"Unhand me, signor," said the damsel, with an assumption of dignity. "I am a Calabrese woman, and all Calabria will applaud the deed!"
A shout arose from the admiring populace; yet the girl trembled with shame, sorrow, and anger.
"But not so will He into whose awful presence you were about to hurl a fellow-being, with many grievous sins and follies accumulated on his head. You would have destroyed him, body and soul: he would have passed away unbidden, unconfessed, and unforgiven! Heaven judge between him and thee, woman! but in this matter you have acted unwisely. Madonna grant forgiveness to you both!" added Marco, signing the cross.
"Madonna grant it!" muttered the rabble round us, bowing their heads.
"I am not a child to be preached to, either by canon regular or church militant!" retorted this fiery damsel. She was a noble-looking beauty, about twenty, with long dark lashes, silken hair, and ripe pouting lips, which consorted oddly with her broad hat and black surtout of the newest Neapolitan cut. The colour was fast returning to her pallid cheek, and the fire of her eyes had never dimmed. "Lead me to the Podesta of Catanzaro! by him will I be judged; but not by a knight of the Maltese cross."
"No, signora," replied Castelermo, "I am not prosecutor in this matter: to your own sorrows and conscience I leave you—adieu!" and she was led away by the people, her face buried in her mantle, and utterly deserted by that stern confidence which had sustained her throughout this wild affair.
Sergeant Annibale Porko we reported to the officer next in command, who promised to send him to St. Eufemio for trial by court-martial: a pledge which he never redeemed.
About an hour after Ave-Maria rang, we quitted the mountain town of Catanzaro, and struck directly across the country, with the intention of visiting the villa D'Alfieri.
Not long after this affair I remember Castelermo handing me, with a cold and grim smile, a copy of the "Gazzetta Britannica," in which there was a paragraph, announcing that our wild friend the captain had been married to the widow of Belcastro, with great splendour, at the archiepiscopal residence of the Bishop of Cosenza.
From that hour I never again heard him utter the name of Despina.