But I have not yet done with him. The second chapter is devoted to an account in Grabalotti language of the early life and loves of the interesting bandit:
“Rino Grabalotti is my name,” he says. “Italy is my nation; the Deep Dell is my dwelling-place, and—but no! never shall monkish cant pollute the lips to baleful imprecation attuned for ever. Let the blue and hideous glare of the lightning, and the ghastly gleam of the hag-ridden meteor, illumine the deeds of my doing. Growl, ye thunders! Roar, ye tempests! Yell, ye fiends, and howl in hideous harmony a prelude to my tale!”
He then proceeds to inform the artist (who, with an eye for copy, ventures to hint “that an outline of his history would be interesting”) that he was the son of a priest, and born in Naples; and naturally much annoyed by the scandalous irregularity of his birth, he devotes his life to robbing and murdering as many of his fellow-creatures as good fortune places in his hands in the practice of his profession.
But I anticipate. Grabalotti declines to say much about his infancy; he seems to have been pretty often reminded of the scandal of his birth, and as often he registered a vow that, sooner or later, he would close for ever the mouths of the slanderers.
“It was in my sixteenth summer,” he continues, “that I really began to live. Though in years a boy, I was in all else a man. Passion hurtled in my darkening eye, and plunged my heart in lava. I loved; what Italian at my age does not? Yes; I—the ruthless, the scathed, the smouldering, the sanguinary, the Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell—I, even I, gasped with tortuous anguish in the maddening transports of Cupid.”
Giulia is the name of the fair creature who has caused the eruption of this volcanic passion; and on what the bandit-lover calls “an evening of rosy gladness,” he seeks his fair enslaver’s window, guitar in hand. But the voice, “which was the best at a barcarole of any in Naples,” had raised a very few love notes, when a rough voice exclaims:
“‘What dost thou here, spurious offspring of sacrilege?’ accompanying the inquiry by an equally rough salutation from behind (oh, madness!)—‘begone!’
“Confusion simmered in my brain. Frenzied, I turned; one stroke of my stiletto, and my wounded honour was salved—with gore. It was that of Giulia’s father!”
This sudden death of the author of her being offended Giulia, and she solemnly renounced young Grabalotti for ever. This intimation, conveyed in a mixture of “indignation mingled with scorn,” had an extraordinary effect. Says the lover: