“I would take care of Bindo, Nonno,” she answered, at last. “Do not be afraid of that.”
“But how? It is easy to say. But how?”
“I suppose I could dance at theatres,” said Gemma after reflection. Nonno shook his head.
“For the theatres you would need to dance differently: it is all spinning, craning, drilling there; you dance, my child, as a flower in the wind. The theatres do not care for that.”
“Then I do not know,” said Gemma. “But something I would do. Bindo should not suffer.”
“You are a good child,” said the old man, tenderly. She sank down again on the grass.
“Do not think of dying, Nonno,” she said. “It is all so dark where death is.”
“Not when one gets to the saints,” said the simple old man. He always fancied Paradise just like Amalfi,—his own Amalfi, where long ago, so long ago, he had run and leaped, a merry naked boy, in the azure waves, and caught the glittering sea-mouse and the pink column of the gemmia in his hands. Paradise would be just like Amalfi; the promise of it consoled him as he trotted on tired limbs along the wet gravel of English market-roads, or meekly bore the noisy horse-play of English village crowds.
The rain had ceased, and the sun was shining a little in a drowsy half-hearted way, as if it were but half awake even at mid-day. There were big hedges on either side of the lane, and broad strips of turf. These lanes are almost all that is left of the rural and leafy old England of Seventeen Hundred; and they are beautiful in their own way when midsummer crowds them with flowers, and in spring when their palm-willows blossom, and in autumn when their hazel-coppices are brown with nuts, and in winter when their holly and ivy clamber high, and their fine trees make a tracery of bare boughs delicate as the net-work of lace against the gray skies.