e table,
and round the room are men with savage eyes and bristling beards,
armed to the teeth, keen for vengeance. The dead man's musket and
pocket-pistol lie beside him, and his bloody shirt is hung up at his
head. Suddenly, the silence, hitherto only disturbed by suppressed
groans and muttered curses, is broken by a sharp cry. A woman rises:
it is the sister of the dead man; she seizes his shirt, and holding
it aloft with Maenad gestures and frantic screams, gives rhythmic
utterance to her grief and rage. 'I was spinning, when I heard a great
noise: it was a gunshot, which went into my heart, and seemed a voice
that cried, "Run, thy brother is dying." I ran into the room above;
I took the blow into my breast; I said, "Now he is dead, there is
nothing to give me comfort. Who will undertake thy vengeance? When I
show thy shirt, who will vow to let his beard grow till the murderer
is slain? Who is there left to do it? A mother near her death? A
sister? Of all our race there is only left a woman, without kin, poor,
orphan, and a girl. Yet, O my brother! never fear. For thy vengeance
thy sister is enough!

'"Ma per fa la to bindetta,
Sta siguru, basta anch ella!

Give me the pistol; I will shoulder the gun; I will away to the
hills. My brother, heart of thy sister, thou shalt be avenged!"' A
_vocero_ declaimed upon the bier of Giammatteo and Pasquale,
two cousins, by the sister of the former, is still fiercer and more
energetic in its malediction. This Erinnys of revenge prays Christ and
all the saints to extirpate the murderer's whole race, to shrivel it
up till it passes from the earth. Then, with a sudden and vehement
transition to the pathos of her own sorrow, she exclaims:--

'Halla mai bista nissunu
Tumba l'omi pe li canti?'

It appears from these words that Giammatteo's enemies had killed him
because they were jealous of his skill in singing. Shortly after,
she curses the curate of the village, a kinsman of the murderer, for
refusing to toll the funeral bells; and at last, all other threads of
rage and sorrow being twined and knotted into one, she gives loose
to her raging thirst for blood: 'If only I had a son, to train like
a sleuth-hound, that he might track the murderer! Oh, if I had a son!
Oh, if I had a lad!' Her words seem to choke her, and she swoons, and
remains for a short time insensible. When the Bacchante of revenge
awakes, it is with milder feelings in her heart: 'O brother mine,
Matteo!