The Signora was not so new as they had supposed. She had bought better wine in larger bottles, in Genzano, close to Rome, for seven cents a bottle, and this was high at six. It was not, however, worth while to multiply words about it, and they made a compromise by paying seven soldi a bottle, with which the young woman seemed to be perfectly well satisfied.
Then they went out and mounted their donkeys, followed by the reproachful eyes and extended hands of fourteen men and children, and closely attended by the young hotel servant, who attached himself to Bianca. Marion, having visited Monte Cassino thoroughly not long before, had not accompanied them, being a little delicate, too, about joining himself to a party without an invitation from the monastery, though he would certainly have been included had his connection with the family been known.
Bianca dropped her pocket-handkerchief, and the young volunteer esquire rushed to pick it up and present it to her with a gallant touch of the cap and a smile that displayed a fine set of teeth. She accepted it with blushing thanks.
“My dear, he counts on half a lira for that,” the Signora remarked. “Don’t get any romantic ideas into your head. He would be as gallant as that to a witch, if he thought she would pay him. You must really put on a more severe expression. You have precisely the look at this moment of some young princess of fairyland who goes about giving bags of gold to everybody. If you keep on that sweet face, you will be as surrounded by beggars as a lump of sugar with flies.”
“You are a terribly forbidding and obdurate woman,” Mr. Vane said, looking into the Signora’s laughing face.
“I am sometimes,” she protested. “I pity one beggar, or two beggars, or sometimes three beggars; but when I see a score of healthy cormorants surround poor travellers, and ready for any pretence or any servility to get money out of them, I lose patience. I’ve been victimized too much in days that are gone to be very long-suffering now. Besides, I work for my money and have a feeling of indignation when I see a strong, healthy person stretch out a hand that has done me no service. Aren’t these donkeys little darlings? I do think they are the most useful, faithful creatures in the world.”
“If I could only know just where the backbone of mine is situated,” Isabel said pathetically; for her saddle had been constantly slipping either backward or forward ever since she mounted. “It really seems to me that I could ride a rail more securely. There I go! Oh!”
The hotel-servant rushed enthusiastically to catch the back of her saddle, and lift the rider from her nearly horizontal position, and help her off while they tightened the girths.
“It’s a sort of knack which you will soon learn,” the Signora said consolingly. “The poor little animals are as thin as a rail, but the saddles are like a chair. Just let yourself go, humor the motion of the donkey, and in a little while you will sit like—like Bianca there. Look at that child! All she wants is an infant in her arms!”
They had passed the narrow and stony loops of the path out of the town, and reached the mountain-side, and, as the Signora spoke, Bianca, leading the procession, went round a turn before them and came back higher up. She sat in the saddle as easily as if in a chair, upright, her hands folded in her lap, and her fair face uplifted as she gazed at the great pile of the monastery on the peak above them.