“A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may you die by the sword!” she burst out, rushing towards her stall, but directing this first volley of her wrath against Bratti, who, without heeding the malediction, quietly slipped into her place, within hearing of the narrative which had been absorbing her attention; making a sign at the same time to the younger stranger to keep near him.
“I tell you I saw it myself,” said a fat man, with a bunch of newly-purchased leeks in his hand. “I was in Santa Maria Novella, and saw it myself. The woman started up and threw out her arms, and cried out and said she saw a big bull with fiery horns coming down on the church to crush it. I saw it myself.”
“Saw what, Goro?” said a man of slim figure, whose eye twinkled rather roguishly. He wore a close jerkin, a skull-cap lodged carelessly over his left ear as if it had fallen there by chance, a delicate linen apron tucked up on one side, and a razor stuck in his belt. “Saw the bull, or only the woman?”
“Why, the woman, to be sure; but it’s all one, mi pare: it doesn’t alter the meaning—va!” answered the fat man, with some contempt.
“Meaning? no, no; that’s clear enough,” said several voices at once, and then followed a confusion of tongues, in which “Lights shooting over San Lorenzo for three nights together”—“Thunder in the clear starlight”—“Lantern of the Duomo struck with the sword of Saint Michael”—“Palle” (Arms of the Medici)—“All smashed”—“Lions tearing each other to pieces”—“Ah! and they might well”—“Boto[[1]] caduto in Santissima Nunziata!”—“Died like the best of Christians”—“God will have pardoned him”—were often-repeated phrases, which shot across each other like storm-driven hailstones, each speaker feeling rather the necessity of utterance than of finding a listener. Perhaps the only silent members of the group were Bratti, who, as a new-comer, was busy in mentally piecing together the flying fragments of information; the man of the razor; and a thin-lipped, eager-looking personage in spectacles, wearing a pen-and-ink case at his belt.
[1] A votive image of Lorenzo, in wax, hung up in the Church of the Annunziata, supposed to have fallen at the time of his death. Boto is popular Tuscan for Voto.
“Ebbene, Nello,” said Bratti, skirting the group till he was within hearing of the barber. “It appears the Magnifico is dead—rest his soul!—and the price of wax will rise?”
“Even as you say,” answered Nello; and then added, with an air of extra gravity, but with marvellous rapidity, “and his waxen image in the Nunziata fell at the same moment, they say; or at some other time, whenever it pleases the Frati Serviti, who know best. And several cows and women have had still-born calves this Quaresima; and for the bad eggs that have been broken since the Carnival, nobody has counted them. Ah! a great man—a great politician—a greater poet than Dante. And yet the cupola didn’t fall, only the lantern. Che miracolo!”
A sharp and lengthened “Pst!” was suddenly heard darting across the pelting storm of gutturals. It came from the pale man in spectacles, and had the effect he intended; for the noise ceased, and all eyes in the group were fixed on him with a look of expectation.
“’Tis well said you Florentines are blind,” he began, in an incisive high voice. “It appears to me, you need nothing but a diet of hay to make cattle of you. What! do you think the death of Lorenzo is the scourge God has prepared for Florence? Go! you are sparrows chattering praise over the dead hawk. What! a man who was trying to slip a noose over every neck in the Republic that he might tighten it at his pleasure! You like that; you like to have the election of your magistrates turned into closet-work, and no man to use the rights of a citizen unless he is a Medicean. That is what is meant by qualification now: netto di specchio[[2]] no longer means that a man pays his dues to the Republic: it means that he’ll wink at robbery of the people’s money—at robbery of their daughters’ dowries; that he’ll play the chamberer and the philosopher by turns—listen to bawdy songs at the Carnival and cry ‘Bellissimi!’—and listen to sacred lauds and cry again ‘Bellissimi!’ But this is what you love: you grumble and raise a riot over your quattrini bianchi” (white farthings); “but you take no notice when the public treasury has got a hole in the bottom for the gold to run into Lorenzo’s drains. You like to pay for footmen to walk before and behind one of your citizens, that he may be affable and condescending to you. ‘See, what a tall Pisan we keep,’ say you, ‘to march before him with the drawn sword flashing in our eyes!—and yet Lorenzo smiles at us. What goodness!’ And you think the death of a man, who would soon have saddled and bridled you as the Sforza has saddled and bridled Milan—you think his death is the scourge God is warning you of by portents. I tell you there is another sort of scourge in the air.”