Marietta: A Maid of Venice

by F. Marion Crawford

"Silence!" roared the lieutenant. "Open the door, or it will be the worse for you."

"It will be the worse for you, if the Signor Giovanni hears this disturbance," answered Pasquale, who could see Giovanni at the window opposite in the moonlight. "Either get orders from him, or go home and leave me in holy peace, you band of braying jackasses, you mob of blobber-lipped Barbary apes, you pack of doltish, droiling, doddered joltheads! Be off!"

This eloquence, combined with Pasquale's assured manner, caused the lieutenant to hesitate before breaking down the door, an operation for which he had not been prepared, and for which he had brought no engines of battery.

"Can you get in?" he inquired of his men, without deigning to answer the porter's invectives. "If not, let one of you go for a sledge hammer. Try it with the butts of your halberds against the lock, one, two, three and all at once."

"Oh, break down the door!" cried Pasquale derisively. "It is of oak and iron, and it cost good money, and you shall pay for it, you lubberly ours."

But the men pounded away with a good will.

"Open the door!" cried Giovanni from the opposite window, at the top of his lungs.

The sight of the destruction of property for which he might have to account to his father was very painful to him. But he could not make himself heard in the terrific din, or else Pasquale suspected the truth and pretended that he could not hear. The porter had seen Marietta a moment in the gloom, and he knew that she had gone back to warn Zorzi. He hoped to give them both time to hide themselves, and he now retired from the grating and began to strengthen the door, first by putting two more heavy oak bars in their places across it near the top and bottom, and further by bringing the scanty furniture from his lodge and piling it up against the panels.

Meanwhile the pounding continued at a great rate, and Giovanni thought it better to go down and interfere in person, since he could not make himself heard. The servants were all roused by this time, and many heads were looking out of upper windows, not only from Beroviero's house, but from the houses higher up, beyond the wooden bridge. Two men who were walking up the footway from the opposite direction stopped at a little distance and looked on, their hoods drawn over their eyes.

Giovanni came out hurriedly and crossed the bridge. He laid his hand on the lieutenant's shoulder anxiously and spoke close to his ear, for the pounding was deafening. The six men had strapped their halberds firmly together in a solid bundle with their belts, and standing three on each side they swung the whole mass of wood and iron like a battering ram, in regular time.