“Water,” said Zorzi very faintly.  “And feed the fire—­it must be time.”

The foreman dipped a cupful of water from an earthen jar, held up his head and helped him to drink.  Giovanni pushed some wood into the furnace.

“I will send for a surgeon,” he repeated, and went out.

Zorzi closed his eyes, and the foreman stood looking at him.

“Do not stay here,” Zorzi said.  “You can do nothing for me, and the surgeon will come presently.”

Then the foreman also left him, and he was alone.  It was not in his nature to give way to bodily pain, but he was glad the men were gone, for he could not have borne much more in silence.  He turned his head to the wall and bit the edge of the leathern cushion.  Now and then his whole body shook convulsively.

He did not hear the door open again, for the torturing pain that shot through him dulled all his other senses.  He wished that he might faint away, even for a moment, but his nerves were too sound for that.  He was recalled to outer things by feeling a hand laid gently on his leg, and immediately afterwards he heard a man’s voice, in a quietly gruff tone that scarcely rose or fell, reciting a whole litany of the most appalling blasphemies that ever fell from human lips.  For an instant, in his suffering, Zorzi fancied that he had died and was in the clutches of Satan himself.

He turned his head on the cushion and saw the ugly face of the old porter, who was bending down and examining the wounded foot while he steadily cursed everything in heaven and earth, with an earnestness that would have been grotesque had his language been less frightful.  For a few moments Zorzi almost forgot that he was hurt, as he listened.  Not a saint in the calendar seemed likely to escape the porter’s fury, and he even went to the length of cursing the relatives, male and female, of half-legendary martyrs and other good persons about whose families he could not possibly know anything.

“For heaven’s sake, Pasquale!” cried Zorzi.  “You will certainly be struck by lightning!”

He had always supposed that the porter hated him, as every one else did, and he could not understand.  By this time he was far more helpless than he had been just after he had been hurt, and when he tried to move the injured foot to a more comfortable position it felt like a lump of scorching lead.

The porter entered upon a final malediction, which might be supposed to have gathered destructive force by collecting into itself all those that had gone before, and he directed the whole complex anathema upon the soul of the coward who had done the foul deed, and upon his mother, his sisters and his daughters if he had any, and upon the souls of all his dead relations, men, women and children, and all of his relations that should ever be born, to the end of time.  He had been a sailor in his youth.

“Who did that to you?” he asked, when he had thus devoted the unknown offender to everlasting perdition.