“Ah! San Rocco,” said he, “this is a worse trick than the one San Pasquale played me!”
However, Saridda in time got better, and as she was standing at the door, with her head tied up in a handkerchief, and her face yellow as new wax, she said to Nino—
“San Rocco has worked a miracle for me, and you ought to come too, and carry a candle at his festival.”
Nino’s heart was too full to speak, and he nodded assent. But before the festival came round, he too was taken with the pestilence, and lay at the point of death. Saridda tore her face with her nails, and said that she wanted to die with him, and she would cut off her hair and have it buried with him, and no one should ever look her in the face again as long as she lived.
“No, no,” replied Nino, his face all drawn with agony. “Your hair will grow again, but it will be I that will never see you again, for I shall be dead.”
“A fine miracle that San Rocco has worked for you!” said Turi, by way of comforting him.
Both of them slowly recovered; and when they sat sunning themselves, with their backs to the wall and very long faces, kept throwing San Rocco and San Pasquale in each other’s teeth.
One day Bruno, the carter, coming back from the country after the cholera was over, passed by them, and said—
“We’re going to have a grand festival to thank San Pasquale for having saved us from the cholera. We shall have no more demagogues and no more opposition, now, that the vice-prætor is dead. He has left the quarrel behind him in his will.”