"Angela," said he, "this is Master Anthony, the new apprentice. Will you look after him in the kitchen till after supper? I may change my mind about his sleeping in the clerks' dormitory. You might lend him some of your son's clothes, temporarily. He has suffered a mishap."
The face of the woman of a fine olive complexion beamed broadly upon the small figure before her.
"Benvenuto, signore," she said. "I shall attend to your clothes, sir, as soon as I milk. Saints! The goat has gone!"
She started after the animal much in the manner of a mountain pursuing a flea, but holding up her skirt. The goat had taken refuge in some defunct garden-beds, the graceful stone outlines of which on either side of the court now enclosed nothing but heaps of rubbish. As the mountain approached, the flea merely hopped away and the process repeated itself. Finally it shifted to the other flower-bed.
Mr. Bonnyfeather, although he had emitted no unseemly noises, was in no shape to aid even had he been so inclined. He was, however, still able to nod to Anthony who now joined in the hunt. The mountain was thus aided in its pursuit of the flea by a small, flapping blackbird with white, gawky legs. Mr. Bonnyfeather could no longer restrain his guffaws. Anthony now approached. The goat lowered her horns, and the boy flapped his cloak. At this ill omen, Capricorna departed nimbly up a staircase to the flat roof. Its bearded, female countenance appeared shortly afterward peering solemnly over the low parapet.
"M-a-a-a-a, my friends."
The challenge was accepted and the chase moved heavenward. The small boy preceded the huge woman up the narrow staircase toward the roof. Suddenly, the goat appeared at the top. Her pursuers paused thoughtfully in mid-air, but not for long. Gathering her feet under her like a bird in flight, the goat descended upon those below in the manner of an ancient battering ram. Two sounds marked the whizzing return of her body to the earth below; a small puff when it hit Anthony, and a grunt like a startled sow when Anthony hit Angela. The goat passed over them. They both rolled to the bottom of the stairs where they were met by Mr. Bonnyfeather who was trying to laugh and cry at the same time.
For a few breathless moments the mountain appeared to be in travail. Then it wheezed, groaned, arose, and departed to the kitchen feeling itself below the timber line for broken bones. An enormous clattering of pots and pans later ensued.
Anthony had luckily been saved serious injury by being driven into a soft place on the mountain. Nevertheless, he was in a miserable enough state. Mr. Bonnyfeather carried his limp form into the house and sat down with him by a table near the door. The boy's face was chalky and his white eyelids trembled. He gasped occasionally and there was blood on his lips.
"Welcome, indeed!" thought Mr. Bonnyfeather, "puir little laddie!" He sat for a minute wondering what he could do.
"Faith, Faith," he called at last. There was no answer. "Drat the woman, she'll be oot wi the clarks, brisket bonny, nae doot." His indignation rose with his anxiety. The whole establishment had availed themselves of his permission to go to a carnival performance. Gianfaldoni was to dance. Only the cook, who had no interest in that art any longer, remained in the courtyard. Mr. Bonnyfeather reflected with some bitterness that even Faith Paleologus, his trusted housekeeper of a decade or more, would desert him to see a mere bailerino. Alone with the hurt child in his arms in a huge, dusty, old ballroom seething with mouldy frescoes and hung with cobwebbed chandeliers, he felt as if fate had played him a scurvy trick.
It was in this baroque scene of departed grandeur that the merchant habitually ate and entertained visiting ship captains. As he looked about it now in the fast-fading light, the moth-eaten splendours of the high-roofed and too ample apartment seemed to be mocking his loneliness. There was not a human sound in the generally thronged courtyard. An occasional suppressed bleat from the goat only served to lend a slightly demoniac quality to the unusual quiet. It was suddenly borne in upon Mr. Bonnyfeather sitting in the silence and the twilight that every living thing had deserted him—that life would leave him alone thus a helpless and childless old man. He looked down at the pallid face of the boy and sighed.
It was some thirty years now since he had held a child in his arms who resembled this one. The similarity of their features was undoubted. It troubled him. It stirred, and not vaguely, a sorrow so deep as to be tearless, a grief lapped as it were in deep, damp stone, but one from which great pressure or a sudden shattering blow might still extort drops of moisture. It was in this deep vein that he was now penetrated. It came upon him that even the cloak looked familiar. But all women's cloaks look the same. Pooh! He was a foolish old man alone in the dark, aegri somnia. Stop dreaming! He must do something for this child who was ill, who had been flung as it seemed into his arms by the Church—and that devil of a goat, Auld Hornie himself.
Well, he would do something about it. He was lonely. He could cheat the devil at least. As if he had come to a sudden and irrevocable resolution Mr. Bonnyfeather rose determinately and laid Anthony on the big oak table putting an old leather cushion under his head. The boy stirred weakly, and half opening his eyes closed them again with a shiver.
The great ballroom of the Palazzo Gobo had once extended the entire length of the lower floor, but in its second incarnation as the Casa da Bonnyfeather this painted scene of much ancient, ceremonious gayety had been divided like Gaul. Stone partitions had been thrown across either end and the space behind them divided in turn into several smaller rooms. Of the two new apartments, thus laid oflf at either end of the old, one was occupied by the cook with a numerous family, and the other by Mr. Bonnyfeather himself.
It was toward his own particular section of the building that the merchant now made his way. Taking a large bunch of keys from his bulging pockets, he unlocked the door in the partition.
Before him was a long hall floored with a carpet of deep pile upon which his feet fell noiselessly. In the daytime this corridor was lighted from above by a skylight. That, however, was only a glimmer now above his head where a few stars appeared as if peering through a hole in the roof. All that part of the building would now have been entirely dark had it not been for a subdued radiance that escaped from a small Chinese lamp on a gilt stand at the extreme end of the hall.
Set beside the wide, white door of Mr. Bonnyfeather's room, the gilded and carved lintel of which it invested with important shadows, the light of this oriental lantern seemed to percolate its jade screen statically as if determined to tinge even the shadows upon which it now shone with its own quiet serenity. Behind the partition he had reared, and amid these shadows, the merchant had attempted to build for himself a refuge from the world. Once over the threshold of these precincts, Mr. Bonnyfeather shook off the rather staid man of business that the world knew and became a mere man. He unbent and moved now, not only more at ease, but more gracefully, as if he had cast off the habits of half a lifetime and returned to those of his youth.
Besides his own room at the end of the corridor, there were two others on each side of it as he passed down. The two on the left were empty and had been so for years. One had belonged to his wife who had died in childbirth, and the other to the daughter she had borne. The rooms on the right, which looked into the court, were those of Faith Paleologus, the housekeeper, and Sandy McNab, the chief clerk.
On this evening, while the living were absent, as he stepped into the corridor the place seemed to Mr. Bonnyfeather unbearably quiet. The sense of loneliness which he had experienced so vividly a few moments earlier was now reinforced and increased several fold, and this time with a kind of stealthy eeriness inherent in the close quarters and the silent carpet underfoot.