The news at once spread throughout the little island, and caused the deepest dejection there.  The fishers who, at the first irruption of force, had risen as one man to defend their comrade’s cause, bowed their heads without a murmur before the unquestioned authority of a legal judgment.  Solomon received unflinchingly the stab that pierced his heart.  No sigh escaped his breast; no tear came to his eyes; his wound did not bleed.  Since his son’s arrest he had sold all he possessed in the world, even the little silver cross left by his wife at her death, even the pearl necklace that flattered his fatherly pride by losing its whiteness against his dear Nisida’s throat; the pieces of gold gained by the sale of these things he had sewn into his coarse woollen cap, and had established himself in the city.  He ate nothing but the bread thrown to him by the pity of passers-by, and slept on the steps of churches or at the magistrates’ door.

To estimate at its full value the heroic courage of this unhappy father, one must take a general view of the whole extent of his misfortune.  Overwhelmed by age and grief, he looked forward with solemn calmness to the terrible moment which would bear his son, a few days before him, to the grave.  His sharpest agony was the thought of the shame that would envelop his family.  The first scaffold erected in that gently mannered island would arise for Gabriel, and that ignominious punishment tarnish the whole population and imprint upon it the first brand of disgrace.  By a sad transition, which yet comes so easily in the destiny of man, the poor father grew to long for those moments of danger at which he had formerly trembled, those moments in which his son might have died nobly.  And now all was lost:  a long life of work, of abnegation, and of good deeds, a pure and stainless reputation that had extended beyond the gulf into distant countries, and the traditional admiration, rising almost to worship, of several generations; all these things only served to deepen the pit into which the fisherman had fallen, at one blow, from his kingly height.  Good fame, that divine halo without which nothing here on earth is sacred, had disappeared.  Men no longer dared to defend the poor wretch, they pitied him.  His name would soon carry horror with it, and Nisida, poor orphan, would be nothing to anyone but the sister of a man who had been condemned to death.  Even Bastiano turned away his face and wept.  Thus, when every respite was over, when poor Solomon’s every attempt had failed, people in the town who saw him smile strangely, as though under the obsession of some fixed idea, said to one another that the old man had lost his reason.