“Oh, Dad, you’re so phlegmatic!”
“But I thought you were tired.”
“I’m not any more; I want to see the play.—You come then, Tony.”
Tony rose with an elaborate sigh.
“As you please, signorina,” he murmured obediently. An onlooker would have thought Constance cruel in dragging him away from his well-earned rest.
They made their way across the piazza and mounted the church steps behind the crowd where they could look across obliquely to the little stage. A clown was dancing to the music of a hurdy-gurdy while a woman in a tawdry pink satin evening gown beat an accompaniment on a drum. It was a very poor play with very poor players, and yet it represented to these people of Grotta del Monte something of life, of the big outside world which they in their little village would never see. Their upturned faces touched by the moonlight and the flare of the torches contained a look of wondering eagerness—the same look that had been in the eyes of the young peasant when he had begged to be taken to America.
The two stood back in the shadow of the doorway watching the people with the same interest that the people were expending on the stage. A child had been lifted to the base of the saint’s pedestal in order to see, and in the excitement of a duel between two clowns he suddenly lost his balance and toppled off. His mother snatched him up quickly and commenced covering the hurt arm with kisses to make it well.
Constance laughed.
“Isn’t it queer,” she asked, “to think how different these people are from us and yet how exactly the same. Their way of living is absolutely foreign but their feelings are just like yours and mine.”
He touched her arm and called her attention to a man and a girl on the step below them. It was the young peasant again who had guided them down the mountain, but who now had eyes for no one but Maria. She leaned toward him to see the stage and his arm was around her. Their interest in the play was purely a pretense and both of them knew it.