She pressed his arm. “But you have come home, amore—you have come home to Maddalena. Wherever we two are together that is home.”
“Yes—it must be so—” he murmured. His eyes were searching the long, cool shadows, green because of their trees; the turf and the rustle of last year’s leaves made him want to take off his shoes—“Let us get married very soon,” he said, as though his words were an answer to something. “Since you will take me as I am, diletta, let us get married very soon.”
“As soon as you wish, we will marry,” she agreed. “Why should we wait any longer?”
He withdrew his gaze from those long, cool shadows and let it rest on her face, and suddenly he wished to tell her of his childhood, knowing that she would understand.
“You are my woman—all my woman,” he repeated, “and so I can tell you all. I have never had anyone to talk to like this—no one who cared to listen.”
While he talked she saw him less as a man than as a lonely little boy; and all her motherhood stretched out its arms, so that she could not speak for tears—so great was the heart within her. And something of her motherhood touched him, too, and he walked with her holding her hand.
He said: “It is strange, but I think my mother must have been just like you Maddalena.”
They ate little of the meal that Fabio had prepared, and after a while it was evening. The voices of the other lovers came softly out of the dusk towards them. A large, yellow moon climbed up over the woods, and hung there opposite the sunset.
“Look!” said Gian-Luca, and his eyes were wide with the beauty and mystery of it, But Maddalena’s eyes were on him, seeing all mystery and beauty in his face, the beginnings and the noon-tides and the endings of all days—for such is the love of woman.
IV
Maddalena took him down to the Italian church—St. Peter’s in Hatton Garden. And there he must talk with old Father Antonio, Aunt Ottavia’s confessor. For to please Maddalena, Gian-Luca had consented in the end to be married in a church. “I would have a blessing on our love,” she had said. And because of the gratitude he felt towards her, he had been unwilling to grieve her. He had told her that he did not believe in God, and at that she had only smiled. “You may not believe in Him yet,” she had said, “but remember that He believes in you.”
“A man should believe in himself,” he had replied; “he should not be dependent on his God.”
Gian-Luca had not disliked Father Antonio, a kindly old fellow, with very blue eyes, who on his part had not disliked Gian-Luca, in spite of the latter’s lack of faith. Father Antonio was a fisher of men, and he sometimes cast his net in strange waters. “One never knows whom one may catch,” he would argue; “it is always worth taking a risk.” And so, when Gian-Luca had faithfully promised that his children should be given to the care of Mother Church, Father Antonio had consented to the marriage being performed at St. Peter’s. Aunt Ottavia got very voluble and busy.
“I will go and light candles at once,” she told Gian-Luca; “I will go and light candles for my nephew’s conversion; I will also make a Novena to Saint Joseph.”
V
Maddalena would have liked them to live with Aunt Ottavia, who was willing to turn out all her lodgers, and to let Maddalena their rooms. But a closer acquaintance with Coldbath Square, and with Aunt Ottavia, kind though she was, had decided Gian-Luca against this plan. For Coldbath Square was anything but clean, in spite of its hopeful name; and as for Aunt Ottavia, she never stopped talking; failing an audience she would talk to herself, Gian-Luca had heard her at it. Aunt Ottavia was all blacks and whites like a magpie, and quite as voluble, it seemed. She was piously shrewd and shrewdly pious, she gave, as a rule, that she might receive. She contributed nothing to St. Anthony’s Bread, for she liked to have something to show for her pennies, and this being so she would buy little candles. Three penny candles she would burn to the saint, and then proceed to tax his patience to the utmost by a long recital of her needs. She liked Gian-Luca and thought Maddalena lucky—a girl without a dot to secure so fine a husband! Yes, indeed, Maddalena was lucky!
Aunt Ottavia knew life, very thoroughly she knew it—for the most part it only made her laugh. She had come from a village in far-off Liguria, and there she had known what it was to be married to a cobbler who had liked to get drunk. He had been very funny on certain occasions, and had tried to lay her across his knees so that he might beat her with a newly-soled slipper; but as she had been agile and quick as a squirrel, he had fortunately never succeeded. Now she would laugh when she told of Pietrino; she would say: “He was a kind man, he did it out of love—they are funny, these men, they have their little fancies.” And then she would cross herself, remembering that he was dead, and would mutter a prayer for his soul.
Gian-Luca took the basement and the ground floor of a house that he had found in Millman Street. It was not too far from the church for Maddalena, and the Russell Square tube was convenient for him. Maddalena was pleased at the thought of having her own kitchen, for she happened to be an expert cook.
Fabio insisted on helping to furnish this new abode for his grandson. “Ma si,” he said firmly, when Gian-Luca demurred, “I will do at least this
