Chapter X: On the Wing

LONG before Natale waked, the day had dawned, but the sun had not long looked down into the valley before he turned stiffly on his grassy couch and rubbed his eyes. Then, however, he lost not an instant in taking up his journey where it had left off the night before.

How easy it was in the light of the sunbeams of the early morning to spring over the dry stones of the bank, and with a swift glance up and down select a safe place to cross the water which had seemed so dangerous and cruel in the dark.

The daylight changed everything, of course, and it was but a few moments after waking before he was across the stream and scrambling up to the low wall bounding the road on the river side. From the inner edge of the road the mountains rose precipitately.

As Natale clambered over the wall the church bells of Cutigliano burst into a wrangle of sound, which must have echoed from one end of the village to the other. Though the distance softened the metallic tones, the little boy was startled by them into a scamper away down the sunlit road as if the mischievous village boys whose office it was to ring the bells were in headlong chase after him. The day must have been the _festa_ of some saint, and for a long time Natale heard the bells’ voices, sweetened more and more as his bare feet trudged onward and the distance fell between him and them. But he soon gave up his running because his legs were stiff and his feet sore, and as yet no one appeared coming along the road behind him, in pursuit.

There had been no doubt in his own mind of the direction he should take after once gaining the road. He knew that Giovanni and Antonio with the house-wagon had been bound for the Bagni di Lucca, and also he knew that the road to the Bagni led downward with the stream, and not up toward the cold region of Abetone, the “Great Fir Tree.”

So all he had to do was to follow the road, broad and white, by the way they had come three weeks before, without need, even, of asking his way of the peasants he should meet. He had turned the shoulder of a great green mountain-spur which entirely shut off the view of Cutigliano before he would stop for an instant in his lame tramping. Once assured that the town was out of sight behind him, he sat down breathlessly on one of the heaps of loose stones such as flank every mountain road in Italy. Then he deliberately took each foot in turn in his small hands and gravely and pitifully examined its bruises. There was nothing to be done, then, but plant them in the road again and continue his way.

For an hour or more he trudged painfully on, but the stiffness in his legs left him after a while, and he began to be only hungry. He wished he had thought of hiding in his pocket, the night before, a crust of the dark, coarse bread he loved, and which had always been plentiful at Sora Grazia’s. But the coppers jingled comfortably there instead, and Natale contented himself to wait for breakfast till he should pass some bread shop along the road.

The morning air was sweet with the freshness of early day, and the delicious odor of the wild thyme’s tiny blossoms. Tall harebells nodded to him from the thyme and heather bank shoulder-high above the road, and sparkled with the sunshine and dew upon their purple flowerets. The river, which in the darkness had seemed to mock him with its roaring, now only murmured softly as it slipped over the stones in the sunlight.

By and by, Natale began to meet people in the road, men with donkeys bearing huge basketfuls of wet grass and wild flowers shorn from the steep terraces above for the cow or donkey at home, and women tramping in their thick-soled shoes to Cutigliano with baskets of fresh fruit or eggs or cheeses for the summer hotels balanced on their heads. From all of these Natale kept his face steadily averted, lest they should bear back to the town tidings of his going. Usually, after passing a group of these wayfarers, the boy broke into a quick run in order to lengthen the distance between them and himself, but these spurts of speed availed him little, for he had always to stop and rest afterward, and so lost many more minutes than he had gained of the golden day.

The road had already become a curving white glare before Natale came in sight of a long stone house having many windows and doors, and standing on the inner edge of the road. He came upon it suddenly, on turning a sharp curve, and then he saw that another house faced it on the opposite side of the road, and that an inviting shade lay between. The back of one of the houses looked directly upon the steep slope of the mountain behind, while the rear wall of its opposite neighbor had its foundation in the rocky banks of the tumbling river. In the shade between, barefoot peasant children played noisily. Near by, a stream of spring water, clear and cold, trickled from a wooden trough into a rough stone basin.

And here at last were rest and food and drink for the runaway,--only no one must learn that he was a runaway!

A fat and black-eyed housewife with arms akimbo stood in one of the doors, and as Natale came up to her on limping feet, she eyed him with interest from the stone of the doorstep.

“Will you give me a little piece of bread, signora? See, I have money,” said Natale, showing her a handful of Mr. Grantly’s copper coins in his open palm.

“A bit of bread you shall have, to be sure, and your _soldi_ you shall keep, little one,” the good-natured creature promptly answered, and while the children left their play and gathered about Natale, with friendly eyes, their mother disappeared into the very small and dusky shop behind.

“There, sit down and eat,” she said, returning with a hunk of bread and a generous lump of cheese on a coarse plate in her hand.

As Natale received the plate and moved rather lamely toward the dripping fountain in the shade, the children ran ahead, and one filled a rusty tin cup with the cold water and had it ready for Natale by the time he reached the mossy brink of the fountain.

These little ones of the road, wild and rude enough in their play, were well used to offering the “cup of cold water” to the passing wayfarer, and Natale’s thirsty throat gulped the draught gratefully.

There was something about the child which arrested the attention of the woman more than the ordinary passer-by often did, and she also stood watching Natale breakfast hungrily.

He was shy and downcast, fearing difficult questions, and as soon as the last crumb of bread and cheese had disappeared he got to his feet, setting the empty plate on the margin of the fountain.

“Thank you, signora, and good-by,” he said, and was off.

“No, but wait!” she cried, laying her hand on his shrinking shoulder. “You have eaten my bread; now answer my questions. What is your name, _picino_,[7] and where are you going?”

[Footnote 7: Little boy.]

“Down the road,” was the shyly spoken answer to the last question, with a quiet waiving of the first. “Please let me go, signora. It is already late, and I must hasten.”

“Well, go!” she exclaimed then, “and a good journey to you!” But she stood watching him trudge briskly away from her until another curve in the zigzag road hid him from her sight.

“Some stranger’s child!” she muttered to herself, going back to the doorstep. “I have never seen him pass here before, and few there be who pass by without the knowledge of Chiara. Well, I am glad he has his _soldi_ safe in his pocket. May the saints protect and feed my own children when they go a-wandering! You, Beppo! keep your head out of the dust of the road!”

“Mamá, mamá, Beppino is making _capitomboli_, such as the boy who was here just now made in the circus at Cutigliano, on the day we went with our father to the big tent! Do you not remember?” cried an admiring small sister of Beppo. “See, our Beppo does them even better than the other boy, mamá!”

The woman gave a little start of recollection, and then dismissed the idea which had occurred to her, as impossible--fortunately, perhaps, for Natale.

“Silly girl! The circus people went down the road a week ago to the Bagni, do _you_ not remember? How should the boy be seven days behind? No more _capitomboli_, I say, Beppo _mio_, in all this dust!”

In a carriage, with two good horses and a fine cracking whip behind them, one may drive from Cutigliano down to the Baths of Lucca in the first half of a summer’s day. On two tired slim little legs, one would need much more time to accomplish the journey. Also when one has been for six days imprisoned within stone walls, one does not hurry--if fairly out of danger--along beauteous and fresh-smelling paths of freedom.

Every hour or so after leaving the woman and children at the fountain, Natale stopped for a rest along the way. Sometimes he sat down on a heap of mending stones by the wayside, in company with some stone-breaker hammering away in the shade of his sun screen, a rude lattice of chestnut boughs propped behind the heap of stones.

The monotonous clink of the hammer breaking the sharp-edged stones was usually stayed as the lonely worker turned to chat with the large-eyed child hovering near. Only once or twice was Natale’s cheerful “_Buon’ giorno!_”[8] returned by an unwelcoming growl or by sour silence. In such cases, the dawdling feet made all haste to pass and seek a resting-place in the shade of some breeze-rustled chestnut tree quite out of sight of the cross stone-breaker.

[Footnote 8: Good morning.]

The second night was passed as the first had been, out of doors, after a supper of hot rice paid for at an _osteria_,[9] a short way back along the road. Natale might have slept, as well, at the little inn, but he was too unused to roofs to dream of proposing it, and the absent-minded old landlord had not seemed to be thinking of anything but puffing away at his pipe, as Natale slipped past him and out of the dingy passage-way, after paying for his food.

[Footnote 9: Inn.]

A long-bodied two-wheeled cart stood outside the inn door, its shafts’ ends resting on the ground, its rear high in air, and Natale, with an instinct for sleeping above wheels, had decided to return to the cart for a night’s lodging place when the world should be dark again. But sleep overtook him as he lay waiting at the foot of a tree to which he had scrambled from the road below, and when he roused, dawn was staining the pale sky with rose color.

The next day promised to pass as the first had done,--with slipping shyly past occasional houses of entertainment along the way, with lingerings to stare into the mysterious depths of some noisy mill in league with the tumbling river, and with long, monotonous trampings, between times, along the smooth road, bordered always by the mountains and the river. As the road neared the valley, it crossed dashing streams hurrying to join their waters to the broader water of the river, and so solid was the stone masonry of the arches that one would never have known that he was crossing a bridge but for the sparkle and the laughter of the foaming water as it dashed under the road and out again.

Many times Natale, himself a small dark speck on the endless white road, looked up the long mountain slopes, green in the sunlight, purple in the shadow, and glimpsed high above him on the giddy heights the climbing roofs of some hoary old mountain town, away out of hearing of the busy river, out of reach of traveling circus wagons, and which,

“Like an eagle’s nest hangs on the crest
Of purple Apennine.”

It was past noon of the second day when Natale entered a village on a level with the highway. Here the road suddenly changed into a stone-paved street, running between high houses and echoing with the tramp of wooden-soled shoes and the patter of donkeys’ hoofs.

He stopped at the door of a sour-smelling wine shop where sat a man on a stool outside the door. To him the little boy put his question as to whether this town might perhaps be very near to the Bagni di Lucca. This man wore a red fez on his bushy, black head, and down his long, black beard trickled drops from the wine cup at his lips. The fellow did not stop his drinking long enough to reply in so many words to the question, but a decided shaking of his head and the pointing of a long, dirty finger onward sufficiently enlightened Natale, and he kept slowly on his way.

In passing a small baker’s shop, he stopped and bought a great ring of sweetish bread, and then slipping his arm through this, he went more cheerily onward. There were still many _soldi_ left in his pocket, and surely this beautiful ring of bread would last until the Bagni di Lucca should come in sight, with, of course, the dear yellow tent set in its midst!

One of the last houses he passed as he left the town was entered through a garden by a huge wooden door opening upon the cobblestones of the street. This door stood ajar, and Natale stayed his steps for a moment to gaze through the aperture down a charming vista of trellised vines supported on crumbling white columns of masonry. Green and gold lights played over the rough paving-stones of the cloister-like colonnade through the latticework above. Halfway down this corridor, two or three girls romped and sang together, their scarlet kerchiefs and the rich blues of their skirts making dashes of vivid color in the shade where they lounged. Pale jewels of grapes, already growing pink and amethystine, crowded the vines with promise of luscious sweetness when their full time should come.

The girls peered back at the travel-worn lad peering in at them, but when the largest of them called mockingly to him, “Enter, signore!” Natale ran away down the street and again out upon the road. The girls had made him think of Arduina and Olga and little Maria, and away down at the end of the corridor he had caught a glimpse of a gray-haired woman sitting on a flight of broken stone steps, with an infant on her lap. His heart swelled with homesickness. If only he might see Nonna once again! How long was the monotonous road to Bagni di Lucca!

The day, however, was not to close without an exciting and important event.