"Si signorina, ma senza denari non si canta messa. Clever men want to be paid. Your doctor would cost me the eyes of the head."
"You shall have as much money as ever you want," answered Antonia, pulling a long netted purse from her pocket.
The gold showed through the silken meshes, and the old man's eyes glittered with greed as he looked at it. She filled his tremulous hands with guineas, emptying both ends of the purse into his hollowed palms. He had never seen so much gold. The strangers who came to sit under his pergola, and drink great bowls of new milk from the fawn-coloured cows that were his best source of income, thought themselves generous if they gave him a scudo at parting: but here was a visitor from fairyland raining gold into his hands.
"They are English guineas, and you will gain by the exchange," she said, "so you can have the physician to see you every day. He will not want to bleed you when he sees how weak you are."
The old man shook his head doubtfully. They were so ready with the lancet, those doctors! His eyes were fixed on the guineas, as he tried to reckon them. The coins lay in too close a heap to be counted easily.
He broke into a rapture of gratitude, invoking every saint in the calendar, and Antonia shivered with pain at the exaggeration of his acknowledgments. He thanked her as a wayside beggar would have done. His benedictions were the same as the professional mendicants, the maimed and halt and blind, gave her when she dropped a coin into a basket or a hat. He belonged to the race which is accustomed to taking favours from strangers. He belonged to the sons of bondage, poverty's hereditary slaves.
She appealed to Francesca.
"Would it not be better for your grandfather if he lived at Bellagio, where he would have a comfortable house in a street, and plenty of neighbours?" she asked.
"I don't think he would like to leave the vineyard, Signorina; though it would be very pleasant to live in the town," answered Francesca.
Her dark eyes sparkled at the thought. It was lonely on the hill, where she had only the children to talk to, and her grandfather, whose conversation was one long lamentation.