Then he understood that the strange signorina must be very dangerous. Donna Elisa was so sure that Gaetano would fall in love with her that she was almost glad to hear that he meant to go away.
For anything seemed better to her than a penniless daughter-in-law, whose father was a thief.
VI
DON MATTEO’S MISSION
One afternoon the old priest, Don Matteo, inserted his feet into newly polished shoes, put on a newly brushed soutane, and laid his cloak in the most effective folds. His face shone as he went up the street, and when he distributed blessings to the old women spinning by the doorposts, it was with gestures as graceful as if he had scattered roses.
The street along which Don Matteo was walking was spanned by at least seven arches, as if every house wished to bind itself to a neighbor. It ran small and narrow down the mountain; it was half street and half staircase; the gutters were always overflowing, and there were always plenty of orange-skins and cabbage-leaves to slip on. Clothes hung on the line, from the ground up to the sky. Wet shirt-sleeves and apron-strings were carried by the wind right into Don Matteo’s face. And it felt horrid and wet, as if Don Matteo had been touched by a corpse.
At the end of the street lay a little dark square, and there Don Matteo saw an old house, before which he stopped. It was big, and square, and almost without windows. It had two enormous flights of steps, and two big doors with heavy locks. And it had walls of black lava, and a “loggia,” where green slime grew over the tiled floor, and where the spider-webs were so thick that the nimble lizards were almost held fast in them.
Don Matteo lifted the knocker, and knocked till it thundered. All the women in the street began to talk, and to question. All the washerwomen by the fountain in the square dropped soap and wooden clapper, and began to whisper, and ask, “What is Don Matteo’s errand? Why does Don Matteo knock on the door of an old, haunted house, where nobody dares to live except the strange signorina, whose father is in prison?”
But now Giannita opened the door for Don Matteo, and conducted him through long passages, smelling of mould and damp. In several places in the floor the stones were loose, and Don Matteo could see way down into the cellar, where great armies of rats raced over the black earth floor.