'Take the priest of the Saracinesca! Handcuff him! Put him in chains! Curses on his soul, and on the souls of his dead!'
'He tried to kill him with a stone yesterday!'
'He has done it to-day, the assassin!'
'Let us burn him alive! Let us tear him to pieces! Death to the Roman!'
'Let me get my hands upon his face!' screamed a dishevelled woman.
And a child, that stood near, spat at him.
Ippolito had stepped backwards before them and faced them, pale and staring in amazement and horror. He could not understand, at first. The hideous treachery was altogether beyond his belief. Yet Tebaldo's outstretched hand pointed at him, and it was Tebaldo's voice that was bidding the soldiers take him. Their faces were impenetrable. Only the young Piedmontese officer, used to another world in the civilised north, betrayed in his expression the sort of curiosity one sees in the looks of people who are watching wild beasts in a cage.
'You had better clear the church,' he said to the carabineers. 'This confusion is unseemly.'
He was not their officer, but they at once began to obey him. The crowd resisted a little, when the big men pushed them back with outstretched arms, as one gathers canes in the brake, to bind them together before cutting them off at the roots.