however, was reserved for the especial Antiquity that blocked her own front path, that elbowed her own front door, this noisome stable or sty--for it was now one, now the other--which she had hated and abhorred for sixteen long years.For it was just sixteen years ago this month since she had first entered the hill town of St. Francis. She had not entered it alone, but
in the company of a handsome bridegroom, Antonio Guadagni by name, and so happy was she that everything had seemed to her enchanting--these same steep streets with their ancient dwellings, the same dirt, the same yellowness, the same continuous leisure and causeless beatitude. And when her Tonio took her through the town and up this second ascent to the squalid little house, where,
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staring and laughing and crowding nearer to look at her, she found his family assembled, innumerable children (they seemed innumerable then), a bedridden grandam, a disreputable old uncle (who began to compliment her), even this did not appear a burden, though of course it was a surprise. For Tonio had told her, sadly, that he was "all alone in the world." It had been one of the reasons why she had wished to marry him--that she might make a home for so desolate a man.
The home was already made, and it was somewhat full. Desolate Tonio explained, with shouts of laughter, in which all the assemblage joined, that seven of the children were his, the eighth being an orphan nephew left to his care; his wife had died eight months before, and this was her grandmother--on the bed there; this her good old uncle, a very accomplished man, who had written son-nets. Mrs. Guadagni number two had excellent powers of vision, but she was never able to discover the goodness of this accom-
plished uncle; it was a quality which, like the beneficence of angels, one is obliged to take on trust.
She was forty-five, a New England woman, with some small savings, who had come to Italy as companion and attendant to a distant
cousin, an invalid with money. The cousin had died suddenly at Perugia, and Prudence had allowed the chance of returning to Led-
ham with her effects to pass by unnoticed--a remarkable lapse of the quality of which her first name was the exponent, regarding
which her whole life hitherto had been one sharply outlined example. This lapse was due to her having already become the captive of this handsome, this irresistible, this wholly unexpected Tonio, who was serving as waiter in the Perugian inn. Divining her savings, and seeing with his own eyes her wonderful strength and energy, this good-natured reprobate had made love to her a little in the facile Italian way, and the poor plain simple-hearted spinster, to whom no one had ever spoken a word of gallantry in all her life before, had been completely swept off her balance by the novelty of it, and by the thronging new sensations which his few English words, his speaking dark eyes, and ardent entreaties roused in her maiden breast. It was her one moment of madness (who has not had one?). She married him, marvelling a little inwardly when he required her to walk to Assisi, but content to walk to China if that
should be his pleasure. When she reached the squalid house on the height and saw its crowd of occupants, when her own money was demanded to send down to Assisi to purchase the wedding dinner, then she understood--why they had walked.
But she never understood anything else. She never permitted herself to understand. Tonio, plump and idle, enjoyed a year of para-disiacal opulence under her ministrations (and in spite of some of them); he was eighteen years younger than she was; it was natural that he should wish to enjoy on a larger scale than hers--so he told her. At the end of twelve months a fever carried him off, and
his widow, who mourned for him with all her heart, was left to face the world with the eight children, the grandmother, the good old
uncle, and whatever courage she was able to muster after counting over and over the eighty-five dollars that alone remained to her of
the six hundred she had brought him.
Of course she could have gone back to her own country. But that idea never once occurred to her; she had married Tonio for better or worse; she could not in honor desert the worst now that it had come. It had come in force; on the very day of the funeral she had been obliged to work eight hours; on every day that had followed through all these years, the hours had been on an average fourteen; sometimes more.
Bent under her basket, the widow now arrived at the back door of her home. It was a small narrow house, built of rough stones plastered over and painted bright yellow. But though thus gay without, it was dark within; the few windows were very small, and their
four little panes of thick glass were covered with an iron grating; there was no elevation above the ground, the brick floor inside be-
ing of the same level as the flagging of the path without, so that there was always a sense of groping when one entered the low door.
There were but four rooms, the kitchen, with a bedroom opening from it, and two chambers above under the sloping roof. Prudence unstrapped her basket and placed it in a wood-shed which she had constructed with her own hands. For she could not comprehend a house without a wood-shed; she called it a wood-shed, though there was very little wood to put in it: in Assisi no one
made a fire for warmth; for cooking they burned twigs. She hung up the fagot (it was a fagot of twigs), the herbs, and the sickle;
then, after giving her narrow skirts a shake, she entered the kitchen.
There was a bed in this room. Granmar would not allow it to be moved elsewhere; her bed had always been in the kitchen, and in the kitchen it should remain; no one but Denza, indeed, would wish to shove her off; Annunziata had liked to have her dear old granmar there, where she could see for herself that she was having everything she needed; but Annunziata had been an angel of goodness, as well as of the dearest beauty; whereas Denza--but any one could see what Denza was! As Granmar's tongue was decidedly a thing
to be reckoned with, her bed remained where it always had been; from its comfortable cleanliness the old creature could overlook and criticise to her heart's content the entire household economy of Annunziata's successor. Not only the kitchen, but the whole
house and garden, had been vigorously purified by this successor; single-handed she had attacked and carried away accumulations
which had been there since Columbus discovered America. Even Granmar was rescued from her squalor and coaxed to wear a clean cap and neat little shawl, her withered brown hands reposing meanwhile upon a sheet which, though coarse, was spotless.
Granmar was a very terrible old woman; she had a beak-like nose, round glittering black eyes set in broad circles of yellow wrinkles, no mouth to speak of, and a receding chin; her voice was now a gruff bass, now a shrill yell.
"How late you are! you do it on purpose," she said as Prudence entered. "And me--as haven't had a thing I've wanted since you went away hours upon hours ago. Nunziata there has been as stupid as a stone--behold her!"
She spoke in peasant Italian, a tongue which Mrs. Guadagni the second (called Denza by the family, from Prudenza, the Italian form
of her first name) now spoke readily enough, though after a fashion of her own. She remained always convinced that Italian was
simply lunatic English, English spoiled. One of the children, named Pasquale, she called Squawly, and she always believed that the title came from the strength of his infant lungs; many other words impressed her in the same way.
She now made no reply to Granmar's complaints save to give one business-like look towards the bed to see whether the pillows were
