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Updated: June 15, 2025
"I begin to comprehend. This is one of your tricks, Messer Grio. One of the clever tricks you play in your cups! Some day you'll do that in them will No!" repressing the bully as he attempted to rise. "Have done now and let us understand. The 'Bible and Hand, eh? 'Twas there, I suppose, you and this youth met, and " "Quarrelled," said Claude sullenly. "That's all." "And you followed him hither?"
The stout man and Grio had their heads together and their faces bent over the girl's hand, which the former held. On them, however, Claude scarcely bestowed a glance. It was the girl's face which caught and held his eyes, nay, made them burn. Had it blushed, had it showed white, he had borne the thing more lightly, he had understood it better.
Grio's altered aspect, his crestfallen air owned the virtue of the argument if not of the citation; which he did not understand. He drew a deep breath. "Per Bacco," he said, "if you succeed in doing it, Messer Basterga " "I shall do it," Basterga retorted, "if you do not spoil all with your drunken tricks!" Grio was silent a moment, sunk plainly in reflection.
Do you know," he continued with a snort of indignation, "that in his Hyperbolimæus, not content with the statement that Joseph Justus left his laundress's bill at Louvain unpaid, he alleges that I I, Cæsar Basterga of Padua was broken on the wheel at Munster a year ago for the murder of a gentleman!" Grio turned a shade paler.
Before the young man could answer, Grio broke in. "So you have followed me here, have you?" he cried, striking his jug on the table and glaring across the board at the offender. "You weren't content to escape last night it seems. Now " "Enough!" Basterga muttered, the keen expression of his face unchanged. "Softly! Softly! Where are we? I don't understand. What is this? Last night "
But Messer Grio had slipped away some minutes before. The affair at the inn which had threatened to turn out so unpleasantly for our hero, should have gone some way towards destroying the illusions with which he had entered Geneva. But faith is strong in the young, and hope stronger.
On that day it caught Claude's attention; and was he mistaken, or were the hands that, under cover of Grio's cloak, rested on the wall busy about something? In any case he must make up his mind whether he moved or stayed. For Grio was coming on again. Claude hesitated a moment. Then he determined to stay.
Come, Messer Grio," he continued, clapping him on the shoulder, as he rose from his seat. "We have sat long enough. If the young ones will not stir, it becomes the old ones to set an example. Will you to my room and view the precipitation of which I told you?" Grio gave a snarling assent, and got to his feet; and the party broke up with no more words.
He shook his head in sheer inability to foresee; and then, seeing that she continued to look anxiously for his answer, that answer which he knew to be of no value, for minute by minute the sense of his helplessness was weighing upon him, "It may be," he muttered. "God knows. When Grio is gone we will talk about it."
"Witness all, he drew first!" he cried; and his glance quitting Grio for the briefest instant sought to meet the merchants' eyes. "I am on my defence. I call all here to witness that he has thrust this quarrel upon me!" The landlord wrung his hands. "Oh dear! oh dear!" he cried. "In Heaven's name, gentlemen, put up! put up! Stop them! Will no one stop them!"
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