Chapter VII: The Caged Bird of the Fields

THERE is a short, crooked street in Cutigliano, which leads back of the church and out upon the promenade of San Vito. This street is confined on either hand by stone houses and stone walls of gardens, and paved with large square stones. Here and there a gateway gives a peep at lapping hills across the river. The massive church tower rises directly from a narrow turn in this street, and when the bells ring down from the arches in the top of this tower, the stony street reverberates with a deafening clamor.

By the time the priest and Natale reached the foot of the church tower, the boy was weeping bitterly but quietly. His one free arm hid as much of his face as possible, and his feet in the clumsy new shoes stumbled so helplessly that Luigi had some trouble in preventing his falling.

As they had passed through the town, where everybody sat at their doors or lounged in the _piazza_, all had recognized the little acrobat, as Natale realized only too well. Many accosted him in wonder, and some would even have stopped him to inquire into his misfortune in being left behind by his family. But the young priest motioned such away with authority, silencing with a gesture of his long finger the too curious. Others had already learned how it had come about that Natale was to spend a year with Sora Grazia, and her son the priest, and these contented themselves with shrugs and smiles for the boy’s companion, as who should say: “We wish you well of your bargain, Signor priest.”

The great hands of the church clock pointed to ten minutes of four, as the bell boomed the hour of six. No one, however, ever thought of consulting the huge figures painted on the stone face of the tower clock, for those long iron hands had not stirred for many a day.

The deep sound of the bell struck so suddenly upon Natale’s ears that he started, and dropping his arm from before his eyes, gazed dully ahead. It was not often that he had strayed farther than this corner of the old church, and he had never followed the San Vito promenade to the end. Most of the town was left behind now; whither could this man be taking him?

A row of houses with numbers in blue figures on one side of the lintels extended back of the church, but before none of these did Luigi pause. Next came a low, broken wall, and then a house, detached from its neighbors and with a long, sloping roof, covered with slabs of slate. This house had no door opening on the street, and in the blank front wall there was only a very small window at one corner close under the eaves. Over a door in the end of the house nearest the church there was a small crucifix in carved stone set into the wall, but this door was seemingly closed and unused.

The priest led Natale a few steps farther, to the other end of the house, and then they left the street and entered a long balcony leading to a wide-open door.

A middle-aged woman sat just inside this doorway at the foot of a flight of stairs leading up into the room under the roof. She wore a kerchief of red and black cotton over her head and tied in a knot under her chin, and her eyes were bent upon a coarse piece of mending occupying her work-worn hands.

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At Luigi’s heavy step on the stone flooring of the balcony, she lifted her face to his and something like a smile softened the expression of her stern features. Her black brows unbent and she made way for her son to enter by twisting her stool slightly and shifting her feet. Luigi passed by her and took up his stand in the gathering gloom of the little passage, his eyes fixed warily upon Natale. The little boy had released his hand from the priest’s outside the door, and now stood leaning against the railing of the balcony, staring frowningly at the woman.

“You are content to have it over with, Gigi?” the mother asked, glancing from man to boy and back again.

Luigi nodded his head.

“Give him something to eat and put him to bed,” he counseled in a low tone, “and do not argue with him to-night. To-morrow the sun will shine and he will begin to forget.”

Natale’s sharp ears caught every word, stolid as he looked. “Forget?” What did they think he would forget? Not Olga’s last words, certainly: “I would run after the wagon, if I were you.”

But, _why was he not running now_? No door, as yet, kept him prisoner. There was the empty street. Below ran the long, long white road. The night was coming down, and he was not afraid of the dark. Once out of sight, around one of the loops of the road, it would take but a moment to slip off the heavy shoes with their soles half an inch thick, and then on and on in the cool darkness he might run on light bare feet--“after the wagon.”

He thrilled with the thought as it flashed through his mind, but a flash of the same thought thrilled Sora Grazia at the same time, for just then she leaned forward and laying her hand on Natale’s arm, she drew him to her side.

“Once I had a curly-haired little boy of my own,” she said with a serious smile, “but after a while, he grew to be a man, and now he has brought to me another little boy. Natalino, I hope you will be as good a boy as my Gigi ever was.”

Natale gazed earnestly into the woman’s face.

“I am not at all good, signora,” he said unsteadily, and he could not help the stirring of hope in his heart, with this confession, but Sora Grazia only smiled again and tapped his cheek, and said that perhaps the good Luigi would teach him to be good.

And there was no more opportunity left Natale for running away, for he was presently led into the kitchen where he had to sit and watch Sora Grazia prepare the macaroni for supper. He was hungry enough to enjoy a plateful of this but the slip of boiled beef served him on a clean plate afterward could not be choked down. He had overheard some one in the tent--could it have been only that very day?--say that he was to have meat every day in his new home, and his sister, Arduina, had added that she wished _she_ were sure of getting a morsel three times a week. Had not a doctor in Sicily said that she must have all delicate and nourishing food? And what were dry bread and sour wine as substitutes? No, Natale could not eat the meat that night. Happily the plate of macaroni had been generous, and what in all the land of sunny Italy is so filling as a plate of macaroni?

The valley looked dismally dark that night, as Natale crept from his little trestle bed and crouched on the brick floor at the window, after he was supposed to be asleep. He was to share the priest’s attic chamber, and a few moments before Sora Grazia had carried away the candle. He peered out between the flower pots on the window ledge and again wondered in his childish way why anybody in the big world outside should have troubled to make him miserable.

He was very sure that he had done nothing to harm the foreign lady with the spectacles. Once he had laughed when she had sneezed many times very loudly, in crossing the field near him, but he was sure no one had heard him, for he was lying on the ground and had buried his face in the grass. The pretty signorina with her had laughed too, and said something in their strange language which the lady had answered by another loud sneeze. Besides this, there was absolutely nothing he could have done to provoke any of the people in the garden. Yet, here he was being punished!

The thought of Sora Grazia oppressed him, her serious face and her high hopes of his goodness. The house, too, was quieter than any place he had ever known,--he who had been used to few roofs save those of the caravan and tent. There were no children about, and there was no sound inside of crying, or laughing, or singing, or whistling. It was almost as bad as having to live in a solemn church when the candles are all out and the crowds are gone, and one feels, in the dimness and silence, as if something were coming up stealthily behind one to scare one’s wits away. It is all very well to rest for a minute in a cool church, out of the glare of the sunlight, when one may run out again at will, free as a wild bird or butterfly. But to have to stay, night and day, for a whole year in such a place! Natale shuddered, for this was just the way in which the awful quiet of the little stone house of the priest affected him.

When Luigi came up to bed, hours later, he lifted the sleeping boy from the bricks at the window and covered him up snugly in bed.

“My mother thinks we can do it,” he muttered to himself, as he threw off his black gown. “I shall do my part, but I am not sure they have done a wise thing.” Then he sighed a little. Perhaps he was wishing that he could be a little boy again, with the wide, wide world before him, and no one to interfere with his choice of a career,--free to be acrobat or priest, but always to have his own choice.

With the passing of the first night all idea of running away seemed to have left Natale’s mind, and Sora Grazia was at first delighted to find her charge as submissive as a lamb to all her arrangements. After the first day or two, however, it became not quite so comfortable to see the little boy sit immovable for hours at a time, on the floor of the balcony, gazing down into the valley where the river ran merrily over the rocks. She would even have preferred to rebuke the child for something a little more outrageous than his listless torpor. She herself had to eat the meat prepared for Natale, if she would not see it wasted, for Natale could not touch it, nor would Luigi, her usually tractable son.

The young priest was no less puzzled over Natale’s conduct than his mother was. The schoolmaster reported to him that the boy held his little paper-covered spelling-book before his eyes with the utmost diligence, and really seemed to try to remember the letters as they were pointed out to him with patient repetition, but that he might as well have been gazing off into the valley instead, for all the good the pages did him, and Luigi believed it.

The other boys tried to lure him into their games and to practice his funny _capitomboli_ but he would only sit quietly by, on the stone steps of the church, watching them till playtime was over, when he must sit up on the bench in the schoolroom again and hold his book before his eyes.

“He cannot keep up his sulking forever,” Sora Grazia said on the sixth day of Natale’s stay with her. Luigi was standing near her in the balcony, brushing the dust from the skirts of his long gown, which he shook vigorously with his strong hands, as his mother continued, “I confess that I am surprised he has taken things so quietly.”

“A little too quietly!” muttered Luigi into the folds of his gown.

“But now, one would like to see him brighten up a little instead of glooming over his food and everything else,” Sora Grazia went on. “He is not the same child he was a week ago, making his ridiculous _capitomboli_ over the circus carpet. I wonder if he could turn a somersault now, Luigi.” The woman lifted her head from her work to look over at Natale, who sat on the low street wall with his feet dangling into the road.

“I gave him leave to go and play with the boys down in the field, this afternoon,” said Luigi, shaking his gown almost viciously. “He said he did not wish to go where his tent had been, and that he never expected to turn a somersault again.”

“Impertinent!” exclaimed Sora Grazia. “We’ll let him alone a while longer, and he’ll come all right. A child cannot sulk forever, as I said before.”

“But one can die of starvation and homesickness, perhaps,” quoth Luigi, stepping past his mother and springing up the stairs, his gown upon his arm.

Grazia’s retort was stayed upon her lips by what she now saw passing in the street.