Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Second book - IX. Palazzo Geraci and Palazzo Corvaja
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282 THE MIRACLES OF ANTICHRIST ’
At first I only thought: 1 God ! if it had been mine !’
Then I said to La Felucca: ’ Let my boy be dead,
and let Ninetta’s live.’ I gave La Felucca my
silver comb, and she agreed. When you came
home from Messina I said to you: ’ Let us take a
foster child. We have never been on good terms.
Let us try what adopting a child will do/ You
liked the proposal, and I adopted my own child.
You have been happy with him, and we have lived
as if in paradise.”
Before she finished speaking the carabiniere put
the child down on the ground. The dark men
silently opened their ranks for him, and he went
his way. A shiver went through Donna Micaela
when she saw the carabiniere go. He should have
stayed to protect the poor woman. His going seemed
to mean: “That woman is beyond the pale of the
law; I cannot protect her.” Every man and woman
standing there felt the same: “She is outside of
the law.”
One after another went their way.
Piero, the husband, stood motionless without
looking up. Something fierce and dreadful was
gathering in him. Rage and suffering were
gathering within him. Something terrible would happen
as soon as he and Marcia were alone.
The woman made no effort to escape. She stood
still, paralyzed by the certainty that her fate was
sealed, and that nothing could change it. She
neither prayed nor fled. She shrank together like a
dog before an angry master. The Sicilian women
know what awaits them when they have wounded
their husbands’ honor.
The only one who tried to defend her was Donna
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