“Ecco! he opens his eyes, my bimbo! my Natalino! Carino,[10] what does it all mean? Tell Nonna how you have come back to the circo!”
But at first Natale only lifted one hand to stroke the dear, wrinkled face of Nonna, in smiling content. After a little, he laid his hand on the breast of his blouse and begged to be allowed to go to Giovanni.
“He will not scold me for coming back when he sees what I have brought with me,” he urged.
But Nonna reminded him that the tent was still crowded with spectators,—did he not hear the music close by, and the laughter of the people, as the clown and Antonio and Arduina did the funny pantomime?
Natale lay back listening, with a happy smile on his lips, while Nonna went to blow up the coals of a small fire on the ground outside, and to hurry the broth that Natale might have nourishment. She could not prevail upon the boy to confide to her what he was so anxious to tell his stepfather, and she left him alone, too glad to have him returned to them, to grumble over his reticence.
Of all the children, Natale most sweetly recalled her own son’s childhood, and Antonio’s boyish affection for her, his cheeriness and obedience, had seemed to live again in Natale, although he was Elvira’s son, and no grandson, at all, of her own.
The little ones, Tito, Maria, Gigi and the rest, were asleep in their corners, and Nonna had been sitting at rest in the wagon door when Olga had rushed up with the news that Natale had arrived and lay dying, perhaps, on the ground outside the tent. It was Nonna’s strong arms that had borne him away to the house-wagon, and Nonna’s vigorous rubbings and applications of cold water that had brought him out of the half-swoon of exhaustion. So Nonna was content with her work, and would not press Natalino’s secret from him.
By the time the performance was over, and the merry-makers had streamed out whistling, chatting and laughing together, and had gone their ways homeward, Natale, fed and rested, was sitting up bright-eyed and eager to announce his news.
It was stuffy and hot in the wagon, and Giovanni went to fetch the boy outside, the moment the tent had emptied and the players were at leisure. Olga had not even taken time to change the yellow satin blouse and pink tights for her usual faded cotton frock. As for Antonio, he had only slipped his feet into a pair of loose slippers, so the great acrobat stood before Natale in all the glory of his spangled black velvet and shapely, pink-clad limbs.
As the night was dark, one of the lamps was brought from the tent, and a wild, gypsy-like scene its rays revealed under the trees about the steps of the house-wagon. Elvira, in an access of motherly tenderness, gathered Natale to her red satin bosom, and called him by all the musical pet names belonging to the boys and girls of Italy, while the musicians peeped over the shoulders of the actors and wondered how little Natale had ever found his way on foot all the way from Cutigliano to the Bagni.