Donna Elisa lifted her eyebrows a little. “You think that he could prevail upon me to be silent about such a thing,” she said, and her voice was very strange.
“But, Donna Elisa,” Donna Micaela whispered in her ear, “it is impossible, quite impossible not to love him. He is beautiful; don’t you know it? And he subjugates me, and I am afraid of him. You must let me love him.”
“Must I?” Donna Elisa kept her eyes down and spoke quite shortly and harshly.
Donna Micaela was beside herself. “It is I whom he loves,” she said. “It is not Giannita, but me, and you ought to consider me as a daughter; you ought to help me; you ought to be kind to me. And instead you stand against me; you are cruel to me. You do not let me come to you and talk of him. However much I long, and however much I work, I may not tell you of it.”
Donna Elisa could hold out no longer. Donna Micaela was nothing but a child, young and foolish and quivering like a bird’s heart,--just one to be taken care of. She had to throw her arms about her.
“I never knew it, you poor, foolish child,” she said.
The blind singers had a meeting in the church of Lucia. Highest up in the choir behind the altar sat thirty old, blind, men on the carved chairs of the Jesuit fathers. They were poor, most of them; most of them had a beggar’s wallet and a crutch beside them.
They were all very earnest and solemn; they knew what it meant to be members of that holy band of singers, of that glorious old Academy.
Now and then below in the church a subdued noise was audible. The blind men’s guides were sitting there, children, dogs, and old women, waiting. Sometimes the children began to romp with one another and with the dogs, but it was instantly suppressed and silenced.
Those of the blind who were _trovatori_ stood up one after another and spoke new verses.
“You people who live on holy Etna,” one of them recited, “men who live on the mountain of wonders, rise up, give your mistress a new glory! She longs for two ribbons to heighten her beauty, two long, narrow bands of steel to fasten her mantle. Give them to your mistress, and she will reward you with riches; she will give gold for steel. Countless are the treasures that she in her might will give them who assist her.”