It set him instantly on my side, in antagonism to the abuser of
my father's memory, a memory which he, poor man, still secretly revered.
The sternness fell away from him. He looked at her and sighed. Then, with
bowed head, and hands clasped behind him, he moved away from me a little.
"Do not let us judge rashly," he said. "Perhaps Agostino received some
provocation. Let us hear..."
"0, you shall hear," she promised tearfully, exultant to prove him wrong.
"You shall hear a yet worse abomination that was the cause of it."
And out she poured the story that Rinolfo and his father had run to tell
her--of how I had shown the fellow violence in the first instance because
he had surprised me with Luisina in my arms.
The friar's face grew dark and grave as he listened. But ere she had quite
done, unable longer to contain myself, I interrupted.
"In that he lied like the muckworm that he is," I exclaimed. "And it
increases my regrets that I did not break his neck as I intended."
"He lied?" quoth she, her eyes wide open in amazement--not at the fact, but
at the audacity of what she conceived my falsehood.
"It is not impossible," said Fra Gervasio. "What is your story, Agostino?"
I told it--how the child out of a very gentle and Christian pity had
released the poor birds that were taken in Rinolfo's limed twigs, and how
in a fury he had made to beat her, so that she had fled to me for shelter
and protection; and how, thereupon, I had bidden him begone out of that
garden, and never set foot in it again.
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