“Thou only, dear Adonis, so men tell, thou only of the demigods, dost visit both this world and the stream of Acheron.... Dear has thine advent been, Adonis, and dear shall it be when thou comest again.”
Gaspero never permitted Jane and Peripatetica to lose anything. Doubling through narrow, black streets where lofty buildings nearly met above their heads and where they snatched hurried, delighted glimpses of intricate old grilles, of arched and wheeled windows, of splendid hatchments and fine carved portals—he brought them out at admirable view points for all the many similar parades in widely separated parts of the city.
As the purple dusk came down they found themselves in the Marina, watching the last of the processions moving slowly down the broad avenue to the sea-street. The crowd had thinned. The small angels and John the Baptists went wearily upon dusty little feet, their crowns of now wilted roses canted at dissipated angles over their flushed and tearful faces, the heavy, half-burned wax torches wabbling dangerously near the draggled veils and drooping gilt wings.
The bearers of the images paused often to set down their heavy burdens. The balconies began to blossom with tinted lights. Here and there the Virgin with her twinkling candles was turned toward a balcony filled with some specially faithful children of the church, and stood facing them a moment, tall, ghostly, tragical, in the gathering darkness, before passing onward in her long pilgrimage of mourning that was to end within the church doors as night came down.
“It is enough, Gaspero,” they cried, as the flickering train passed away down the water avenue into the blue blackness of the shadowy evening, and then they went homewards full of that strange mingled sense of languor and refreshment—that “cleansing of the soul with pity and terror” which is the gift of the heroic tragedies....
Every hour of that night the bells rang and masses sang throughout the city. All day Saturday the churches swarmed, and the purple veils, hung before the altar pictures throughout Lent, were rent from top to bottom to the sound of the wailing De Profundis. Sunday the religious world seemed to exhale itself in music and flowers and triumphant masses. Easter Monday morning the populace hurried through the necessary domestic duties at the earliest possible moment, for the Pasqua Flora is the day of villegiatura for all Palermo. Every one wears new clothes. Even the humble asinelli are, for once in the year at least, brushed and combed, and decorated with fresh red tassels if the master is too poor to afford more elaboration of the always elaborate harness. Those asses who have the luck to be the property of rich contadini appear resplendent in new caparison; with towering brass collars heavy with scarlet chenille, flashing with mirrors and inlays of mother-of-pearl, glittering from head to tail with brass buckles, with bells and red tags innumerable, drawing new carts carved and painted with all the myths and legends and history of Sicily in crude chromatic vivacity.
Whole families stream countrywards in these carts to-day; babies clean and starched for once, grandmothers in purple kerchiefs tied under the chin and yellow kerchiefs crossed upon the breast, with gold hoops in their ears; daughters in flowered cottons, their uncovered heads wrought with fearful and wonderful pompadours, sleek and jet black.
Along the seashore, up the sides of Pellegrino, in all the open country about Palermo, they spread and sun themselves, eat, sleep, make love, gossip, dance, and sing in the golden air.
Gaspero drives slowly through the wide-spread picnic, pausing wherever a characteristic group attracts.