Maria Gentili stood silent in the dark chamber, she listened towards the side where the convent lay, and her soul held converse with a spirit. Bernardo seemed to implore of her a Christian burial.
But whoever removed a corpse from the scaffold and buried it, was to be punished by death. Maria was resolved to bury her beloved and then die.
She softly opened the door of her chamber in order to leave the house. She passed through the room in which her aged parents slept. She went to their bedside and listened to their breathing. Then her heart began to quail, for she was the only child of her parents, and their sole support, and when she thought how her death by the hand of the public executioner would bow her father and mother down into the grave, her soul shrank back in great pain, and she turned, and made a step towards her chamber.
At that moment she again heard the voice of her dead lover wail: O Marì! O Marì! I loved thee so well, and now thou forsakest me. In my mangled body lies the heart that died still loving thee—bury me in the Church of St. Francis, in the grave of my fathers, O Marì!
Maria opened the door of the house and passed out into the night. With uncertain footsteps she gained the square of the convent. The night was gloomy. Sometimes the storm came and swept the clouds away, so that the moon shone down. When its beams fell upon the convent, it was as if the light of heaven refused to look upon what it there saw, and the moon wrapped itself again in the black veil of clouds. For before the convent a row of seven corpses lay on the red scaffold, and the seventh was the corpse of a youth.
The owl and the raven screamed upon the tower; they sang the vocero—the dirge for the dead. A grenadier was walking up and down, with his musket on his shoulder, not far off. No wonder that he shuddered to his inmost marrow, and buried his face in his mantle, as he moved slowly up and down.
Maria had wrapped herself in the black faldetta, that her form might be the less distinct in the darkness of the night. She breathed a prayer to the Holy Virgin, the Mother of Sorrows, that she would help her, and then she walked swiftly to the scaffold. It was the seventh body—she loosed Bernardo; her heart, and a faint gleam from his dead face, told her that it was he, even in the dark night. Maria took the dead man in her arms, upon her shoulder. She had become strong, as if with the strength of a man. She bore the corpse into the Church of St. Francis.
There she sat down exhausted, on the steps of an altar, over which the lamp of the Mother of God was burning. The dead Bernardo lay upon her knees, as the dead Christ once lay upon the knees of Mary. In the south they call this group Pietà.
Not a sound in the church. The lamp glimmers above the altar. Outside, a gust of wind that whistles by.
Maria rose. She let the dead Bernardo gently down upon the steps of the altar. She went to the spot where the grave of Bernardo's parents lay. She opened the grave. Then she took up the dead body. She kissed him, and lowered him into the grave, and again shut it. Maria knelt long before the Mother of God, and prayed that Bernardo's soul might have peace in heaven; and then she went silently away to her house, and to her chamber.