Giannella

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

"Is that you, Mariuccia?" he asked, peering round at her. "Where did you come from? I thought I had left you in the house."

"You think and you think, and you never see anything, Sor Professore," she grumbled. "I came down the stairs behind you. I must get some camomile for Giannella. She has a fever—of those!"

He seemed in a kindlier mood than usual, for he shook his head quite sympathetically and said, "That is bad. I am sorry. But it is the weather, and all that heating food. I warned you before. The young blood is not like ours, my good Mariuccia. It makes itself to fire when the sun is in Leo. Give her less to eat and keep her quiet and she will be well in a few days." And he moved away, looking very like a brigand in his big cloak with one end thrown over his shoulder.

Mariuccia watched him disappear, with an expression of almost omniscient pity. "Sor Carlo mio," she murmured, "you have all the instructions of the holy Aristotle, and you can pull down Latin as I used to pull down the chestnuts at Castel Gandolfo—but you are just a baby in arms when it comes to serious things like food and drink. If I were not with you, you would be dead in a month. Rinaldo thinks he and Giannella will get me to live with them. Not a bit of it. They can take care of each other, the Madonna assisting them, and I will continue to protect this unfortunate man of learning till one of us is taken to San Lorenzo."

The evening was still young and Rinaldo thought he would go and listen to the music in Piazza Colonna for a little, so he made his way thither, guided by the strains of "Semiramide" which were ringing out over the otherwise silent city. Piazza Colonna was the favorite gathering place at this hour for citizens of the better class who were not able to get away to the country; as he turned into the square he saw it was already crowded with groups sitting before the cafés as well as with an ever-moving stream of pedestrians taking leisurely exercise in the open space round the bandstand. He found a seat by one of the little marble-topped tables, ordered the popular "orzata," a milky-looking beverage of almond syrup and iced barley water, and, drawing out his notebook, read over the indications he had copied into it. The name Guglielmo De Sanctis, was a common though quite respectable one; there must be at least a hundred De Sanctises in and around Rome; but the address, a second floor in a fashionable street, denoted that the gentleman in question was doing finely in his business, a fact which, Rinaldo thought, argued well for his character. He decided to call upon him the next morning, and then fell to considering how best to put his rather difficult case.

While the active part of his consciousness was thus employed, the other, the artistic one, was enjoying the charming scene before him. The great square, fronting on the Corso and sloping gently up to the majestic façade of the General Post Office at the farther end, lay under the dark night sky, fringed by a many-ringed circle of lights twinkling and intermingling in a soft golden glow. From the center the sculptured shaft of Marcus Aurelius' triumphal column shot up till its crown was lost in darkness; the fountains near it poured their cool sheets of water, gemmed with borrowed stars, into the marble basins, with a rhythmical splash that made a pleasant under-theme to the full music of the band; and every pause in the music was filled with talk and laughter from the audience, delighted with the unexpected coolness after a stifling day. The women looked charmingly pretty in their embroidered muslins and pale summer silks, and these were diversified by the rather theatrical uniforms of the French officers who, conscious of their exalted mission of protecting the Holy Father, swaggered happily about the city in those days, loving and beloved and blissfully unwitting of history to be.

The humming stream of humanity passed and re-passed before Rinaldo's eyes, momentarily eclipsing the pearl and silver of the fountains and then parting to let it shine forth again. Overhead the sky was a dome of shadows; neither moon nor star shot a ray through the darkness which, with the sudden cooling of the air, presaged some portentous change of weather. Rinaldo was taking in all the attractions of the scene, but such spectacles meant to him very much what they do to the rest of his countrymen—pleasant accessories of existence, but too familiar to merit any special attention, except from luckless foreigners who, of course, coming from sad lands where the sun never shone, where the grapes did not grow, where there were no pretty women to admire, no saints to invoke and no feastdays to enjoy, naturally went mad with delight on finding themselves in a country provided with these necessaries of life, and talked a lot of nonsense about Italy and the Italians, unconscious that the latter epithet is one which every Roman indignantly rejects. "Italy" ceases with the frontiers of Tuscany, which have the honor of bordering on the papal states themselves, the setting of the city which is the jewel of the world. To the south, below her feet, as it were, comes the "Regno," the kingdom of the two Sicilies, in due subordination. All is—or rather was in Rinaldo's day—as it should be, and as it undoubtedly would be for ever and ever. All this the benighted foreigner could not be expected to understand, and he was forgiven his ignorance in consideration of the welcome addition to public and private revenues furnished by his lavish expenditure. Rinaldo Goffi in particular had much reason to bless him as an easily satisfied patron of the arts, for most of his pretty genre pictures, not very original but pleasantly delicate in color and correct in drawing, found their way to other lands. He had just put the last touches to the venerable prelate who was going to supply him and Giannella with furniture, and was calculating how soon it would be safe to have him packed for shipment.

"Day after to-morrow, perhaps, if it does not rain," he was thinking, when a young man detached himself from the crowd and bore down upon him with the alertness of a dog recognizing its master. It was little Peppino Sacchetti, who, with his bright eyes, dark complexion and quick movements, always suggested the appearance of a black-and-tan terrier in gay tail-wagging mood.

"How goes it, Nalduccio?" he inquired as he dragged a chair close to that of his friend. "I was looking for you, my son. I have not seen you for days. Have you been finishing his Eminence—or preparing a cup of coffee[2] for the old gentleman who gave you such a turn that Friday?"