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He caught his breath as he spoke. And then he seemed to awaken as one struggling against a spell. "What is thy name?" he asked. Zia also had lost his breath. What had the man meant when he spoke of his eyes? He told his name, but he could answer no further questions. He did not know whose son he was; he had no home; of his mistress he knew only that her name was Judith and that she lived on alms.
He was bending down and staring at Zia as if he were something strange. "What dost thou see, child?" he said at last, and he spoke almost in a breathless whisper. "What art thou waiting for?" Zia stumbled to his feet and held out his bag, frightened, because he had never begged before and did not know how, and if he did not carry back money and food, he would be horribly beaten again.
But there were no lepers, there were no hunchbacks; there were only Zia and the light. He knelt and turned himself toward the cave and prayed, and as he so knelt and prayed the man Joseph rolled open the heavy wooden door. Then Zia, still kneeling, beat himself softly upon the breast and prayed again, not as before to Jehovah, but to that which he beheld.
Judith was standing at the door of her hovel one morning when Zia was going forth for the day. He had fearfully been aware that for days she had been watching him as he had never known her to watch him before. This morning she had followed him to the door, and had held him there a few moments in the light with some harsh speech, keeping her eyes fixed on him the while.
Even as they so stood there fell upon the clear air of the morning a hollow, far-off sound the sound of wooden clappers rattled together, and the hopeless crying of two words, "Unclean! Unclean!" Then silence fell. Upon Zia descended a fear beyond all power of words to utter. In his quaking young torment he lifted his eyes and met the gaze of the old woman as it flamed down upon him.
He began to see that he was enjoying his time in Monteriano, in spite of the tiresomeness of his companions and the occasional contrariness of himself. He had been to this theatre many years before, on the occasion of a performance of "La Zia di Carlo." Since then it had been thoroughly done up, in the tints of the beet-root and the tomato, and was in many other ways a credit to the little town.
Soon he himself no longer saw it. Joseph of Nazareth came to the wooden doors and drew them together, and the boy stood alone on the mountain- side, trembling still, and wet with the dew of the night; but not weary, not hungered, not athirst or afraid, only quaking with wonder and joy he, the little hunchback Zia, who had known no joy before since the hour of his birth.
An Embassy from Venice was expected upon important affairs of State, and there was an unusual radiance in the face of the Queen, for it had been announced that the Illustrissimo, the Signor Zorzi Cornaro, brother to Caterina, was chief of the Commission, and it was long since one of her very own had been with her. "Zia mia," she said eagerly to the elder Lady of the Bernardini.
Zia had heard of soothsayers and dealers with evil spirits, and at such hours was either asleep on his pallet in a far corner or, if he lay awake, hid his face under his wretched covering and stopped his ears. Once when she had drawn near and found his large eyes open and staring at her in spellbound terror, she had beaten him horribly and cast him into the storm raging outside.
The light was there, fair, radiant, wonderful. The cave was bathed in it. The woman in the blue robe sat upon the straw, and in her arms she held a new-born child. Zia touched his forehead to the earth again, again, again, unknowing that he did so. The child was the light itself! He must rise and draw near. That which had drawn him up the mountainside drew him again.
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