“Santo diavolone!” cried Compare Nino, panting, heated, and dishevelled. “I’d like to know who has the face to cry Viva San Pasquale again!”
“I!” yelled Turi the tanner, who looked forward to being his brother-in-law, quite beside himself with rage, and nearly blinded by a chance blow received in the mêlée. “Viva San Pasquale till death!”
“For the love of Heaven! for the love of Heaven!” shrieked his sister Saridda, throwing herself between her brother and her betrothed. All three had been going for a walk in all love and good fellowship up to that moment.
Compare Nino, the expectant bridegroom, kept crying in derision, “Long live my boots—viva San Stivale!”
“Take that!” howled Turi, foaming at the mouth, his eyes swollen and his face like a tomato. “Take that for San Rocco, you and your boots! There!”
In this way they exchanged blows which would have felled an ox, till their friends succeeded in separating them by dint of cuffs and kicks. Saridda, who by this time had grown excited on her own account, now cried Viva San Pasquale, and was very nearly coming to blows with her lover, as if they had already been husband and wife.
At such times parents quarrel most desperately with their sons and daughters, and wives separate from their husbands, if by misfortune a woman of the parish of San Pasquale has married a man from San Rocco.
“I won’t hear another word about that man!” cried Saridda, standing with her hands on her hips, to the neighbours, when they asked her how it happened that the marriage had not come off. “I won’t have him, if they give him to me dressed in gold and silver from head to foot! Do you hear?”
“Saridda may stay where she is till she turns mouldy, for all I care!” said Compare Nino, in his turn, as he was getting the blood washed from his face at the public-house. “A parcel of beggars and cowards, over in the tanner’s quarter! I must have been drunk when it came into my head to look for a sweetheart over there!”
“Since it is this way,” had been the Syndic’s conclusion, “and they can’t carry a saint out into the square without sticks and fighting, so that it’s perfectly beastly,—I will have no more festivals, nor processions, nor services; and if they bring out so much as one single candle—what you may call a candle—I’ll have them every one in gaol.”