“It is finished, away, away!” Gasperone drove the grateful, gossiping crowd before him. “The Comandante does not allow loafing about the Camp; be off!”
On Easter morning the Camp slept late; it was to be a real holiday, for the men at least. The matins of the birds began before dawn. At sunrise the world was one great opal; as the sun grew stronger, the opalescent mists disappeared; by the time the goats came rambling to the kitchen door, the earth was an emerald between a sapphire sea and sky. Caterina was the first to give me the lovely Easter greeting:
“Oggi il Signor non è morto!” (Today our Lord is not dead.)
A little girl in a pretty blue dress, a buff handkerchief tied over her rippling bronze hair, shyly held out a lilac lily as she lisped:—“Blessed be thou!”
PAY-WINDOW AND THE ARCHBISHOP’S BELL. [Page 453.]
“Don’t you know her?” cried Caterina. “It’s Teresa; the dress suits her, yes?”
Teresa, the ragged little witch of last night, was transformed into a neat demure child! All that bright beautiful Easter day I kept meeting one and another of the girls and women, who the night before had been so forlorn, so bedraggled. Today they were neat and freshly dressed for Pasqua. How did they do it? In the streets, in the church, wherever you met the women, you felt that effort at festive dress for the great feast of the year, the world-old festival, that from the beginning of time we have celebrated by one name or another.
The services in Messina this Easter Sunday were far more impressive than any I ever saw at Rome or even at Seville. The pontifical mass was said by the Archbishop in a small wooden theatre that had escaped destruction. The congregation was large; there were now forty thousand persons in Messina. Many of the congregation were maimed or crippled. A man with a bandaged right arm at the elevation of the Host struck his breast three times and murmured low, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Poor soul! whatever his sins have been, his sufferings must have matched them! In the afternoon the images of the Saviour and of Mary the Mother were carried in procession through Messina. Cries of “Viva Maria!” followed the figures. A young girl took her earrings from her ears, and one of the bearers climbed up and hung the offering in Mary’s girdle.