The woman made no effort to escape. She stood still, paralyzed by the certainty that her fate was sealed, and that nothing could change it. She neither prayed nor fled. She shrank together like a dog before an angry master. The Sicilian women know what awaits them when they have wounded their husbands’ honor.
The only one who tried to defend her was Donna Micaela. Never would she have begged Marcia to confess, she said to Piero, if she had known what he was. She had thought that he was a generous man. Such a one would have said: “You have done wrong; but the fact that you confess your sin publicly, and expose yourself to my anger to save the child, atones for everything. It is punishment enough.” A generous man would have taken the child on one arm, put the other round his wife’s waist, and have gone happy to his home. A signor would have acted so. But he was no signor; he was a bloodhound.
She talked in vain; the man did not hear her; the woman did not hear her. Her words seemed to be thrown back from an impenetrable wall.
Just then the child came to the father, and tried to take his hand. Furious, he looked at the boy. As the latter was dressed in girl’s clothes, his hair smoothly combed and drawn back by the ears, he saw instantly the likeness to Marcia, which he had not noticed before. He kicked Marcia’s son away.
There was a terrible tension in the square. The neighbors continued to go quietly and slowly away. Many went unwillingly and with hesitation, but still they went. The husband seemed only to be waiting for the last to go.
Donna Micaela ceased speaking; she took the image instead and laid it in Marcia’s arms. “Take him, my sister Marcia, and may he protect you!” she said.
The man saw it, and his rage increased. It seemed as if he could no longer contain himself till he was alone. He crouched like a wild beast ready to spring.
But the image did not rest in vain in the woman’s arms. The outcast moved her to an act of the greatest love.
“What will Christ in Paradise say to me, who have first deceived my husband, and then made him a murderer?” she thought. And she remembered how she had loved big Piero in the days of her happy youth. She had not then thought of bringing such misery upon him.