“Some ladies up at the house there have a little present for you all,” the black-coated Italian butler of the boarding-house announced, peering in upon the group gathered about the sputtering lamp inside, “but they wish to send it down by the boy, Natale.”
Then Natale was himself again, and without demur or bashfulness presented himself to the servant.
“It is well you turned up in time, Natalino,” said the clown, giving him a little shove toward the dignified butler waiting just outside. “Perhaps Olga would not have done, in this case. Off with you to the forestieri[4] above!”
Many a boy would have been abashed at finding himself the center of such a group as awaited Natale in the hallway of the house in the garden. But Natale was too well accustomed to an array of faces fixed upon him to make the least show of bashfulness. The lady of the house, whose pleasant face he knew very well, laid her hand on his shoulder and asked him kindly in Italian if anything had been heard of the money lost that afternoon, and her soft, dark eyes looked sympathetically into his own.
“No, signora, and my papá says we shall never see a soldo of it again,” was Natale’s prompt answer.
“Ask him if they have any idea of the person who stole it,” Betty Bishop suggested in English, and Madame Cioche did so. Natale’s answer to this was more expressive than polite perhaps, for without words he simply raised his shoulders as high as possible, pressing his elbows against his sides, and spreading his hands wide to indicate the complete ignorance of his people as to the coward who had taken their hard-earned money. And the drawn-down corners of his mouth so changed the expression of his face that one would hardly have known him.
“Who would have believed the child could make himself so ugly,” Mrs. Bishop exclaimed. “Have you no tongue, boy, to answer properly?”
But as English words were far less intelligible to Natale than Caffero’s whinny, or Niero’s bark, he only looked up into Madame Cioche’s face and smiled.
“There! it is a bonny little face after all,” said that lady, “and now shall we give him the money and send him away?”
“No, let me speak to him first,” demanded Mrs. Bishop, “and you, Mrs. Choky, must interpret. Ask him if he likes to be a wicked little circus boy.”