Donna Micaela let Assunta come into the room. She appeared just as she looked every day, when she sat and begged on the Cathedral steps; the same patched dress, the same faded headcloth, and the same crutch.
Little and bent, she limped forward to the coffin. She had a shrivelled face, a sunken mouth, and dull eyes. Donna Micaela said to herself that it was incarnate helplessness and feebleness who had come into the room.
The old woman raised her voice and began to speak in the wife’s name.
“My lord is dead, and I am alone! He who raised me to his side is dead! Is it not terrible that my home has lost its master?—Why are the shutters of your windows closed? say the passers-by.—I answer, I cannot bear to see the light, because my sorrow is so great; my grief is three-fold.—What, are so many of your race carried away by the White Brethren?—No, none of my race is dead, but I have lost my husband, my husband, my husband!”
Old Assunta needed to say no more. Donna Micaela burst into lamentations. The whole room was filled with the sound of weeping from the sympathetic women; for there is no grief like losing a husband. Those who were widows thought of what they had lost, and those who were not as yet widows thought of the time when they would not be able to go on the street, because no husband would be with them; when they would be left to loneliness, poverty, oblivion; when they would be nothing, mean nothing; when they would be the world’s outcast children because they no longer had a husband; because nothing any longer gave them the right to live.
It was late in December, the days between Christmas and the New Year.
There was still the same danger of insurrection, and people still heard terrifying rumors. It was said that Falco Falcone had gathered together a band of brigands in the quarries, and that he was only waiting for the appointed day to break into Diamante and plunder it.
It was also whispered that the people in several of the small mountain towns had risen, torn down the custom’s offices at the town-gates, and driven away the officials.
People said too that troops were passing from town to town, arresting all suspicious people, and shooting them down by hundreds.