XIV
THE GOLDEN WEDDING
Next day heaven opened to us—a heaven, as does not always happen, of some one’s else making. Our dear Avis Knight, fancying that Lawrence was looking rather worn, persuaded him to shift the world to other shoulders while he went off for golden apples, and he agreed to a cruise in the yacht. Whereupon, Avis begged that Pelleas and I bring Nichola and spend at Little Rosemont the month of their absence. The roses were in full bloom and Avis said prettily that she longed to think of us alone there among them. Really, to have inherited North America would have been nothing to this; for Little Rosemont is my idea of a palace and I think is by far the most beautiful of the Long Island country places.
Therefore Pelleas and I went in town to fetch various belongings and Nichola. Or I think I should say to approach Nichola, that violent and inevitable force to be reckoned with like the weather and earthquakes.
“Whatever will Nichola say?” we had been wondering all the way on train and ferry, and “Whatever will Nichola say?” we put it in a kind of panic, as Pelleas turned the latch-key at our house.
We went at once to the kitchen and as we descended the stairs we heard her singing low, like a lullaby, that passionate serenade, Com’ è gentil, from Don Pasquale. Her voice is harsh and broken and sadly alien to serenades but the tones have never lost what might have been their power of lullaby. Perhaps it is that this is never lost from any woman’s voice. At all events, old Nichola reduces street-organ song, and hymn, and aria di bravura to this universal cradle measure.
When we appeared thus suddenly before her she looked up, but she did not cease her song. She kept her eyes on us and I saw them light, but the serenade went on and her hands continued their task above the table.
“Nichola,” I said, “we are invited to a most beautiful place on Long Island to stay a month while our friends are away. We are to take you, and we must start to-morrow. The house has one hundred and forty rooms, Nichola, and you shall be my lady’s maid, as you used.”
“And nothing to do, Nichola, but pick roses and sing,” Pelleas added, beaming.
Our old serving-woman pinched the crust about a plump new pie. On the board lay a straggling remnant of the dough for the Guinea goat. Nichola always fashioned from the remnant of pie-crust a Guinea goat which she baked and, with a blanket of jelly, ate, beginning at the horns. Once in her native Capri there had appeared, she had told me, a man from West Africa leading a Guinea goat which she averred could count; and the incident had so impressed her that she had never since made a pie without shaping this ruminant quadruped. Whether there really ever was such a goat I do not know, but Nichola believed in it and in memoriam molded pie-crust goats by the thousand. She has even fried them as doughnuts, too; but these are not so successful for the horns puff out absurdly.