Donna Elisa really show the flower to Gaetano? No, no; Donna Elisa was
too sensible. But if he had seen her from the window of his workshop?
Well, he would not answer. She had made herself ridiculous.
No, never, never again would she do such a thing. It was best for her not
to know. It was best for her that Gaetano did not ask after her.
Nevertheless she wondered what answer she would get. But none came.
So another week passed. Then it came into Don Ferrante’s mind that he
would like to go out for a drive in the afternoon.
In the carriage-house of the summer palace there was an ancient state
carriage, which was certainly more than a hundred years old. It was very
high; it had a small, narrow body, which swung on leather straps between
the back wheels, which were as big as the water-wheels of a mill. It was
painted white, with gilding; it was lined with red velvet, and had a coat
of arms on its doors.
Once it had been a great honor to ride in that carriage; and when the
old Alagonas had passed in it along the Corso, people had stood on their
thresholds, and crowded to their doors, and hung over balconies to see
them. But then it had been drawn by spirited barbs; then the coachman
had worn a wig, and the footman gold braid, and it had been driven with
embroidered silk reins.
Now Don Ferrante wished to harness his old horses before the gala
carriage and have his old shopman take the place of coachman.
When Donna Micaela told him that it could not be, Don Ferrante began to
weep. What would people think of him if he did not show himself on the
Corso in the afternoon? That was the last thing a man of position denied
himself. How could anyone know that he was a nobleman, if he did not
drive up and down the street in the carriage of the old Alagonas?
The happiest hour Don Ferrante had enjoyed since his illness was when
he drove out for the first time. He sat erect and nodded and waved very
graciously to every one he met. And the people of Diamante bowed, and
took off their hats, so that they swept the street. Why should they not
give Don Ferrante this pleasure?
Donna Micaela was with him, for Don Ferrante did not dare to drive alone.
She had not wished to go, but Don Ferrante had wept, and reminded her
that he had married her when she was despised and penniless. She ought
not to be ungrateful; she ought not to forget what he had done for her,
and ought to come with him. Why did she not wish to drive with him in his
carriage? It was the finest old carriage in Sicily.
“Why will you not come with me?” said Don Ferrante. “Remember that I am
the only one who loves you. Do you not see that not even your father
loves you? You must not be ungrateful.”
In this way he had forced Donna Micaela to take her place in the gala
carriage.
But it was not at all as she had expected. No one laughed. The women
courtesied, and the men bowed as solemnly as if the carriage had been a
hundred years younger. And Donna Micaela could not detect a smile on any
face.
No one in all Diamante would have wished to laugh; for every one knew
how Don Ferrante treated Donna Micaela. They knew how he loved her, and
how he wept if she left him for a single minute. They knew, too, that he
tormented her with jealousy, and that he trampled her hats to pieces,
if they became her, and never gave her money for new dresses, because
no other was to find her beautiful, and love her. But all the time he
told her that she was so ugly that no one but he could bear to look at
her face. And because every one in Diamante knew it all, no one laughed.
Laugh at her, sitting and chatting with a sick man! They are pious
Christians in Diamante, and not barbarians.
So the gala-carriage in its faded glory drove up and down the Corso in
Diamante during the hour between five and six. And in Diamante it drove
quite alone, for there were no other fine carriages there; but people
knew that at that same time all the carriages in Rome drove to Monte
Pincio, all those in Naples to the Via Nazionale, and all in Florence to
the Cascine, and all in Palermo to La Favorita.
But when the carriage approached the Porta Etnea for the third time, a
merry sound of horns was heard from the road outside.
And through the gate swung a big, high coach in the English style.
It was meant to look old-fashioned also. The postilion riding on the off
leader had leather trousers, and a wig tied in a pig-tail. The coach was
like an old diligence, with the body behind the coach box and seats on
the roof.
But everything was new; the horses were magnificent, powerful animals,
carriage and harness shone, and the passengers were some young gentlemen
and ladies from Catania, who were making an excursion up Etna. And they
could not help laughing as they drove by the old gala-carriage. They
leaned over from where they sat on the high roof to look at it, and their
laughter sounded very loud and echoed between the high, silent houses of
Diamante.
Donna Micaela was very unhappy. They were some of her old circle of
friends. What would they not say when they came home? “We have seen
Micaela Palmeri in Diamante.” And they would laugh and talk, laugh and
talk.
Her life seemed so squalid. She was nothing but the slave of a fool. Her
whole life long she would never do anything but chat with Don Ferrante.
When she came home she was quite exhausted. She was so tired and weak
that she could scarcely drag herself up the steps.
And all the time Don Ferrante was rejoicing in his good fortune at having
met all those fine people, and having been seen in his state. He told her
that now no one would ask whether she was ugly, or whether her father had
stolen. Now people knew that she was the wife of a man of rank.
After dinner Donna Micaela sat quite silent, and let her father talk to
Don Ferrante. Then a mandolin began to sound quite softly in the street
under the window of the summer palace. It was a single mandolin with
no accompaniment of guitar or violin. Nothing could be more light and
airy; nothing more captivating and affecting. No one could think that
human hands were touching the strings. It was as if bees and crickets and
grasshoppers were giving a concert.
“There is some one again who has fallen in love with Giannita,” said Don
Ferrante. “That is a woman, Giannita. Any one can see that she is pretty.
If I were young I should fall in love with Giannita. She knows how to
love.”
Donna Micaela started. He was right, she thought. The mandolin-player
meant Giannita. That evening Giannita was at home with her mother, but
otherwise she always lived at the summer palace. Donna Micaela had
arranged it so since Don Ferrante had been ill.
But Donna Micaela liked the mandolin playing, for whomever it might be
meant. It came sweet, and soft, and comforting. She went gently into her
room to listen better in the dark and loneliness.
A sweet, strong fragrance met her there. What was it? Her hands began to
tremble before she found a candle and a match. On her work-table lay a
big, widely opened magnolia-blossom.
On one of the flower petals was pricked: “Who loves me?” And now stood
under it: “Gaetano.”
Beside the flower lay a little white book full of love-songs. And there
was a mark against one of the little verses:--
“None have known the love that I have brought thee,
Silent, secret, born in midnight’s measure.
All my dreams have stolen forth and sought thee;
Miser-like, the while, I watched my treasure:
Tho’ the priest shall seek to shrive me, dying,
Silent I, nor needing him to speed me,
Bar the door, fling forth the key, and lying
Thus unshriven, go where death shall lead me.”
The mandolin continued to play. There is something of open air and
sunlight in a mandolin; something soothing and calming; something of the
cheering carelessness of beautiful nature.
IX
FLIGHT
At that time the little image from Aracoeli was still in Diamante.
The Englishwoman who owned it had been fascinated by Diamante. She had
not been able to bring herself to leave it.
She had hired the whole first floor of the hotel, and had established
herself there as in a home. She bought for large sums everything she
could find in the way of old pots and old coins. She bought mosaics, and
altar-pictures, and holy images. She thought that she would like to make
a collection of all the saints of the church.
She heard of Gaetano, and sent him a message to come to her at the hotel.
Gaetano collected what he had carved during the last few days and took
them with him to Miss Tottenham. She was much pleased with his little
images, and wished to buy them all.
But the rich Englishwoman’s rooms were like the lumber-rooms of a museum.
They were filled with every conceivable thing, and there was confusion
and disorder everywhere. Here stood half-empty trunks; there hung cloaks
and hats; here lay paintings and engravings; there were guide-books,
railway time-tables, tea-sets, and alcohol lamps; elsewhere halberds,
prayer-books, mandolins, and escutcheons.
And that opened Gaetano’s eyes. He flushed suddenly, bit his lips, and
began to repack his images.
He had caught sight of an image of the Christchild. It was the outcast,
who was standing there in the midst of all the disorder, with his
wretched crown on his head and brass shoes on his feet. The color was
worn off his face; the rings and ornaments hanging on him were tarnished,
and his dress was yellowed with age.
When Gaetano saw that, he would not sell his images to Miss Tottenham; he
meant simply to go his way.
When she asked him what was the matter with him he stormed at her, and
scolded her.
Did she know that many of the things she had about her were sacred?
Did she know, or did she not know, that that was the holy Christchild
himself? And she had let him lose three fingers on one hand, and let the
jewels fall out of his crown, and let him lie dirty, and tarnished, and
dishonored! And if she had so treated the image of God’s own son, how
would she let everything else fare? He would not sell anything to her.
When Gaetano burst out at her in that way Miss Tottenham was enraptured,
enchanted.
Here was the true faith and the righteous, holy wrath. This young man
must become an artist. To England, he should go to England! She wished to
send him to the great master, her friend, who was trying to reform art;
to him who wished to teach people to make beautiful house-furnishings,
beautiful church-fittings, who wished to create a whole beautiful world.
She decided and arranged, and Gaetano let her go on, because he would
rather now go away from Diamante.
He saw that he could no longer endure to live there. He believed that it
was God leading him out of temptation.
He went away quite unobserved. Donna Micaela scarcely knew anything of it
until he was gone. He had not dared to come and bid her good-bye.
X
THE SIROCCO
After that two years passed quietly. The only thing that happened at
Diamante and in all Sicily was that the people grew ever poorer and
poorer.
Then there came an autumn, and it was about the time when the wine was to
be harvested.
At that time songs generally rise full-fledged to the lips; at that time
new and beautiful melodies stream from the mandolins.
Then crowds of young people go out to the vineyards, and there is work
and laughter all day, dance and laughter all night, and no one knows what
sleep is.
Then the bright ocean of air over the mountain is more beautiful than
at any other time. Then the air is full of wit; sparkling glances flash
through it; it gets warmth not only from the sun, but also from the
glowing faces of the young women of Etna.
But that autumn all the vineyards were devastated by the phylloxera. No
grape-pickers pushed their way between the vines; no long lines of women
carrying heaped-up baskets on their heads wound up to the presses, and at
night there was no dancing on the flat roofs.
That autumn no clear, light October air lay over the Etna region. As
if it had been in league with the famine, the heavy, weakening wind
from the Sahara came over from Africa, and brought with it dust and
exhalations that darkened the sky.
Never, as long as that autumn lasted, was there a fresh mountain breeze.
The baleful Sirocco blew incessantly.
Sometimes it came dry and heavy with sand, and so hot that they had to
shut doors and windows, and keep in their rooms, not to faint away.
But oftener it came warm and damp and enervating. And the people felt no
rest; trouble left them neither by day nor by night, and cares piled upon
them like snow-drifts on the high mountains.
And the restlessness reached Donna Micaela as she sat and watched with
her old husband, Don Ferrante.
During that autumn she never heard any one laugh, nor heard a song.
People crept by one another, so full of anger and despair that they were
almost choked. And she said to herself that they were certainly dreaming
of an insurrection. She saw that they had to revolt. It would help no
one, but they had no other resource.
In the beginning of the autumn, sitting on her balcony, she heard the
people talk in the street. They always talked of the famine: We have
blight in wheat and wine; there is a crisis in sulphur and oranges; all
Sicily’s yellow gold has failed. How shall we live?
And Donna Micaela understood that it was terrible. Wheat, wine, oranges,
and sulphur, all their yellow gold!
She began to understand, too, that the misery was greater than men could
bear long, and she grieved that life should be made so hard. She asked
why the people should be forced to bear such enormous taxes. Why should
the salt tax exist, so that a poor woman could not go down to the shore
and get a pail of salt water, but must buy costly salt in the government
shops? Why should there be a tax on palm-trees? The peasants, with anger
in their hearts, were felling the old trees that had waved so long over
the noble isle. And why should a tax be put on windows? What did they
want? Was it that the poor should take away their windows, move out of
their rooms, and live in cellars?
In the sulphur-mines there were strikes and turbulence, and the
government was sending troops to force the people back to work. Donna
Micaela wondered if the government did not know that there was no
machinery in those mines. Perhaps it had never heard that children
dragged the ore up from the deep shafts. It did not know that these
children were slaves; it could not imagine that parents had sold them to
overseers. Or if the government did know it, why did it wish to help the
mine-owners?
At one time she heard of a terrible number of crimes. And she began again
with her questions. Why did they let the people become so criminal? And
why did they let them be so poor and so ragged? Why must they all be so
ragged? She knew that any one living in Palermo or Catania did not need
to ask. But he who lived in Diamante could not help fearing and asking.
Why did they let the people be so poor that they died of hunger?
As yet the summer was hardly over; it was no later in the autumn than the
end of October, and already Donna Micaela began to see the day when the
insurrection would break out. She saw the starved people come rushing
along the street. They would plunder the shops and they would plunder
the few rich men there were in the town. Outside the summer palace the
wild horde would stop, and they would climb up to the balcony and the
glass doors. “Bring out the jewels of the old Alagonas; bring out Don
Ferrante’s millions!” That was their dream,--the summer palace! They
believed that it was as full of gold as a fairy palace.
But when they found nothing, they would put a dagger to her throat, to
make her give up the treasures that she had never possessed, and she
would be killed by the bloodthirsty crowds.
Why could not the great land-owners stop at home? Why must they irritate
the poor by living in grand style in Rome and Paris? The people would not
be so bitter against them if they stayed at home; they would not swear
such a solemn and sacred oath to kill all the rich when the time should
come.
Donna Micaela wished that she could have escaped to one of the big towns.
But both her father and Don Ferrante fell ill that autumn, and for their
sakes she was forced to remain where she was. And she knew that she would
be killed as an atonement for the sins of the rich against the poor.
For many years misfortunes had been gathering over Sicily, and now they
could no longer be held back. Etna itself began to menace an eruption. At
night sulphurous smoke floated red as fire, and rumblings were heard as
far away as Diamante. The end of everything was coming. Everything was to
be destroyed at once.
Did not the government know of the discontent? Ah, the government had
at last heard of it, and it had appointed a committee. It was a great
comfort to see the members of the committee come driving one fine day
along the Corso in Diamante. If only the people had understood that they
wished them well! If the women had not stood in their doorways and spat
at the fine gentlemen from the mainland; if the children had not run
beside the carriages and cried: “Thief, thief!”
Everything they did only stirred up the revolt, and there was no one who
could control the people and quiet them. They trusted no officials. They
despised those least who only took bribes. But people said that many
belonged to the society of Mafia; they said that their one thought was to
extort money and acquire power.
As time went on, several signs showed that something terrible was
impending. In the papers they wrote that crowds of working-men were
gathering in the larger towns and wandering about the streets. People
read also in the papers how the socialist leaders were going through the
country, and making seditious speeches. All at once it became clear to
Donna Micaela whence all the trouble came. The socialists were inciting
the revolt. It was their firebrand speeches that set the blood of the
people boiling. How could they let them do it? Who was king in Sicily?
Was his name Don Felice, or Umberto?
Donna Micaela felt a horror which she could not shake off. It was as if
they had conspired especially against her. And the more she heard of the
socialists, the more she feared them.
Giannita tried to calm her. “We have not a single socialist in
Diamante,” she said. “In Diamante no one is thinking of revolt.” Donna
Micaela asked her if she did not know what it meant when the old distaff
spinners sat in their dark corners, and told of the great brigands and
of the famous Palermo fisherman, Giuseppe Alesi, whom they called the
Masaniello of Sicily.
If the socialists could once get the revolt started, Diamante would also
join in. All Diamante knew already that something dreadful was impending.
They had seen the ghost of the big, black monk on the balcony of the
Palazzo Geraci; they heard the owls scream through the night, and some
declared that the cocks crowed at sunset, and were silent at daybreak.
One day in November Diamante was suddenly filled with terrible people.
They were men with the faces of wild beasts, with bushy beards, and
with big hands set on enormously long arms. Several of them wore wide,
fluttering linen garments, and the people thought that they recognized in
them famous bandits and newly freed galley-slaves.
Giannita related that all these wild people lived in the mountain wastes
inland and had crossed Simeto and come to Diamante, because a rumor had
gone about that revolt had already broken out. But when they had found
everything quiet, and the barracks full of soldiers, they had gone away.
Donna Micaela thought incessantly of those people, and expected them to
be her murderers. She saw before her their fluttering linen garments and
their brute faces. She knew that they were lurking in their mountain
holes, and waiting for the day when they should hear shots and the noise
of an outbreak in Diamante. Then they would fall upon the town with
fire and murder, and march at the head of all the starving people as the
generals and leaders in the plundering.
All that autumn Donna Micaela had to nurse both her father and Don
Ferrante; for they lay sick month after month. People had told her,
however, that their lives were in no danger.
She was very glad to be able to keep Don Ferrante alive, for it was her
only hope that at the last the people would spare him, who was of such an
old and venerated race.
As she sat by their sick-beds, her thoughts went often in longing to
Gaetano, and many were the times when she wished that he were at home.
She would not feel such terror and fear of death if he stood once more in
his workshop. Then she would have felt nothing but security and peace.
Even now, when he was so far away, it was to him her thoughts turned when
fear was driving her mad. Not a single letter had come from him since he
had gone away, so that sometimes she believed that he had forgotten her
entirely. At other times she was quite sure that he loved her, for she
felt herself compelled to think of him, and knew that he was near her in
thought, and was calling to her.
That autumn she at last received a letter from Gaetano. Alas, such a
letter! Donna Micaela’s first thought was to burn it.
She had gone up to the roof-garden in order to be alone when she read the
letter. She had once heard Gaetano’s declaration of love there. That had
not moved her. It had neither warmed her nor frightened her.
But this letter was different. He prayed that she would come to him, be
his, give him her life. When she read it she was frightened at herself.
She felt how she longed to cry out into the air, “I am coming, I am
coming,” and set out. It drew her, carried her away.
“Let us be happy!” he wrote. “We are losing time; the years are passing.
Let us be happy!”
He described to her how they would live. He told her of other women who
had obeyed love and been happy. He wrote as temptingly as convincingly.
But it was not the contents; it was the love that glowed and burned
in the letter which overcame her. It rose from the paper like an
intoxicating incense, and she felt it penetrate her. It was burning,
longing, speaking, in every word.
Now she was no longer a saint to him, as she had been before. It came so
unexpectedly, after two years’ silence, that she was stunned. And she was
troubled because it delighted her.
She had never thought that love was like this. Should she really like it?
She found with dismay that she did like it.
And so she punished both herself and him by writing a severe reply. It
was moral, moral; it was nothing but moral! She was proud when she had
written it. She did not deny that she loved him, but perhaps Gaetano
would not be able to find the words of love, they were so buried in
admonitions. He could not have found them, for he wrote no more letters.
But now Donna Micaela could no longer think of Gaetano as a shelter and a
support. Now he was more dangerous than the men from the mountains.
Every day graver news came to Diamante. Everybody began to get out their
weapons. And although it was forbidden, they were carried secretly by
every one.
All travellers left the island, and in their place one regiment after
another was sent over from Italy.
The socialists talked and talked. They were possessed by evil spirits;
they could not rest until they had brought on the disaster!
At last the ringleaders had decided on the day on which the storm was to
break loose. All Sicily, all Italy, was to rise. It was no longer menace;
it was reality.
More and more troops came from the mainland. Most of them were
Neapolitans, who live in constant feud with the Sicilians. And now the
news came that the island had been declared in a state of siege. There
were to be no more courts of justice; only court-martials. And the people
said that the soldiers would be free to plunder and murder as they
pleased.
No one knew what was to happen. Terror seemed to make every one mad. The
peasants raised ramparts in the hills. In Diamante men stood in great
groups on the market-place, stood there day after day, without going to
their work. There was something terrible in those groups of men dressed
in dark cloaks and slouch hats. They were all probably dreaming of the
hour when they should plunder the summer palace.
The nearer the day approached when the insurrection was to break out, the
sicker Don Ferrante became; and Donna Micaela began to fear that he would
die.
It seemed to her a sign that she was predestined to destruction, that she
was also losing Don Ferrante. Who would have any regard for her when he
was no longer alive?
She watched over him. She and all the women of the quarter sat in silent
prayer about his bed.