drawing-rooms of Paris, the English lady who has promised to be his
bride, and will shortly visit him in the humble manoir of his
ancestors. From his first step among them the villagers of
Pietranera, divided already into two rival camps, are watching him in
suspense--Pietranera, perched among those deep forests where the
stifled sense of violent death is everywhere. Colomba places in his
hands the little chest which contains the father's shirt covered with
great spots of blood. "Behold the lead that struck him!" and she
laid on the shirt two rusted bullets. "Orso! you will avenge him!"
She embraces him with a kind of madness, kisses wildly the bullets
and the shirt, leaves him with the terrible relics already exerting
their mystic power upon him. It is as if in the nineteenth century a
girl, amid Christian habits, had gone back to that primitive old
pagan version of the story of the Grail, which [26] identifies it not
with the Most Precious Blood, but only with the blood of a murdered
relation crying for vengeance. Awake at last in his old chamber at
Pietranera, the house of the Barricini at the other end of the
square, with its rival tower and rudely carved escutcheons, stares
him in the face. His ancestral enemy is there, an aged man now, but
with two well-grown sons, like two stupid dumb animals, whose
innocent blood will soon be on his so oddly lighted conscience. At
times, his better hope seemed to lie in picking a quarrel and killing
at least in fair fight, one of these two stupid dumb animals; with
rude ill-suppressed laughter one day, as they overhear Colomba's
violent utterances at a funeral feast, for she is a renowned
improvisatrice. "Your father is an old man," he finds himself
saying, "I could crush with my hands. 'Tis for you I am destined,
for you and your brother!" And if it is by course of nature that the
old man dies not long after the murder of these sons (self-provoked
after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as it happens, by an odd