were long gone to foreign courts, the Maestro had a special love for Guido. And Guido had always known it, and he felt a sudden warm rush of feeling for the man now. The Maestro seemed older, was that inevitable? His hair had gone entirely white.
He sent the two little boys off with a perfunctory greeting, and then his eyes settled on the elegant and remote figure of the Venetian who was wandering among the orange trees that crowded the cloister, their blossoms already turned to tiny building fruit.
“You must tell me at once what is going on here,” said the Maestro under his breath. But when he looked at Guido again, he gave way immediately to another warm embrace, holding his old pupil for a moment as if he were listening to some distant sound.
Guido was at once steamy. “Surely you got my letter from Bologna.”
“Yes, and daily I am visited by men from the Venetian Embassy. They have all but accused me of gelding this princeling under this roof, and threaten to obtain the right to search us.”
“Well, then, send for them,” Guido growled. But he was afraid.
“Why have you gone to such lengths for this boy?” the Maestro asked patiently.
“When you hear his voice, you will know,” Guido answered.
The Maestro smiled. “Well, I see you are your old self, nothing has changed there.”
And after a moment’s hesitation, he consented that, for the time being at least, Tonio might be given a private attic room.
Tonio proceeded up the stairs slowly. He could not stop himself from glancing back at the crowded practice rooms whose doors stood open revealing some hundred or more boys all at work upon various instruments. Cellos, double basses, flutes, and trumpets gave off their roar amid the general din, while here and there at least a dozen children pounded upon harpsichords.
And in the halls themselves the boys sat at their lessons at various benches, one even practicing his violin in a corner of the stairway, another having made the landing his desk where he bowed his head as Tonio and Guido passed, hardly missing a stroke of the pen on his staff as he harmonized a composition.
The stairs themselves were worn concave from so many feet over so many centuries, and there was about everything a barren, scrubbed look which Guido had never before noticed.
He could not guess what Tonio was thinking, and he did not know that in all his life, this boy had never even for one day been subject to the rules or discipline of any institution.
Tonio knew nothing of children either. And he was staring at them as though they were quite an unusual phenomenon.
He paused, stranded, at the door of the long dormitory in which Guido had spent his nights as a boy, and turned willingly enough to be led down an attic corridor to the little slope-roofed room that would be his own chamber.
All within was neat and ready for some special occupant, a castrato who had in his last years of residency here distinguished himself. In fact, Guido himself had once slept in this chamber.
The shutters opening inward from the dormer window were painted with green leaves and soft overblown roses, while a similar border of flowers ran along the tops of the walls.
And bright enameled decorations covered the desk and chair, the dark red cabinet with its gilded edges waiting for Tonio’s possessions.
The boy glanced back and forth, and then suddenly he saw through the open window the distant bluish peak of the mountain again, and he moved almost mindlessly towards it.
For an eternity he stood gazing out at that plume of smoke that rose so straight to the faint disintegrating clouds and then finally he turned again to Guido. His eyes were filled with quiet wonder. And they moved again over the furnishings of this little place without the slightest censure or complaint. It was as if, for an instant, he liked all that he saw. As if the weight of his pain were something any human being could carry, day in day out, hour by hour, without some final alleviation. He turned again to the mountain.
“Would you like to climb Vesuvius?” Guido asked.
Tonio turned with such a bright face that Guido was startled. It was the boy again enhanced by the softest natural radiance.
“We’ll go up some day if you like,” Guido said.
And for the first time Tonio smiled at him.
But Guido was stricken to see the light go out of the boy’s face