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Do you wonder that the ladies in striped blankets gave the cheek to Maso Cecci and turned to Marco Zoppa? That wasn't all, but it was an accentuation of a long series of spiteful injuries wrought him by the wrinkled old villain.
Then he stepped lightly and daintily into the room. A candle guttered on a little table in the corner, and the Crucified showed white upon the black cross above. Marco Zoppa lay on his bed with his throat cut from ear to ear. The cut was so resolute that his head stuck out at an angle from his body almost a right angle; and in some struggle he had got his nostril sliced.
They met before the cafe, the man of intolerable wrongs and the Pilia-Borsa of Siena. Maso scowled till his thick eyebrows cut his face horizontally in two. He stood ostentatiously still, muttering with his lips as the trio went lightly by. Then he made to go on. But old Marco Zoppa stood up and made a speech.
And he always cursed Marco Zoppa who gave her chestnuts and sage counsel for nothing.
Maso, when he heard the shatter of hoofs and the wild roar from thousands of throats down below him in the Campo, cursed old Zoppa with a grey face, and went muttering round the blinding sides of the Duomo to find his daughter. And when he did find her she was eating chestnuts at the open door of her aunt's shop in the Via Ghibellina!
Siena was feasting, and the waiters furtively swept their foreheads with their coat-sleeves as they ran in and out of the trattorie. In the trattoria of the Aquila Rossa old Marco Zoppa smoked his pipe and talked, between the spurts of smoke, to his neighbours. Fate brought him face to face with two enemies at once.
For, as he mounted the narrow stair cut between old houses steep as rocks, he turned and saw Zoppa placidly smoking his pipe in the very spot he had held, squatted on the fountain-rim with his green umbrella between his knees. He was beaming through his spectacles, in a fatherly, indulgent sort of way, upon the shouting people; following the race too, like one who had paid for his box.
"No thanks are owing, Marco Zoppa"; Maso was ashy with shame and rage at the old man's placid benevolence. "Marco Zoppa, thou hast been my enemy ever, and I have borne it" the Cafe roared with laughter; a fat old Capuchin nearly had a fit. Maso looked round with fright in his eyes. He went on, "Now thou hast gone too far insulting me grossly before these citizens.
Throughout all the apartments he placed the arms of Cosimo in diverse fashions, with his emblem of the Falcon and Diamond. The said pictures were all by the hand of Vincenzio di Zoppa, a painter of no small repute at that time and in that country.
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