift, “He who goes slow goes safe” (Chi va piano va sano).
No impolite questions were put to Bertino concerning the affair that had necessitated his sudden exit from Mulberry, nor did Bertino give any hint of his belief, inspired by Juno’s ruse, that Signor Di Bello had been laid low. Had not the ethics of Mulberry rendered the knife-play and the names of all concerned a forbidden subject, they could have told him that his uncle was up and about and cracking walnuts in his usual form. But the vendetta is sacred, and Bridget, itching as she was to discuss the murderous attempt, was too much Italianized to venture upon that hallowed ground. Aided by their knowledge of Signor Di Bello’s admiration for Juno, however, the Tomatoes were easily able to understand why Bertino had risen to the assertion of a husband’s rights under the law of the stiletto.
When Bertino told them he had slept in the pipe every night since his hasty departure from the city, the banker, with an expansive grace that atoned handsomely for the insult of attempting to slay him, begged him to remain a guest at Villa Tomato. They were not quite settled in their summer home, to be sure, but in a few minutes they would be prepared to serve breakfast. The formality ended here, for one and all they fell to the task of putting their house in order. First the clamour of Mike, Pat, and Biddy was silenced by issuing to each a large chunk of coarse bread, with the command that they go at once and gather dry twigs for firewood. The urchins returned quickly with the stock of bread greatly diminished, but the store of firewood not much increased. Meantime Signor Tomato and Bertino had set up the stove, and fitted a sheet-iron chimney to the end of the pipe that was to serve as kitchen and parlour. Bridget soon had a fire crackling, though it tried her back somewhat stooping as she moved from the parlour door to the kitchen. But she did not grumble. Her heart warmed with womanly response to the blessing of a home, lowly as it was, and she stirred inside and out of the pipe with a jollity of temper that bespoke the halcyon days of the babies.
The Last Lady, as they now called the wicked bust, had swallowed all but a dollar or two of the bank’s capital, but for what remained to give them a new start Bridget was full of thanksgiving. She had rationed the outfit with a small supply of codfish, with which to make the indispensable Neapolitan baccalà; a generous measure of the cheap but enduring lupine beans, some bacon, red onions, and a half dozen loaves of secondhand bread. So well had she managed the finances that a balance of forty-seven cents was left in the treasury. Soon after the blue smoke began writhing from the chimney she had a pot of soup on the stove, and hungrily Domenico and Bertino busied themselves in the current of its gustful odour. They brought leafy boughs from the scrub oaks and fashioned them thickly atop and beside both wings of the iron villa to shield it from the sun’s fire. They made it look like a mound of the plain grown with tangled greenery and pierced by two grottoes straight and smooth as arrow shafts. Of the pipe not used as a kitchen they devised a dormitory, and placed therein the Last Lady, first swathing her tenderly in paper and putting her back in the casing of pine wood. For doors the nankeen sail was made to serve a new turn, but not without a throe of sorrow did the banker cut it in parts and fasten them to the ends of the pipes.
The first meal cooked in the villa scullery was a triumph for Bridget’s art. Never in all her Mulberry days had she produced a better minestrone. Bertino was asked to a seat at the table, which consisted of a piece of oilcloth spread on the ground. While they sat like tailors in a circle spooning their thick soup from tin plates and munching the secondhand bread, a bobolink and his wife, drawn by the human habitation, dashed above them, weighing the question of becoming neighbours:
“...Now they rise and now they fly;
They cross and turn, and in and out, and down the middle and wheel about,