“She is Venetian, she is false, she is stupid,” said Teresa; “and moreover she has a wanton eye on Gian-Luca.”
“Ma Dio!” gasped Fabio; “he is yet but a child.”
“He will not remain always a child,” she reminded.
“But what of the husband? I am certain he is firm, I am sure he is a lion among men.”
“When the lion lies down with the lamb,” smiled Teresa, “I have heard that he loses his strength.”
Fabio groaned loudly. “Madonna!” he complained; “and we have but now completed that large order.”
“That is why,” said Teresa. “Her eye is on Gian-Luca, so she sends her lion here to spend money.”
“What must be done?” inquired Fabio weakly, beginning to fidget with the things about the room.
“Nothing,” said Teresa. “If we take him away, we do but make him think the more.”
“But supposing—”
“We will not suppose,” she said firmly. “He is handsome and young, but he is also ambitious; he will not stay long at the Capo di Monte. Meanwhile he will probably meet some young girls, one of whom he can marry later on—there is Berta, for instance; it is true she is plain, still, she will probably improve.”
“Alas!” exclaimed Fabio, wringing his hands. “What a terrible danger is youth! When I think of our Olga—”
But Teresa’s face stopped him.
“I wish you would weigh up those hams,” she said quickly; “I feel sure they are under weight again.”
IV
A year slipped by uneventfully enough in all save one momentous happening; Gian-Luca experienced his first love of woman, and the woman he loved was the blue-eyed Padrona with her masses of red-gold hair.
A boy’s first love is a love apart, and never again may he hope to recapture the glory and the anguish of it. It is heavy with portent and fearful with beauty, terrible as an army with banners; yet withal so tender and selfless a thing as to brush the very hem of the garment of God. Only once in a life comes such loving as this, and now it had come to Gian-Luca. In its train came all those quickening perceptions that go to the making of a lover; the acuteness of hearing, of seeing, of divining. A hitherto unsuspected capacity for joy; and an equal capacity for sorrow.
Gian-Luca felt himself taken unawares; yet when he thought it over he would feel quite convinced that he must have always loved the Padrona. Be this as it may, he now noticed things about her that had quite escaped him in the past; the lights in her hair; a dimple in her cheek, so faint as to be almost imperceptible; the fact that two of her pink fingernails had little white marks upon them, and above all a tiny scar on her hand, a scar that filled him with the queerest emotion whenever his eyes beheld it. And what he now found so strange in his condition was his yearning over imperfections; he loved those two nails with the white marks the best, and the hand with the scar, and the whole of the Padrona when she looked tired, or ill, or fretful—or if her hair was untidy.
Alone in the night he would think mighty thoughts about goodness and greatness and valor; yet so humble was he that these thoughts would be detached. He longed to lay down his life for the Padrona, but that would be neither greatness nor valor, not even goodness—just something quite simple, like fetching cigarettes from the bar. This love of Gian-Luca’s was a thing of pure giving, expecting nothing in return. Its motto was to serve, its desire to comfort, its ultimate ambition to worship. And as all that he now did was done unto Love, he polished the nickel more brightly; his tumblers and wineglasses shone like the sun, his aprons were spotless, his hands red from washing, and he surreptitiously bought a pocket-comb with which he was always combing his hair when he found himself alone in the pantry.
If the Padrona noticed these things, she gave no sign that she did so. Her manner was gentle, her smile kind and sunny—though in this last respect she unbent just a little, she was always smiling at Gian-Luca. As time went on it was him she would call to fetch and carry for her bar.
“You go,” she would say, and her small front teeth would come gleaming out at him like pearls of great worth, “you go—that old Mario is always so slow, and I cannot endure our fat Swiss.”
Occasionally too, she would send him on errands in the time between luncheon and dinner. This time belonged by rights to the waiters, in it they could usually do as they pleased; but the days when Gian-Luca was not sent on errands he would generally sit near the bar with a book, for among other things he wished to grow wise, in order to be worthy of the Padrona.
The Padrona would sometimes come into the bar. “Reading, Gian-Luca?” she would say, smiling at him; and once she had asked him to show her his book. “Dio Santo!” she had exclaimed, “it looks very dull; as for me, I am not at all clever!”
At such moments Gian-Luca could only stare, all his self-assurance would leave him. In the hands of the Padrona he melted like wax; and once he had had to remember his motto: “I have got myself,” in order to be certain that his legs were not turning into fluid. But somehow these days the motto sounded wrong, nor could it restore his self-assurance. “I have got Gemma!” he would catch himself repeating; Gemma being the name of the Padrona that nobody used but the Padrone.
The Padrone! a large, black-browed, insolent man who bullied the miserable Mario; a man whom the fierce Moscatone of the kitchen had threatened to split like a fowl. A man who had more lurid titles below stairs than hairs in his greasy black head; a
