'Mother!'
'I tell you – Dino, I will not have you looking at me in that way. I will not have it. I am not saying anything against Italia, I tell you. I have not waited until now to have my own son teach me how to know a good girl when I see one, though, mind you, there's many a lass will sweep out the corners of the balcony while she's waiting to be married, and when she's got a husband – you'll not find her so much as wiping the dust off her own plate. Not that I am saying that Italia is of that sort. She is a good girl.'
'Yes,' said Dino lifting up his face. And then, as if there had indeed been some spell of comfort and of healing in the very sound of her name, he rose with a new look of light and gladness in his young eyes.
'Mother, dear.' He stood looking down upon her bowed gray head for a moment, and stooped and kissed it. 'I will go for Palmira first. But I will come back as soon as I can,' he said simply. 'Poor mother! it is hard for you I know. What you wanted to make you happy was a very different sort of son – the kind of fellow who never troubled his head about other people's doings, and who would have found out long ago how to get on with Sor Checco – confound him! Poor little mother. But we must even make the best of what we have. And you will see it will not turn out so badly as you fear. Come, mother, dear, look up before I go, and let me see that you are not angry;' he slipped his arm about her neck, forcing her to raise her head and look at him.
But although she yielded to the caress – 'I am not like you; I cannot change as the wind blows. When I mean a thing I mean it,' she said, sadly enough. And long after he had gone she sat still, as he had left her, gazing fixedly at the closed door. That door! how much of her life had she not seen pass through it, not to return, since the time when the years seemed long before her and she had found her chief pride, her chief plaything, in her handsome boy! Now, it was as if with every month that passed he were going more and more away from her, as the likeness to his dead father deepened. And the knowledge of this was like the painful pressure of a heavy hand upon her bruised mother's heart.
Disappointment, discouragement, and the rebellion against that discouragement, and all the weariness of a hard strenuous nature, for ever struggling, and for ever thrust back upon itself, were expressed in every line of her worn yet insistent face. She sat thus for what seemed to her a long space of time before she roused herself to take up her work. But before she did so she blew out both the candles. 'He likes plenty of light. They will do for him when he comes back. His eyes are young still, let him save 'em while he can,' she said half aloud, bending her own gray head still lower over her work as she knitted on and on in the darkened room. She let the fire go down to its lowest ember; what was the good of wasting warmth if Dino was not there to enjoy it? But, indeed, she was scarcely aware of the increasing cold, her mind was already so full of new plans for the future – projects in which she unconsciously disposed of the future action of her son as confidently as if he were still the little child she remembered, her docile bright-eyed boy, knowing no other law but the imperious rule of her anxious and exacting love.
CHAPTER II.
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
As he reached the quay, and even before he was so near it, from the steps above, looking across from the bridge, Dino could see the light shining like a welcome behind the curtained window of old Drea's house. The wind had fallen a little, but not the sea. The flight of stone stairs leading down to the landing from the level of the street was wet and slippery with the salt spray; even here, in the shelter of the Old Port, the black water was tossing and heaving in the light of the rising moon. There was a continual movement, a backward and forward swaying, among the ships at anchor; a shifting of the level of the signal lights.
As he came nearer Dino could see that the friendly scarlet curtain had a great rent across the middle of it; he halted by the window, looking in with smiling eyes at the little group by the fireside. A young girl was sitting on a low stool beside the fire, with her back to the window; she was talking to a child who knelt beside her and was looking up intently in her face. The young man could not see that face, which was turned away from him, but only the outline of the dear round head, with its heavy dark twist of hair; he could not hear what she was saying; he could only watch the quick motion of her little brown hands. She appeared to be telling some story, which the child was listening to with bated breath. All about them were scattered books and pieces of paper; there was a guitar – an open inkstand – upon a neighbouring chair. 'Ah, the idle child! the idle little girl!' the young man said to himself with a half tender laugh, looking at those fallen papers upon the floor. And then he rapped once, twice, upon the window.
Italia sprang to her feet at the sound. 'Dino! it is Dino!' she cried joyfully, and flew to the door to meet him, with two little outstretched hands, and welcome beaming in her eyes. She led him in, away from the wind and cold and darkness. 'Father is coming, and we have been expecting you, oh, for hours. I know it has been such a hard day for you, you poor, poor Dino,' she said, in that sweet low voice of hers, which seemed made only to express the pity and goodness and loving-kindness of her gentle heart. She did not let go his hand: to the young man's fancy it was as if all the new light and warmth about him were radiating only from her look. As he gazed at her it seemed to him that he had never fairly seen her before: when she turned away again, blushing, he started as if he were awakening from a dream.
'We were speaking of interesting things. Italia was telling me a story. It was a fairy story – out of a book – but now you have come in and interrupted it,' observed little Palmira quietly, looking gravely up at both of them from where she still knelt upon the floor.
'But hush, you bad child. Why, Mira, surely you would not have our Dino think we are not glad to see him? And if we talk about fairies do you think our hard taskmaster will not begin to ask us about our lessons?' said Italia laughing, and still with that softest rosy flush upon her cheek. 'There! that is what we have done for you, signor Dino,' as she pointed to the scattered papers upon the floor. 'It was I who threw them down there, because – oh, because I had not done one of them. And I hate learning to write, it hurts my fingers; and then I can't hold my guitar. And this is my birthday, and Lucia is coming to supper with us – father has just gone over to fetch her – and see, I have put on the new dress she made for me; do you like it? But Lucia will scold me. I have not mended the hole in the curtain, and I tore it a week ago,' cried the girl with another laugh.
''Tis a pretty dress. Have I never seen you in it before? but you always look the same in my eyes, and whatever I see you wear is what I like the best,' Dino answered, looking at her fondly. He put out his hand and touched the sleeve of her cotton frock. 'You will wear this the day we go to Monte Nero – '
'For the pilgrimage? ah, yes. And this year we must take poor Lucia with us. And the Sora Catarina; – it would not be like Monte Nero if you and your mother were not with us. Do you remember the first time we went there together, Dino? I was twelve years old.'
'And you carried your doll into the church for the benediction; I remember – '
'Ah, but it was a very pretty doll. It was the old Marchesa gave it to me, one day your mother had taken me with her to the palazzo. I remember it so well: I had never been in such a big room before, and when Sora Catarina left me alone I was frightened, and I cried. And then the Marchesa herself came in and spoke to me. She had a long train to her gown that rustled, and it had gold things on it, like the dress of the Madonna. And when she dropped her handkerchief I picked it up for her. It was fine, oh, so fine! and white, like a cobweb, and it smelt of flowers.'
'Why did she not give you that instead of a doll? I would not have taken the doll. I despise dolls,' said Palmira, lifting up her little pale face again from her book.
'As if I had ever been as wise as you, you little monkey. Oh, Dino, I know I have been very idle all the week. And it seems so ungrateful to you after all your trouble. But I can't write, I really can't. I am like father, all my fingers are thumbs,' said Italia mournfully, shaking her head and looking down on