The door was open, and Rinaldo, curious as a girl, peeped in. But there was nothing to attract him inside. A pallet bed, a table, a straw chair; a crucifix; and on the brick range a battered cooking pot; these constituted the furniture, and an embrowned old sacred print the only ornamentation. The explorer made a grimace at the austerity of the abode and stepped back to the parapet to carry out the real object of his visit. Yes, he had come to the right spot. Far below was the Via Santafede, and opposite, on a level slightly lower than the one where he stood, were certain fourth-floor windows which, by all the canons of topography, should belong to the Bianchi apartment. Four were closed and curtained; the fifth and sixth were open and evidently belonged to the kitchen, for Rinaldo could see the bricks of the floor and the corner of the range. There was one more beyond, open too, with a carnation flowering on the sill. Within was a low chair with a basket of work on it. Was this the spot where the Biondina was accustomed to sit? Even as he framed the eager question, she came forward, put the basket down beside the chair and settled herself to her sewing without once glancing up. She had removed her lace veil, and her bent head shone in the morning light as her needle flew in and out of the linen. Once she turned to speak to someone in the room, and Rinaldo ducked behind his flowered defenses in fear of being seen; but in a moment he was leaning over again, taking in every detail of the picture across the street.
Now came another diversion. Giannella found some Indian corn on the window sill and scattered it on the outer ledge, whistling softly. One, two, half-a-dozen pigeons materialized out of blue space, paused a moment among the flower-pots near Rinaldo, cocked their heads, considered well, and then descended in a flock to gather the golden harvest. He heard the girl laugh as she pushed away one which had boldly settled on her shoulder. Then someone within called sharply, and she left her place in haste. Rinaldo lingered awhile, but she did not return; and conscience, suddenly aware of the flight of time, drove him back to his own quarters, to the society of Themistocles, who was sick and sulky to-day, and of the lay figure, fallen stiffly aside in the grand chair, as if the red cotton cardinal were tired of waiting for his truant portrait painter.
CHAPTER X
Mariuccia regarded it as too drastic an answer to her prayers when the erring padrone returned from Ostia shivering and sneezing, his clothes covered with green mud from the excavations where he had been joyously burrowing over some valuable discoveries just made in Tiber's forgotten port. His boots were soaked—his lunch uneaten.
"Figlio mio," cried Mariuccia, all her animosity quenched in anxious pity as she opened the door and beheld him in this heartbreaking condition. "What have you been doing? But this is fatal. Domine Dio, you shake, you have fever. Animal that I was to let you go in those old boots. Come in and let me put you to bed at once."
Bianchi resigned himself to her ministrations only too gladly, and while she rolled him up in hot blankets and surrounded him with fortifications of scalding bricks, Giannella, all undeterred by the late hour, rushed off to the apothecary for quinine and other potent drugs. She had never found herself in the street after dark before, but charity gave her wings and she was whipped along by remorse. Suppose the poor padrone were to die? And she had been feeling so cross with him lately, had been so ungrateful for the little attentions which he had been trying to show her and which probably only her own stupid conceit had distorted into anything more alarming than kindness and condescension. Did man but know it, he has only to catch a cold in the head to make the women of his establishment forget all the grumpinesses and tyrannies of years. Poor darling, he wasn't well all the time! What a shame to have resented shortcomings which one ought to have known were but symptoms of approaching indisposition. Quick, cosset him, doctor him, and in a few days perhaps the gentle invalid will feel well enough to put his pretty foot on our necks again.
The Professor basked contentedly enough in the excitement he had caused, and by the end of the second day was feeling much better. Mariuccia having reduced him to a state of apparent subjugation and tucked him up in his blankets with fearful threats of what would overtake him if he put so much as a hand out of bed, hoisted a basket of wet linen on her head and climbed up to the roof where each tenant was allowed a small space for drying clothes.
Giannella had been feeling unusually light-hearted all day. The padrone was better—what a comfort. And the house was peaceful; there had been no more "little arguments" between him and Mariuccia. Then the morning had been so lovely when she slipped out to the five o'clock Mass, a summer morning with fragrance everywhere, as if ghostly violets and roses had been dancing about the streets all night and had left their sweetness behind them when they fled at the coming of the sun. This was not her own idea; Giannella could not be called imaginative; she had found it in a book of very sentimental poems which somebody had most inappropriately presented to the Professor. But it struck her as pretty, and she had remembered it as she crossed the cool, empty piazza in the summer dawn. Then it had been most consoling to see a young man devoutly following the Mass. Young men were not in the habit of coming to church on weekdays; Mariuccia said they were too lazy or too frivolous. Mariuccia had a bad opinion of men in general, and Giannella accepted it, as she accepted most axioms enounced by her elders, in unruffled good faith. But here was living contradiction to such pessimism, a sprightly-looking young gentleman, as well dressed as Don Onorato himself, kneeling piously on a pretty silk handkerchief from the "Deus in adjutorium" to the "Ite Missa Est." Giannella was sure that she had never turned her head to look at him, and was a little puzzled to know how she had ascertained all these attractive details. True, she had dropped her rosary—very stupidly—and he had picked it up and returned it to her with grave politeness but without attempting to meet her glance of thanks. Ah, how comforting it was to a Christian heart to witness such faith and piety. The world was perhaps not so evil after all. Mariuccia, and the dear nuns who used to rail at it, and Padre Anselmo, who told her to give special thanks for her separation from it, had never seen a good, handsome young man saying his prayers!