“And the same who so frightened our Tito outside the church,” Nonna chimed in indignantly. “And he all the time pretended to be so pious and anxious to see the saints’ relics in the church! No wonder Tito cried at the snapping of those dirty, thievish fingers in his little face. The saints only know how he found the money in Giovanni’s coat-pocket hung in the tent!”
“Mamá mia, do you remember how stiff my legs were when I played at leaping with the boys at school in Florence?” Antonio, the finished acrobat, asked thoughtfully, breaking a long straw with his fingers and looking at nobody. His blond head reached almost to the lowest boughs of the chestnut tree under which he stood, and the lamplight flared over his fair face and glittering costume.
Natale sat up to hear the words of this oracle, and even slipped off the satin lap of Elvira to the ground, in order to be nearer Antonio.
“I remember that you were a studious boy,” Nonna murmured in reply, with a note of the old bitterness in her voice.
“Natale has done a good work in returning the money to us, Giovanni,” the acrobat continued. “Why send him back to the foreigners? He was unhappy, or he would never have come all this distance alone—mere baby that he is.”
“And the Englishwoman’s money?” Giovanni asked in a businesslike tone.
“What has been used, replace from the pocketbook. It is not much, as we have taken in so good a sum, here at the Bagni. Leo can ride back with it to Cutigliano to-morrow morning, and return in time for our last night here.”
“Ebbene!” said Giovanni, and this meaning “All right, with a very good will,” so it was decided, and then everybody hurried to get into comfortable old clothes and to eat supper.
Leo was sent to the nearest wine shop for a bottle of good red wine that the troop might drink to the joy of Natale’s return and the recovery of the money; also to the just discomfiture of all thieving peddlers.
Long before the evening came to an end, a tired but most happy little boy had crept into the shadow and fallen asleep, with his head pillowed against Nonna’s knee.