Passion fed her eloquence, and the old dame vented upon them insult after insult with a volubility that was astounding. There is no need to record the vindictive and indecorous epithets she scattered broadcast around her; and even as her enemies skulked craven from the field, her wrathful indignation tracked them as they went, sending words of outrage to bear them company. The mere numerical odds was strong against her, and the clamour that arose was deafening, drawing crowds to the doors and the street in front, and at last gaining such a height as to invade the sacred precincts of justice, overbearing the trembling accents of Bombici as lie narrated his tale of woe. Out rushed the valiant carabinieri with the air of men hurrying to a storm, cleaving their way through the crowd—striking, buffeting, trampling all before them. At sight of the governmental power the crowd quailed at once, all save one, the Donna. Standing to her guns to the last, she now turned her sarcasms upon the gendarmes, overwhelming them with a perfect torrent of abuse, and with such success that the mob, so lately the mark of her virulence, actually shook with laughter at the new victims to her passion. For a moment discipline seemed like to yield to anger. The warriors appeared to waver in their impassive valour; but suddenly, with a gleam of wiser counsel, they formed a semi-circle behind the accused, and marched them bodily into the presence of the judge.
Justice was apparently accustomed to similar interruptions; at least, it neither seemed shocked nor disconcerted, but continued to listen with unbroken interest to Vincenzio Bombici’s sorrows—not, indeed, that he had arrived at the incident of the night before. Far from it. He was merely preluding in that fashion which the exactitude of the Tuscan law requires, and replying to the interesting interrogatories regarding his former life, so essential to a due understanding of his present complaint.
‘You are, then, the son of Matteo Friuli Bombici, by his wife Fiammetta?’ read out the prefect solemnly, from the notes he was taking.
‘No, Eccelenza. She was my father’s second wife. My mother’s name was Pacifica.’
‘Pacifica,’ wrote the prefect. ‘Daughter of whom?’
‘Of Felice Corsari, tin-worker in the Borgo St. Apostoli.’
‘Not so fast, not so fast,’ interposed the judge, as he took down the words, and then muttered to himself, ‘in the Borgo St. Apostoli.’
‘My mother was one of eight—three sons and five daughters. The eldest boy, Onofrio——’
‘Irrelevant, irrelevant; or, if necessary, to be recorded hereafter,’ said the prefect. ‘You were bred and brought up in the Catholic faith!’
‘Yes, Eccelenza. The Prête of San Gaetano has confessed me since I was eleven years old. I have taken out more than two hundred pauls in private masses, and paid for three novenas and a plenary, as the Prête will vouch.’