For within that black house everything had seemed certain and sure, but when he came out into the sunshine he began to worry about the promise he had given in the name of the Madonna.
Don Matteo prayed and read, and read and prayed. Might the great God in heaven protect the woman, who had believed him and obeyed him as if he had been a prophet!
Don Matteo turned the corner into the Corso. He struck against donkeys on their way home, with travelling signorinas on their backs; he walked right into peasants coming home from their work, and he pushed against the old women spinning, and entangled their thread. At last he came to a little, dark shop.
It was a shop without a window which was at the corner of an old palace. The threshold was a foot high; the floor was of trampled earth; the door almost always stood open to let in the light. The counter was besieged by peasants and mule-drivers.
And behind the counter stood Don Ferrante. His beard grew in tufts; his face was in one wrinkle; his voice was hoarse with rage. The peasants demanded an immoderately high payment for the loads that they had driven up from Catania.
The people of Diamante soon perceived that Don Ferrante’s wife, Donna Micaela, was nothing but a great child. She could never succeed in looking like a woman of the world, and she really was nothing but a child. And nothing else was to be expected, after the life she had led.
Of the world she had seen nothing but its theatres, museums, ball-rooms, promenades, and race courses; and all such are only play places. She had never been allowed to go alone on the street. She had never worked. No one had ever spoken seriously to her. She had not even been in love with any one.
After she had moved into the summer palace she forgot her cares as gayly and easily as a child would have done. And it appeared that she had the playful disposition of a child, and that she could transform and change everything about her.
The old dirty Saracen town Diamante seemed like a paradise to Donna Micaela. She said that she had not been at all surprised when Don Ferrante had spoken to her in the square, nor when he had proposed to her. It seemed quite natural to her that such things should happen in Diamante. She had seen instantly that Diamante was a town where rich men went and sought out poor, unfortunate signorinas to make them mistresses of their black lava palaces.