As for Gerald—his head bound up in a bloody rag, his arm in a sling, and his face pale as death—he might have disarmed the malice of sarcasm, had it not been that he held his arm clasped close round Marietta’s waist, and even thus, in all his misery, seemed to assert that he was her protector and defender. This was alone sufficient to afford scope for mockery and derision, the fairer portion of the audience distinguishing themselves by the pungent sharpness of their criticisms; and Marietta’s swarthy skin, her tinsel ragged-ness, and her wild, bold eyes, came in for their share of bitter commentary.
‘What a brazen-faced minx it is!’ cried one.
‘What a young creature to have come to such wickedness!’ exclaimed another.
‘Look at the roundness of her shape, and you ‘ll see she is not so very young neither,’ whispered a third.
‘That’s her gypsy blood,’ broke in another. ‘There was one here t’other day, of thirteen, with an infant at her breast; and, more by token, she had just put a stiletto into its father.’
‘The ragazza yonder looks quite equal to the same deed,’ observed the former speaker, ‘if I know anything about what an eye means.’
‘Vincenzio Bombici—where is Vincenzio Bombici?’ cried a surly-looking brigadier, whose large cooked-hat, set squarely on, increased the apparent breadth of an immensely wide face.
‘Ecco mi, Eccelenza!’ whimpered out a wretched-looking object, who, with his face bound up, and himself all swathed like Lazarus from the tomb, came, helped forward by two assistants.
‘Pass in, Vincenzio, and narrate your case,’ said the brigadier, as he opened a door into the dread chamber of justice.
While public sympathy followed the Signor Bombici into the hall of justice, fresh expressions of anger were vented on the unhappy strollers. Any one conversant with Italy is aware that so divided is the peninsula by national jealousies—feuds that date from centuries back—the most opprobrious epithet that hate or passion can employ against any one is to stigmatise him as the native of some other town or city. And now the mob broke into such gibes as, ‘Accursed Calabrians! Ah, vile assassins from Capri’—from Corsica, from the Abruzzi; from anywhere, in short, save the favoured land they stood in. Donna Gaetana was not one who suffered herself to be arraigned without reply, nor was she remarkable for moderation in the style and manner of her rejoinders. With a voluble ribaldry for which her nation enjoys a proud pre-eminence, she assailed her opponents, one and all. She ridiculed their pretensions, mocked their poverty, jeered at their cowardice, and—last insult of all—derided their personal appearance.