Her master's opposition collapsed before this statesmanlike invention. He could not part with his silent, economical jewel of domesticity, to fall into strange and ruthless hands. No, better accept the child, even if it should prove a demon, as he had heard that young children mostly were, and keep his cook. But he made conditions. Under no circumstances was the baby (the flight of time was forgotten by him and he was thinking of something small and noisy that would trip him up at every step) to enter his rooms. And also it must be understood, once and for all, that he must never be asked to contribute to its maintenance. Not a lump of sugar or a crust of bread was it to have from his stores. If people were so silly as to take strange orphans to bring up—Giannella's history had now been explained to him—they must bear the punishment of their spendthrift insanity alone. Perhaps it would teach them wisdom.
Mariuccia's eyes blazed as he said this, and he began to fear that he might have gone too far. But she was generous enough to overlook the insults of a conquered adversary. She thanked him in set terms for the permission to keep Giannella, assured him that he should neither hear nor see the child; and then she calmed her ruffled feelings by the first impertinent speech that had ever fallen from her lips. "Let the padrone congratulate himself on one point. The chastisements due to what he called spendthrift insanity, and which most persons would consider common charity, would never fall on his respected head."
Then she went back to Candida and told her that Giannella must now remain in the city. Her invisible relations wished her to have a superior education, such as was unattainable in her country home. Candida was frankly sorry. She had come to love the paying nursling almost as if it were her own; and the charge of Giannella, who was looked upon by the neighbors as quite a highborn young heiress, conferred much distinction on her foster parents. As for the child herself, she was appalled at the prospect of being parted from "Mamma Candida" and her lifelong playmates, to remain alone with "Zia Mariuccia," who looked so old and stern. She flung herself into Candida's arms and wept bitterly, the two women watching her in silence. Candida rocked her in her arms while some tears of her own trickled down over the golden hair in which she had taken such pride for years past.
Mariuccia let them weep together. These things were matters of destiny. There was nothing for her to say. Their double grief showed that the little one had been happy at least. Her own turn would come when the parting was over; and though she was racking her brain as to ways and means, she was confident that she could make Giannella happy too. She rose quietly and prepared as tempting a dinner as her resources would provide, and her sorrowing guests did full justice to it at last. Then all three went out to make the purchases for Teresina; and the streets, the shops, the band playing stridently as a detachment of French soldiers in gay uniforms marched down the Corso, all sent the country-reared child wild with delight. She was finally put to bed with a honey cake under her pillow, and never woke till Candida, who had slipped away in the dawn, was far out on the Via Appia, so occupied with anticipating Teresina's joy over the grand new clothes that there was little place in her mind for anything else.
A few days later Sebastiano brought a big bundle in which Mariuccia found every garment that Giannella had outgrown carefully folded up and saved by her scrupulous keepers, together with odds and ends of playthings, and little pictures of the Saints given for good conduct by the parish priest who had taught her her catechism. There was also a present of cakes and fruit from the teeming Alban garden in the hills. The padrone was offered his due of all, and actually smiled when he found a little person, with round cheeks and funnily puckered brow, reaching up with two hands to put a plate of fresh figs on his dinner-table. The child nearly dropped it when she saw him enter, but summoned up all her courage to shove it on safely. Then she turned and ran at full speed all the way to the kitchen, where she rushed to Mariuccia's side and hid her face in her protector's voluminous skirts. "Oh, please, please, ask him not to eat me this time!" she wailed. "I didn't know he was there—I will never do it again."
For Mariuccia, determined that the padrone should have no just cause of complaint, had confided to Giannella a terrible secret: the Signor Professor never hurt little girls who obeyed orders, but it was well known that he had once gobbled up a certain naughty child who did not keep out of his way!
CHAPTER IV
The Principessa di Santafede was a lady of gravely gracious manners, iron prejudices and active piety, and she entertained a profound belief in the necessity of her own class to the well-being of the world. So far as she was concerned secular history contained but one record worthy of study and imitation, the record of the noble houses of Rome. Each tradition and regulation connected with these was not only a rubric but a dogma. To believe and act thereupon was to find social salvation; all who rejected these articles of faith perish from her consciousness; their names were erased from her "libro d'oro," and they ceased to be. No taint of novelty had cast its shadow over her education. Except that the history books were thicker and the spelling modernized, the teaching she received in the convent along with all the other noble damsels in Rome was the same as that which had been bestowed on her ancestresses for generations past. It had proved entirely sufficient for those eminent ladies, and neither parents nor instructors could see any reason for changing a detail of it. There would be Roman nobles so long as the world lasted; their vast establishments would move ponderously and surely as they had always moved; and a girl brought from her convent to be placed at the head of such an establishment had but to leave its conduct to the responsible persons, the major-domos, and stewards, and housekeepers, descended from many generations of officials who had served the same "Eccellentissima Casa" in the same capacities. She had but to watch and copy her seniors in order to fulfill her obligations in society, in matrimony, in maternity, to the complete satisfaction of all concerned. Life was quite simple if only people did their duty.