Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - First book - VII. The Bells of San Pasquale
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106 THE MIRACLES OF AJVTICHRIST
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
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