She wished to force her way to Gandolfo; she could not thank him enough. He had told her that Gaetano loved her. When he had quoted the words, “Now may her will be done who was just carried by,” she had suddenly understood that Gaetano had believed that it was she lying under the pall of the Alagonas.
And of that dead woman he had said: “I love her.”
The blood flowed once more in her veins; her heart beat again; her tears fell. “It is life, life,” she said to herself, while she let herself be carried to and fro by the crowd. “Life has come again to me. I shall not die.”
They all had to come up to little Gandolfo to thank him, because he had given them some one to love, to trust in, to long for in those days of dejection, when everything seemed lost.
“_Antichrist shall go from land to land and give bread to the poor_”
It was in February, and the almond-trees were beginning to blossom on the black lava about Diamante.
Cavaliere Palmeri had taken a walk up Etna and had brought home a big almond branch, full of buds and flowers and put it in a vase in the music-room.
Donna Micaela started when she saw it. So they had already come, the almond-blossoms. And for a whole month, for six long weeks, they would be everywhere.
They would stand on the altar in the church; they would lie on the graves, and they would be worn on the breast, on the hat, in the hair. They would blossom over the roads, in the heaps of ruins, on the black lava. And every almond-flower would remind her of the day when the bells rang, when Gaetano was free and happy, and when she dreamed of passing her whole life with him.
It seemed to her as if she never before fully understood what it meant that he was shut in and gone, that she should never see him again.
She had to sit down in order not to fall; her heart seemed to stop, and she shut her eyes.
While she was sitting thus she had a strange experience.
She is all at once at home in the palace in Catania. She is sitting in the lofty hall reading, and she is a happy young girl, Signorina Palmeri. A servant brings in a wandering salesman to her. He is a handsome young fellow with a sprig of almond-blossoms in his button-hole; on his head he carries a board full of little images of the saints, carved in wood.