On the first-floor landing-place Gelsomina, Agnesina Fragalà's nurse, came out, holding the pretty, healthy infant in her arms; the happy mother, Luisella Fragalà, came behind her, dressed to go out, with her bonnet on. But she lingered, leaning on the iron railing, smiling vaguely at her baby, and looking pityingly on the strange escort. She had felt rather tired and preoccupied for some time past, for she had been going every day to the Santo Spirito shop, from an instinct, a presentiment, that was stronger than her pride, tying up the parcels of sweets and cakes with her ring-covered, white hands.
'Poor thing! poor thing!' Luisella Fragalà muttered; her compassion had a deeper, acuter feeling in it than the other people's had.
Raising the heavy yellow brocade curtains behind her double windows on the first-floor, Signora Parascandolo's bloodless face appeared—the rich usurer's wife who had lost all her children.
She seldom went out; she stayed shut up in her gorgeous apartment, full of rich furniture now quite useless and dreary, as she never received anyone since her sons died; only she looked out of the window now and then in a silly kind of way that had grown on her. On seeing Bianca Maria carried up in that way, the poor woman, who took an interest in nothing usually, opened the window, and her voice was added to the rising tumult, crying in prayer and supplication, 'Jesus, Jesus, help us!' All Domenico Mayer's misanthropic family came out on the third-floor landing, leaving their three-roomed little flat that looked on to the Rossi Theatre. First came the father's long, peevish face, and, having just left some copying work brought home from the Finance Office, he had sleeves on to save his coat; then Donna Christina, the mother, who had got rid of the tooth-ache but had a stiff neck instead; next Amalia, with her staring eyes, thick nose and lips, and sulky look of a girl who has not yet got a husband; and Fofò, still afflicted by the hunger which his relations said was a mysterious illness. The whole family nearly threw themselves over the railings out of curiosity, and shrieked out in a chorus: 'Poor girl! poor girl!' A woman in a muslin cap and a man in a blue sweeping-apron were at the window—even the doctor's housekeeper; nor did they stop gazing when their master came up, so overpowering was the excitement in all the Rossi Palace.
That carrying up the stair, amid the noisy compassion of all these different people, the frightened, pitying shrieks, that had a false ring about them, seemed endless to Dr. Amati; as for old Margherita, she shook with annoyance and shame, as if that noise and publicity were insulting to her mistress.
When the door was shut behind them, she asked Giovanni in a fright: 'Is milord not in? Milady is ill.'
'No,' he said, making way for the bearers.
Margherita shook her head despairingly. She went with the doctor and his man into Bianca Maria's room; the girl was laid on the bed. The man-servant went away. The doctor again tried to bring her back with ether—no result. He bit his lip; he said twice or thrice, 'It is impossible!' Once again he raised the violet eyelids, looking at her eyes. She was alive, but she did not recover consciousness.
'Where is her father?' he asked, without turning round.
'I don't know,' the old woman muttered.