sta had been quietly ridded the very next morning: unfrocked, he
took the way of the Brenner and the mountains, and Veronese history
knows nothing further certainly of him. It is thought he may have got so
far as Prague, where at any rate a perfervid preacher called Baptist von
Bern was burnt for heresy in the year 1389--a spreader of anabaptistical
doctrines he was, Gospels of the Spirit, Philadelphianism, and what not.
Everything settled down to routine: Can Signorio to tyranny and
coquetting with Visconti of Milan (who finally swallowed him up), the
bishop to accommodating the claims of God, the Pope, and his temporal
lord, to those of salvation and his stomach; and in like manner did
every person in this narrative after his kind.
Then, on a bright morning in early September, old Baldassare came
limping up the Ponte Navi with his pack on his back, paused a minute on
the bridge, as his habit was, to look down on the busy laundresses by
the water, spat twice, and so doing was observed, threw a cracked "Buon'
giorno, La Testolina!" over the side, and went on his slow way to the
Via Stella.
It was still very early, but not so early that Vanna was not in her
shop-door sewing and crooning to the baby on her lap. She heard his step
the moment he rounded the bottom corner of the street, blushed prettily
from neck to temples, caught up the child, and went out to meet her
lord. Standing before him in her cool cotton gown, there was no sun in
the dusky place but what her halo of hair made, no warmth but that of
her welcoming mouth. Half shyly she stopped, holding up the baby for him
to see: it was not for her to make advances, you must understand; but it
needed no magic to make one believe that what a man's wife should be to
a man that was young Monna Vanna to her rag-picker. Baldassare blinked
and tried to look harassed; the next minute he had pinched Vanna's
cheek. She put the baby into his wiry old arms--a very right move of
hers.
"Eh, _bambinaccio_," he muttered, highly pleased, "it is good to see
thee! So thou art come out to meet thy old dad--thou and thy little
rogue of a mother? Come, the pair of ye, and see what my pack has in
store."
The baby crowed and bubbled, Vanna nested her arm closer in his ribs,
and the trio went into the house.
A keen shot from one eye sufficed to assure the old fellow that as well
as a little beauty he had a domestic treasure to wife. The house was as
fresh as her cheeks, as trim a
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