Natale replied to these mocking words with only a rather naughty shrug of the shoulders, and went to sit down on the lowest step of the short ladder against the wall.
“Give him his polenta, Arduina,” Nonna called shrilly from a little way behind. “He was asleep, Elvira, all tired out with walking to-day as much as any man among us. I keep my eyes open. Don’t scold the boy.”
“One would think my Natale your own grandson, Nonna,” Elvira replied, laughing good-naturedly.
“All boys are as her own sons or grandsons,” Nonna’s daughter-in-law interposed carelessly, as the old woman passed on with Tito, perhaps to see that Arduina gave Natale his proper share of mush.
In Nonna’s big warm heart there was indeed room for the sons and grandsons of those who were too sparing of motherly love and care for their own. The gray-haired woman had long ago accepted this wandering life for the sake of continuing near to her only son, Antonio, the acrobat, and Antonio’s children. When her boy at the age of twenty-two had given up everything that his mother thought of worth in the world—home, a decent, quiet life in it, books, school, a career as a priest—in order to marry Cara, a rosy, lithe-limbed rope-dancer out of Egypt, he had found that his mother was not going to be given up along with these. By and by, when the babies began to come every year or two, Nonna came to be appreciated even by the fantastic daughter-in-law given her by Antonio, while in the hearts of all the little ones Nonna was—well, Nonna,—and therefore everything good and patient and sweet.
It was Nonna who cared for the ailing Pietro, who rubbed Natale’s stiff ankles and elbows with an ointment of her own invention to limber them up, who thought to tuck Olga’s long red hair out of the way when practice time came and the curling locks would have teased the little face and shoulders turned upside down and hindside before. It was Nonna who nursed the babies and put them to bed while the mothers rode the horses in the tent, and Nonna who led the poor pony about to “fresh fields and pastures new”, and Nonna who instructed giddy-brained Arduina in the simple mysteries of concocting savory stews out of next to nothing, and how to make corn meal for ten do service as polenta for twice as many. The little troop could not have done without Nonna, no, indeed!
CHAPTER III
IN THE RING
It took all of that first day and most of the next to get everything into shape for an exhibition on the second night after the arrival of the circus troop at Cutigliano.
The turf had been removed from the ring, or round space inclosed by the low panels of wood, and the tent pole erected, by the time the canvas was mended and the side curtains were ready to be hung.
The sun was just about to slip over the mountain rim in the west when everything was done, and it only remained to draw the stout ropes and hoist the canvas into position. Natale was generally on hand when this was done, listening for the creaking of the pulley at the top of the pole, as the dull yellow canvas slowly rose into position, till, all at once, it spread like a queer, pointed mushroom over the green grass of the field.