It was nearly six o’clock, and I had strolled down to the Piazza del Santo. At that hour, when the slanting light is full of colour and the shadows are long and profound, the great church, with its cupolas and turrets and campaniles, takes on an aspect more than ever fantastic and oriental. I had walked round the church, and now I was standing at the foot of Donatello’s statue, looking up at the grim bronze man, the ponderously stepping beast, when I suddenly became aware that some one was standing very close behind me. I took a step to one side and turned round. It was Fabio. Wearing his famous expression of the sightseeing parson, he was gazing up at the statue, his mouth open in a vacant and fish-like gape. I burst out laughing.
“Precisely.” He laughed too. “I’ve been watching you for the last ten minutes, mooning round the church. You English! Really....” He shook his head.
Together we strolled up the Via del Santo, talking as we went.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do anything about the frescoes,” I said. “But really....” I entered into explanations.
“Some day, perhaps.” Fabio was still optimistic.
“Oh, she’s very well,” said Fabio, “considering. You know she had another son three or four months after you came to see us.”
“She’s expecting another now.” Fabio spoke rather gloomily, I thought. More than ever I admired the old Count’s sagacity. But I was sorry, for his son’s sake, that he had not a wider field in which to exercise his talents.
“And your father?” I asked. “Shall we find him sitting at Pedrochi’s, as usual?”
Fabio laughed. “We shall not,” he said significantly. “He’s flown.”
“Who knows?” said Fabio. “My father is like the swallows; he comes and he goes. Every year.... But the migration isn’t regular. Sometimes he goes away in the spring; sometimes it’s the autumn, sometimes it’s the summer.... One fine morning his man goes into his room to call him as usual, and he isn’t there. Vanished. He might be dead. Oh, but he isn’t.” Fabio laughed. “Two or three months later, in he walks again, as though he were just coming back from a stroll in the Botanical Gardens. ‘Good evening. Good evening.’” Fabio imitated the old Count’s voice and manner, snuffing the air like a war-horse, twisting the ends of an imaginary white moustache. “‘How’s your mother? How are the girls? How have the grapes done this year?’ Snuff, snuff. ‘How’s Lucio? And who the devil has left all this rubbish lying about in my study?’” Fabio burst into an indignant roar that made the loiterers in the Via Roma turn, astonished, in our direction.