Oaths, curses, threats were uttered by the twenty-four men, and the younger and more hasty ones instinctively sought the handles of their daggers.
"Gentlemen," said Bellacic, "supper is ready; the two men have sworn to be friends——"
"I've sworn nothing at all," muttered the tailor, between his teeth.
"Let us sit down," continued the master of the house, "and try to forget our present quarrels; we'll surely come to a better understanding when cakes flowing with honey and sweet wine are brought on the table."
They now carried in for the feast several low, stool-like tables, serving both as boards and dishes. On each one there was a whole roasted lamb, resting on a bed of rice. Every guest took out his dagger and carved for himself the piece he liked best or the one he could easiest reach, and which he gnawed, holding the bone as a handle, if there was one, or using the flat, pancake-like bread—the chupatti of the Indians, the flap-jacks of the Turks—as plates. Soon the wooden bukaras were handed around, and then all ill-humour was drowned in the heady wine of the rich Dalmatian soil. After the lambs and rice, big sirloins of beef and huge tunny-fish followed in succession, then game, and lastly, pastry and fruit.
After more than two hours of eating and drinking, with interludes of singing and shouting, the meal at last came to an end. The gentlemen of the jury, whose brains had been more or less muddled from the day before, were now, almost without any exception, quite drunk. As for the guests, some were jovial and boisterous, others tender and sentimental. Radonic's face was saturnine; Markovic, who was always loquacious, and who spoke in Italian when drunk, was making a long speech that had never had a beginning and did not seem to come to an end; and the worst of it was that, during the whole time, he clasped tightly one of the bukaras, and would not relinquish his hold of it.
As for Vranic and his younger brother, they had both sunk down on the floor sulky and silent. The more they ate and drank, the more weazened and wretched they looked, and the expression of malice on their angry faces deepened their wrinkles into a fiendish scowl.
"I think," said the elder brother, "it is time all this was over, and that we should be going."
"Going?" exclaimed all the guests who heard it. "And where do you want to go?"
"Oh, if he isn't comfortable, let him go!" said one of the arbitrators. "I'm sure I don't want to detain him; his face isn't so pleasant to look at that we should beg him to stay—no, nor his company either."