She let no one frighten her, for she believed that the bells were ringing for her alone. They rocked her to dream. She sat quite still in the music-room and let joy reign in her. But in the whole world about her was fear and anxiety and restlessness.
No one could sit at his work. No one could think of anything but the great horror that San Pasquale foretold.
People began to give the beggars more gifts than they had ever had; but the beggars did not rejoice, because they did not believe they would survive the morrow. And the priests could not rejoice, although they had so many penitents that they had to sit in the confessional all day long, and although gift upon gift was piled up on the altar of the saint.
Not even Vicenzo da Lozzo, the letter-writer, was glad of the day, although people besieged his desk under the court-house loggia, and were more than willing to pay him a soldo a word, if they only might write a line of farewell on this their last day to their dear ones far away.
It was not possible to keep school that day, for the children cried the whole time. At noon the mothers came, their faces stiff with terror, and took their little ones home with them, so that they might at least be together in misfortune.
The apprentices at the tailors and shoe-makers had a holiday. But the poor boys did not dare to enjoy it; they preferred to sit in their places in the workshops, and wait.
In the afternoon the ringing still continued.
Then the old gate-keeper of the palazzo Geraci, where now no one lives but beggars, and who is himself a beggar, and goes dressed in the most miserable rags, went and put on the light-green velvet livery that he wears only on saints’ days and on the king’s birthday. And no one could see him sitting in the gateway dressed in that array without being chilled with fear, for people understood that the old man expected that no other than destruction would march in through the gate he was guarding.
It was dreadful how people frightened one another.
Poor Torino, who had once been a man of means, went from house to house and cried that now the time had come when every one who had cheated and beggared him would get his punishment. He went into all the little shops along the Corso and struck the counter with his hand, saying that now every one in the town would get his sentence, because all had connived to cheat him.
