‘Well spoken, faith!’ said the noble. ‘I tell thee, Giorgio,’ added he to a friend at his side, ‘poets may well feel proud, when they see how the very utterance of their noble sentiments engenders noble thoughts. Look at that tatterdemalion, and think how came he by such notions.’
The abject expression of Babbo’s gratitude, and the far more demonstrative enunciations of old Gaetana’s misery, here interrupted the colloquy. In glowing terms she pictured the calamity that had befallen them—a disaster irreparable for evermore. Never again would human ingenuity construct such mechanism as that which illustrated Don Callemacho’s life. The conjuring tools, too, were masterpieces, not to be replaced; and as to the drum, no contrivance of mere wood and ram-skin ever would give forth such sounds again.
‘Who knows, worthy Donna?’ said the Count, with a grave half-smile. ‘Your own art might teach you, that even the great drama of antiquity has its imitators—some say superiors—in our day.
‘I ‘d say so for one!’ cried Gerald, wiping the blood from his face.
‘Would you so, indeed!’ asked the Count.
‘That would I, so long as glorious Alfieri lives,’ said Gerald resolutely.
‘What hast thou read of thy favourite poet, boy?’ asked the Count.
‘What have I not?—the Saul, the Agamemnon, Oreste, Maria Stuart.’
‘Ah, Signor Principe, you should hear him in Oreste,’ broke in Gaetana; ‘and he plays a solo on the trombone after the second act: he sets every ass in the Campagna a-braying, when he comes to one part. Do it, Gherardi mio; do it for his Highness. Oh me! we have no trombone left us,’ and she burst out into a torrent of grief.
‘Take these people to the inn at the Porta Rossa,’ said the Count to one of his servants. ‘Let them be well cared for and attended to. Fetch a surgeon to see this boy. Adio, my friends. I ‘ll come and see you to-morrow, when you are well rested and refreshed.’