y of two humorously conventional English people,
himself now half Parisianised, with an immense natural cheerfulness,
and willing to believe an account of the crime which relieves those
hated Barricini of all complicity in its guilt. But from the first,
Colomba, with "voice soft and musical," is at his side, gathering every
accident and echo and circumstance, the very lightest circumstance,
[25] into the chain of necessity which draws him to the action every
one at home expects of him as the head of his race. He is not unaware.
Her very silence on the matter speaks so plainly. "You are forming
me!" he admits. "Well! 'Hot shot, or cold steel!'--you see I have not
forgotten my Corsican." More and more, as he goes on his way with her,
he finds himself accessible to the damning thoughts he has so long
combated. In horror, he tries to disperse them by the memory of his
comrades in the regiment, the 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-sup