The little acrobat: a story of Italy

by Janie Prichard Duggan

The daylight changed everything, of course, and it was but a few moments after waking before he was across the stream and scrambling up to the low wall bounding the road on the river side. From the inner edge of the road the mountains rose precipitately.

As Natale clambered over the wall the church bells of Cutigliano burst into a wrangle of sound, which must have echoed from one end of the village to the other. Though the distance softened the metallic tones, the little boy was startled by them into a scamper away down the sunlit road as if the mischievous village boys whose office it was to ring the bells were in headlong chase after him. The day must have been the festa of some saint, and for a long time Natale heard the bells’ voices, sweetened more and more as his bare feet trudged onward and the distance fell between him and them. But he soon gave up his running because his legs were stiff and his feet sore, and as yet no one appeared coming along the road behind him, in pursuit.

There had been no doubt in his own mind of the direction he should take after once gaining the road. He knew that Giovanni and Antonio with the house-wagon had been bound for the Bagni di Lucca, and also he knew that the road to the Bagni led downward with the stream, and not up toward the cold region of Abetone, the “Great Fir Tree.”

So all he had to do was to follow the road, broad and white, by the way they had come three weeks before, without need, even, of asking his way of the peasants he should meet. He had turned the shoulder of a great green mountain-spur which entirely shut off the view of Cutigliano before he would stop for an instant in his lame tramping. Once assured that the town was out of sight behind him, he sat down breathlessly on one of the heaps of loose stones such as flank every mountain road in Italy. Then he deliberately took each foot in turn in his small hands and gravely and pitifully examined its bruises. There was nothing to be done, then, but plant them in the road again and continue his way.

For an hour or more he trudged painfully on, but the stiffness in his legs left him after a while, and he began to be only hungry. He wished he had thought of hiding in his pocket, the night before, a crust of the dark, coarse bread he loved, and which had always been plentiful at Sora Grazia’s. But the coppers jingled comfortably there instead, and Natale contented himself to wait for breakfast till he should pass some bread shop along the road.

The morning air was sweet with the freshness of early day, and the delicious odor of the wild thyme’s tiny blossoms. Tall harebells nodded to him from the thyme and heather bank shoulder-high above the road, and sparkled with the sunshine and dew upon their purple flowerets. The river, which in the darkness had seemed to mock him with its roaring, now only murmured softly as it slipped over the stones in the sunlight.

By and by, Natale began to meet people in the road, men with donkeys bearing huge basketfuls of wet grass and wild flowers shorn from the steep terraces above for the cow or donkey at home, and women tramping in their thick-soled shoes to Cutigliano with baskets of fresh fruit or eggs or cheeses for the summer hotels balanced on their heads. From all of these Natale kept his face steadily averted, lest they should bear back to the town tidings of his going. Usually, after passing a group of these wayfarers, the boy broke into a quick run in order to lengthen the distance between them and himself, but these spurts of speed availed him little, for he had always to stop and rest afterward, and so lost many more minutes than he had gained of the golden day.

The road had already become a curving white glare before Natale came in sight of a long stone house having many windows and doors, and standing on the inner edge of the road. He came upon it suddenly, on turning a sharp curve, and then he saw that another house faced it on the opposite side of the road, and that an inviting shade lay between. The back of one of the houses looked directly upon the steep slope of the mountain behind, while the rear wall of its opposite neighbor had its foundation in the rocky banks of the tumbling river. In the shade between, barefoot peasant children played noisily. Near by, a stream of spring water, clear and cold, trickled from a wooden trough into a rough stone basin.

And here at last were rest and food and drink for the runaway,—only no one must learn that he was a runaway!

A fat and black-eyed housewife with arms akimbo stood in one of the doors, and as Natale came up to her on limping feet, she eyed him with interest from the stone of the doorstep.