“And I shall have a kiss to prove that the beast is not dead,” exclaimed the clown, chirruping a little and smacking his lips. And the great brown head of the horse lifted itself from the dust, the graceful neck turned, and Il Duca actually kissed his master, then scrambled hastily to his feet as if glad for that job to be over, while Giovanni hurried him out of the ring.
“Such silly jokes!” commented Mrs. Bishop, otherwise Aunty, as the performance ended, and the rollicking crowd poured out of the tent. “Think of my having spent two whole hours listening to them, and all on pins too, for fear that poor, ill-used child should be forced to do some other unchristian thing.”
“But, Aunty, what did you expect when you came?” Betty asked impatiently. “Surely the little show was not bad, and there was actually nothing but what was quite decent in every way.”
“I call it ‘bad’ to beat and starve children into turning themselves into monkeys.”
“If people would not go to see the ‘monkeys’ it would be stopped,” was Betty’s retort.
“Well, I am sure I only went to oblige Mrs. Choky,” Aunty said in an injured tone. “She said she thought we ought to encourage the poor people on their first night. But it will be my last night there, as I shall very soon inform her. ‘Encourage’ them to martyrize that poor child, indeed!”
From the first performance in Cutigliano, therefore, Natale’s trouble began, although he did not know it. Contented and tired he lay down in his corner of the brown house on wheels and went to sleep, while the men let down the big yellow canvas of the large tent and furled it about the pole. But first, he ate his supper of macaroni with the rest of the actors, gathered in the small tent behind. Midnight suppers were the rule on the nights when there were performances, as it would have been at the risk of upsetting their stomachs in more ways than one to eat food beforehand.
Later, the stars kept quiet watch above the little encampment, where even Pietro slept well, with the open house door admitting the fresh air of the mountains.
For ten days the yellow “mushroom” spread over the grass of the field, although very much in the way of the fine city gentlemen, playing at ball with bats like tambourines. The noisy music at night and the cheering in the tent may have kept the invalids in the nearest boarding-houses awake and nervous, and the people at large may have grown tired of the performances which they soon learned by heart, but no one felt inclined to hustle the poor people away, and no one grumbled except Mrs. Bishop.
There was something pathetic about the clown in his everyday dress, his gayety and paint all gone and the deep lines of his face showing too plainly in the garish light of day, as he pottered about the tent, adjusting ropes, and keeping off the village boys who would throw stones upon the old canvas, or play hide and seek among the curtains. It gave one a queer feeling, also, to fancy the drooping figure of Pietro, with his pure little face like alabaster, a member of the “wicked circus troop.”