“If I am now your wife, do you know why it is?”--“Oh yes.”--“Do you also know what the priest promised me?”--“That is his affair, but I do what I can.”--“You have heard, perhaps, that I broke with all my friends in Catania when I heard that my father had sought help from them and had not got it.”--“I know it.”--“And that I came here to Diamante that he might escape from seeing them and being ashamed?”--“They will not be coming to the brotherhood.”--“When you know all this, are you not afraid to do anything against my father?”--“Afraid? I am not afraid of my wife.”
“Have I not made you happy?” she asked.--“Yes, of course,” he answered indifferently.--“Have you not enjoyed singing to me? Have you not liked me to have considered you the most generous man in Sicily? Have you not been glad that I was happy in the old palace? Why should it all come to an end?”
He laid his hand on her shoulder and warned her. “Remember that you are not married to a fine gentleman from the Via Etnea!”--“Oh, no!”--“Up here on the mountain the ways are different. Here wives obey their husbands. And we do not care for fair words. But if we want them we know how to get them.”
She was frightened when he spoke so. In a moment she was on her knees before him. It was dark, but enough light came from the other rooms for him to see her eyes. In burning prayer, glorious as stars, they were fixed on him.
“Be merciful! You do not know how much I love him!” Don Ferrante laughed. “You ought to have begun with that. Now you have made me angry.” She still knelt and looked up at him. “It is well,” he said, “for you hereafter to know how you shall behave.” Still she knelt. Then he asked: “Shall I tell him, or will you?”
Donna Micaela was ashamed that she had humbled herself. She rose and answered imperiously: “I shall tell him, but not till the last day. And you _shall_ not let him notice anything.”
“No, I _shall_ not,” he said, and mimicked her. “The less talk about it, the better for me.”
But when he was gone Donna Micaela laughed at Don Ferrante for believing that he could do what he liked with her father. She knew some one who would help her.
In the Cathedral at Diamante there is a miracle-working image of the Madonna, and this is its story.